Sunday Musings: Mary Magdalene and the New Creation
There's a new Adam. There has to be a new Eve, right?
Sunday Musings is early this week — I’m sending it to the entire community on Saturday.
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TODAY IS THE SIXTH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST
The traditional reading for this day is the story from Luke 10 about a pair of sisters, Martha and Mary, who entertain Jesus at their home. It is a familiar tale to Christians — quite charming really — in which Jesus gently chastised one sister and praised the other.
I love the story. But I went a different way with today’s reflection. July 22 is the Feast Day of Mary Magdalene — and I’m running with it. The gospel reading for Mary Magdalene’s day is John 20:11-18.
As my friends and readers know, Mary Magdalene has become a favorite subject around The Cottage. This is mostly due to Elizabeth Schrader-Polczer whose scholarship on Mary Magdalene has been shaking up the world of biblical interpretation. We’ve talked about her work a lot — there are links to some of those posts below.
NOTE to preacher friends: The Martha and Mary of Luke are not the Martha and Mary of John 11. Different story, different location, different women. Don’t conflate them!
Lectionary reading for July 22, Feast of Mary Magdalene
John 20:11-18
Mary stood weeping outside the tomb.
As she wept, she bent over to look into the tomb; and she saw two angels in white, sitting where the body of Jesus had been lying, one at the head and the other at the feet. They said to her, “Woman, why are you weeping?” She said to them, “They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him.”
When she had said this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not know that it was Jesus. Jesus said to her, “Woman, why are you weeping? Whom are you looking for?”
Supposing him to be the gardener, she said to him, “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away.” Jesus said to her, “Mary!” She turned and said to him in Hebrew, “Rabbouni!” (which means Teacher). Jesus said to her, “Do not hold on to me, because I have not yet ascended to the Father. But go to my brothers and say to them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’”
Mary Magdalene went and announced to the disciples, “I have seen the Lord”; and she told them that he had said these things to her.
VIDEO SUNDAY MUSING
I hope you’ll forgive the informality of this reflection. I literally turned the camera on and started talking about Jesus, Mary Magdalene, and the story of John 20. Extemporaneous.
There’s a difference between speaking and writing, and this week the emphasis is on speaking. There’s a transcript below. I cleaned it up the best I could for the sake of clarity and reading, but I think the best version of this musing is on the video.
EDITED SERMON TRANSCRIPT
Today's Sunday Musing is a video reflection and I'm doing something a little different. Instead of focusing on the scheduled lectionary reading for this week, I'm looking a couple of days ahead to July 22.
July 22 is the Feast Day of Mary Magdalene. I love Mary Magdalene. I love talking about Mary Magdalene. And when opportunity presents itself as it does in this week of the Christian calendar, I am more than happy to share her story and some of the things that have been forgotten or ignored about her.
And so today I want to start by reading a poem. At first this poem might seem a little weird to you. It is called “Kenosis,” which is actually a word that's more associated with the epistle to the Philippians. “Emptying” is what the word kenosis means, and the poem is by Alfred Lamont.
It starts out in a place where you might think, oh my gosh, that's an unusual thing for Diana to be talking about because Mary Magdalene is associated in sort of a popular imagination with a Dan Brown novel and with some myths about Jesus and Mary Magdalene, of course, being in a relationship, perhaps being husband and wife, and that perhaps Mary Magdalene actually was the mother of Jesus' children.
At first, it sounds like that this poem is going in that direction. But it presents a very interesting possibility and one that is incredibly theologically rich. Let me just share it with you. (The poem is below under “Inspiration.”)
That's a very suggestive poem.
Mary Magdalene bore his child/She became pregnant by him, but Christ did not fill her womb/He filled her heart, which grew infinitely round with his image like an egg.
The reading from the gospel for the Feast Day of Mary Magdalene is from John 20: 11-18. It's a story that is very familiar and it's read every single Easter Sunday in many churches. It's the story of Mary Magdalene coming to the tomb and staying at the tomb after the other disciples desert her there. Mary is weeping and she doesn't know what is going on. There are two angels who show up in this story and in these events, in this garden tomb.
Eventually, Jesus appears to Mary Magdalene. She doesn't recognize who he is at first, she thinks he's the gardener, and when she turns around, he calls her name. At that moment, when he names her, she recognizes him and is overwhelmed with love for her teacher. She says “teacher” in a very tender and beloved way. It's the word that is most often used by Jesus' friends in the New Testament to describe their relationship with him. “Teacher” she says. She wants to hold him. He resists, tells her to wait; no, this is not the time for that embrace.
