Mary Magdalene Apostle to
the Apostles
Address delivered by the Revd Lucy Winkett, Minor
Canon at St Paul's Cathedral,
at the Go Tell! celebration of Christian
Women, July 2000.
I am enormously privileged to have been given the opportunity to
speak today, and more than that, to have been given the spur of thinking about
Mary Magdalene, of her story and legacy and where we as Christian women are
called to be as this third Christian Millennium has dawned.
I make no claims of objectivity nor would I want to.
I speak as a Christian woman - I am also an ordained priest in the
Church of England (so that makes me highly institutionalised and a
representative of a traditional form of religion). What is more, I currently
work at St Paul's Cathedral in London, one of the most traditional places of
worship in the Church of England - in the middle of all its attendant
connections to State pomp and City ceremony. I'm also a child of my time; a
thirty something white woman who, having grown up in the Shires, has in the
recent past enjoyed living in Manor Park in East London and Handsworth in
Birmingham.
We are here to reflect together on our own place in the world as
Christian women and to celebrate the ministry that we all - lay and
ordained - share.
In my preparations for today, I was interested to note a few
months ago an article in The Daily Express.
It was reported that more people watch the Vicar of Dibley each
week than attend church. It seemed to me clear that the painful but obvious
conclusion from this statistic was that if we want more people in our
congregations then we just needed to ensure that all vicars were
women............. but it also appears to me to be symptomatic of a truth about
the Church of England and women; most people both inside and outside the church
accept women in public religious roles; while acknowledging it is still
unusual. Dawn French is possibly the most recognisably famous religious woman
in the UK which is a strange state of affairs, whichever faith community you
belong to, and while her character can't be called serious, and the series has
drawbacks as a public portrayal of Church, it is to my mind a not unsympathetic
stereotype. She is a strong character, blessed with a life saving sense of
humour; and a genuine poignancy develops as she cares for and is cared for by
the "odd" collection of villagers she has around her.
Christian women minister within and outside the faith community
and have done from the beginning. It is the public identification and
recognition that is part of our story today.
And it is such a public woman that we celebrate today; Mary of
Magdala. For this talk, I should like to trace briefly the story of Mary
Magdalene - her story - and explore how we can interpret her for ourselves, and
then to suggest three themes that arise from her life and from the way
Christian tradition has seen her.
Mary Magdalene - the woman who loved too much - the woman who'd
been a prostitute but was saved from her past by Jesus. The woman who was
slightly dangerous, sexy; a penitent temptress who had turned away from her
many sins and found Jesus Christ more compelling. The woman who injects a
different kind of passion into Holy Week.
Mary Magdalene has given her name to homes for fallen women, to
the Magdalen laundries; popular as workhouses for women pregnant with the
children of priests (with all the attendant imagery of sin and stain). She has
given her name to a charity which currently exists to assist women who have had
or who are having relationships with priests who have committed themselves to
celibacy.
The penitent sinner, the reformed prostitute, has been the
prevailing characterisa- tion of Mary: and her part, particularly in the story
of Holy Week is always in the context of a grateful fallen woman, probably in
love with Jesus, devoted to him and devastated by his death, as a deserted
lover would be.
There is, in fact, no clear Biblical evidence for this
character Mary Magdalene the penitent sinner. The Bible introduces us to a
woman Mary of Magdala about whom it tells us very little. We'll return to her
later - but first let's look at this character of Mary Magdalene and how she
became so deeply embedded in the Christian story.
Mary of Magdala has been for centuries conflated with other Gospel
characters.
There is an unnamed woman in Mark's gospel who comes to anoint
Jesus Christ's head. She has an alabaster jar of expensive oil and scandalises
the disciples who argue that more good could have been done by giving money to
"the poor". Mark 14. 3-9.
There is an unnamed woman in Luke's gospel who is described as
"from the city" and "a sinner" who anoints Jesus Christ's feet, washes them
with her tears, kisses his feet and dries them with her hair. Luke 7.
36-50.
There is an unnamed woman from Samaria in John's gospel - John 4 -
whom Jesus talks to at the village well. She is told by Jesus that she is not
living with her husband and that she has five husbands behind her. Despite
modern scholarship suggesting that this was in fact political code for the
alliances Samaria was making with Israel's enemies, even if it is taken at face
value and accepted as a description of the woman's personal past, she is
not named as Mary of Magdala.
The false equation Mary of Magdala = woman with ointment = woman
at the well = "loose woman" = prostitute has produced the composite figure Mary
Magdalene.
The man generally credited with sanctioning this piece of Biblical
imagination was Pope Gregory the Great who delivered himself of an opinion in
591 in Rome.
"She whom Luke calls the sinful woman, whom John calls Mary, we
believe to be the Mary from whom seven devils were ejected, according to Mark,
And what did these seven devils signify, if not all the vices? It is clear my
brothers that the woman previously used the unguent to perfume her flesh in
forbidden acts. What she therefore displayed more scandalously, she was now
offering to God in a more praiseworthy manner. She turned the mass of her
crimes to virtues, in order to serve God entirely in penance, for