He says to her, I want you to do something. I want you to go and tell my brothers. Tell the other people who have been following me what you have seen. And she goes, and she tells them, “I have seen, have seen the Lord.”
It's an amazing story of the resurrection. It's the only account in the four gospels where Mary Magdalene meets Jesus at the tomb alone. She shows up in all four of the gospel accounts, but she shows up with some other women usually. But here in the gospel of John, it's just Jesus and Mary Magdalene.
Now, I don't know about you, but whenever I hear this passage, I think: Wow! What a beautiful story. Whoever wrote the gospel of John is a marvelous writer. It is full of incredible foreshadowing and symbolic power. It's a beautiful, amazing inspirational piece of literature.
In John 20, you get a story of a man, a woman, a garden, angels, and you get this interesting exchange of the man naming the woman. It’s a scene of great emotional power that begins with weeping and ends with an attempted embrace out of joy.
This sounds vaguely familiar. Where have I heard a story before of a man, a woman, a garden, some angels, somebody weeping? Oh, wait a second. That would be in the book of Genesis! Indeed, there are elements of this story in the gospel of John that clearly harken back to Genesis.
One of the most powerful elements is the fact that the man calls out a name. And there are a couple of different naming stories. In the first two chapters of Genesis, there's the story of Adam naming all the animals. And then Adam, when he's presented with the woman, gives her the name Eve. God calls out Adam, where are you? And Adam, turning around, tries to flee from God.
In John 20, you have a reprise of the story of Adam calling out to Eve. The new Adam — the Christ Adam — calls out to a woman. And she turns around. This is very interesting because Jesus is referred to in the epistles as the new Adam. And so here you have this story of John 20 that clearly has elements of the story of the first Adam present in it.
There are other details of the Eden story that aren't so happy. There’s weeping — you have the man, the woman in the garden – because Eden didn't turn out so well. What happened to the man, the woman in the garden? They made some mistakes. They violated what God told them to do or not to do, and they're exiled, they're sent away. When they are exiled, they are sent out to a world where they will face death. And God posted two angels at the gates of Eden to keep the human race from reentering the garden so they could never eat from the tree of life.
Man, woman, garden, angels, weeping, naming — all in the gospel of John, too.
What's going on here in John 20? See the references? The similarities?
John picked up on a creation narrative because that's what the gospel of John is. Scholars often refer to the gospel of John as the New Testament's creation story. The parallels begin with the opening: “In the beginning was the word and the word was with God, and the word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him and without him, not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people.”
The light shines in the darkness and the darkness shall not overcome it.
Catch the illusion to the first words of Hebrew scripture, Genesis 1: “In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth and the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters. And God said, let there be light. And there was light, and God saw that the light was good, and God separated the light from the darkness. And God called the light day and the darkness he called night. And there was evening and there was morning. The first day.”
John extends the creation, the Genesis themes, throughout the whole gospel of John. It begins with the beginning and the opening words, John 1:1. And you'll see as you go along, if you read the gospel of John with this awareness, where John is hearkening back specifically to the beginning, the creation. The gospel of John is a new creation story.
That means John’s book must conclude with something that relates to the new creation. And here, in John 20, we have it.
The Genesis creation story ended with that exile from Eden. In John chapter 20, what do we get? We read about two angels and a woman in a garden surrounded by death – when a man appears. The man is Jesus the beloved teacher, the Christ. She and Jesus are now a pair in this garden of new creation.
When I was a teenager, I remember reading in the epistles about the idea that Christ was a new Adam. And I'll never forget asking the youth pastor in our Bible study group, “If Jesus is the new Adam, if Christ is the new Adam, well, who's the new Eve?”
At the time, I went to a conservative church. He said, “oh, there's no need for a new Eve.”
But that leaves the story out of balance. And his answer doesn’t seem biblical. Because John 20 strongly suggests that Mary Magdalene is the New Eve.
And that suggestion, of course, gets picked up in the popular imagination. It's what gets picked up in popular literature and mythology and all kinds of stories that stretch through the length of all of the history of Christianity. It's what Dan Brown appealed to in The DaVinci Code. It is a primal mythic story about if you have a new Adam, you have must have a new Eve.
But the point about the gospel of John is that the new Adam is creating a new humanity and there is a new creation – and it will be different from the first creation in Genesis. We also will see the fulfillment of this in all the literature that bears John's name. When you look at the book of Revelation, which is traditionally in what's called the Johannine corpus of literature, and the last book in the Bible — the book of Revelation ends with a vision of the new creation coming down like a bride to the bridegroom.
These themes are present throughout John, and they are here, at the resurrection of Christ. The New Adam with Mary Magdalene. Is she the New Eve?
I certainly think so. And it seems that John would like us to think so, too.
And I think that there's very powerful internal evidence in the scriptures itself, the canonical literature of the Bible, that makes that same point. Perhaps subtly, perhaps it was hard for some people to notice over the years, but it wasn't so hard in the Gnostic gospels, which are non-canonical texts, and also in popular literature, well through the Middle Ages and up into the modern period. In these lesser-known texts, the parallel with Eden, Adam, and Eve was made more pointedly. Throughout church history, there has been a thread of the idea that Mary Magdalene was somehow the New Eve.
Think about John 1:1 – “In the beginning was the Word.”
That word for “Word” there is logos. In the beginning was the logos, and that's the masculine form of the word. And then you get to John chapter 20 and you have this new beginning that's happening in the garden, and it's a clear identification of the logos and who is Jesus. And it seems also pretty clear that Mary Magdalene here is representing some sacred feminine capacity. Is she representing the wisdom of God, known as sophia?
In this scene in the garde , we witness the reuniting and mutual recognition of Logos and Sophia, of word and wisdom. Isn’t that a representation of Genesis 1:1 as well? “In the beginning was the word.” The word of God – God spoken word, the logos. Then, the Spirit, the ruach, the breath of God, the wind of God, joins in the act of creation.
And here, in John 20, those roles are echoed with these two characters, Jesus and Mary Magdalene.
I think it's beautiful that the resurrection account isn't an account of simply words that Mary Magdalene is going to preach, that she's going to go off and tell information to the other disciples. But, instead there is, in this garden, a sort of a remaking of Mary Magdalene and her whole relationship with Jesus. I think that's part of the do not embrace me yet moment. There is this reunion that is happening between them – but not as what we typically think of a male and female joining – in word and in spirit that will result in a new creation being birthed.
And I think that's what the gospel of John is telling us.
And it's about more than simply Mary being an apostle to the apostles, which is of course the way that even the Catholic church is now seeing her important role. It's about more than her just proclaiming something about God. It's about a transformation that occurs for her with Jesus that reverses the curse of Genesis and that opens the path to male and female truly being in the kind of relationship that was intended since the beginning of creation.
And it is a kind of a birthing, and it helps me make sense of this amazing, insightful, deeply spiritual vision presented in LaMotte’s poem. “Mary Magdalene bore his child/She became pregnant by him, but Christ did not fill her womb/He filled her heart, which grew infinitely round with his image/like an egg…”
In John’s story, Mary Magdalene does give birth, but not to a human child. She doesn’t birth a royal bloodline as in Dan Brown’s book, but she brings forth a line for all of us to be fully rebirthed with Christ. The resurrection garden is the new Eden – where the capacity for humanity to be as it should have been since the beginning, male and female in the full image of God, redeemed. And together, they garden, planting the seeds of a new creation.
I hope this week you'll think about Mary Magdalene and Jesus in a garden: man, woman, garden, angels, naming. No longer weeping. Now awaiting a full completion of the embrace. That embrace that will come to fruition when the time is right, but in the meantime, there is planting and sowing to do, there is nurturing. There's a new creation to care for together.
May the memory of Mary Magdalene be blessed, the New Eve, perhaps in a very real way, a new mother of a new humankind made possible by the door opening through Jesus, her teacher, her friend, her beloved, the Christ, clearly the new Adam, and she stands beside him in the garden.
Who else stands besides Adam in the garden other than Eve?
The whole of creation is pregnant with possibility.
Magdalene’s wisdom is so wild, so foolish and simple, it need not be “taught,” just stumbled on and fallen into. Just be a pebble of gratitude dropped in her dark waters. She does not speak. She dwells beneath the words. All she really wants you to know is this: Don’t worry. Don’t be afraid.
Under the noisy chaos of this world is a healing depth of unfathomable silence: it is your very Being. Her breath will take you there.
— Alfred LaMotte
In July 2022, I sent out a sermon I preached at the Wild Goose Festival on Elizabeth Schrader’s work on Mary Magdalene. It caused, well, a bit of an uproar. In the years since, it has been listened to about one million times — not kidding. About 1,000,000 times.
Mary the Tower
July 22 is the Feast Day of Mary Magdalene, beloved of Jesus, and the “Apostle to the Apostles.” Earlier this week, I posted an audio of a sermon (click to listen!) that I delivered at the Wild Goose Festival on “All the Marys.” Within just a few hours after posting it here at The Cottage, it was downloaded nearly 10,000 times. Many listeners asked for …
A year after the Wild Goose sermon, I posted this update. It includes the basic points of Libbie’s research (very concise and helpful), some further thoughts, and links to other resources.
Mary Magdalene Rocked My World
One year ago today, I posted my 2022 Wild Goose sermon, “All the Marys.” The sermon was based on research by my friend, textual scholar Elizabeth “Libbie” Schrader.
INSPIRATION
“I have become the original Image freed from its reflection…
The chains of my forgetfulness only existed in time...
Now, where time rests in the stillness of Eternity, I repose in silence.”
— Gnostic Gospel of Mary, 3rd C.
Mary Magdalene bore his child.
She became pregnant by him.
But Christ did not fill her womb.
He filled her heart, which grew
infinitely round with his image,
like an egg.
She brought the pregnancy to term
by emptying herself,
and became a mirror to reflect
the Beloved, accomplishing
this secret work of yearning through
the fertility of silence, and the deep
companionship of solitude.
Thus, Mary gave birth to her own anointing.
She exchanged a life of hollow things
for living no-thing full of bliss, and whole.
You too are a Magdalene
walking on waves of the Moon Path,
keeper of the Sun’s likeness.
You too enfold the luminous egg,
the round and silent work
of mystic motherhood.
It is no small accomplishment of your shadow
to give birth to the radiance of Christ.
Hidden beams from your conception
penetrate all other souls.
Each of us is a hungry mirror,
yearning for reflection, longing to contain,
by means of our emptiness,
the beauty of each other’s face.
— Alfred LaMotte, “Kenosis,” from his book, Strangers and Pilgrims
Did you know the way this would unfold?
Know before knowing how your story would be disguised?
Did you step into the circle, hands splayed in supplication,
ready to receive gifts of wisdom
in exchange for your dignity and your truth?
Or did they blindside you with
blasphemy and lies?
Was your spirit assaulted in the
twisting and reshaping of your story?
the sharp-edged words of Gregory’s sermon
piercing your spiritual flesh, nailing you to a cross
no one would witness
Do you weep?
longing for a time and place lost
to the translations of today,
when your feet walked dusty paths
alongside compassion and grace
when you were Mary of Magdala,
a woman of her own right, without context to man
How did this all end?
Had you called him when he came to you?
marched willingly into the depths of the underworld
to retrieve his spirit and bring him
again to the light,
an eternal remembrance
of his teaching,
an alchemy of sacred knowledge and love,
Did you mean to honor him for
the rest of history, or revive his soul
for the sake of your own?
Was it for love of us, or love of him?
Or did he come to you of his own desire?
Lay his legacy at your feet,
ask of you the responsibility of remembrance
Did you at first put up your hands in rejection,
back away in fear and suggest the burden
of truth was too great for you to carry?
Yet you braved the world
carried the resuscitation of his spirit
with your words,
faced mockery and disbelief and lies,
a defamation of historical carnage!
shamed before a congregation of millennia!
girls shriveling under the judgment of a thousand moons,
lining church walls and confessional prisons
desperately seeking through the pages and the lore
for anyone who
may look like them,
their sisters and aunties, their mothers and grandmothers
enslaved by existential sufferings,
misconstrued sexuality and stultified awakenings
Do you call to them from across the ether?
whisper your humanity into their ears,
sing for them the melody of your own gospel
come to them in dreams and
light the path of transformation –
of subjugation into strength,
grief into wisdom, fear into action
Do you build for them a step upon which to stand?
bury your wisdom into their bones,
infuse the truth of your own story into their cells so
when they are faced with the option of either
virgin or whore
they know,
these awakening women know,
they can be both – and everything in between.
— Anne Frick, “Poem to Mary of Magdala” For more about the poet, her website is here.
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Love this week’s musing! I also like the contrast between Adam and Eve being sent into exile and death, isolated from the intimate presence of God while Mary the new Eve is sent to tell Good News and begin the building of beloved community with God.
I greatly appreciate the thoughtful insight you have given to John’s beautiful rendering of the garden resurrection.
Honestly, I tend to approach John’s Gospel with some historical apprehension. Compared to the other Gospels, much of it appears to be a creative work of theological prose. It may reflect more the author's conceptualization of Jesus than historical fact.
Your homily, however, points out the literary genius of this author. It shows that even historical fiction can contain beautiful and valuable perspectives.
I appreciate this. Thank you.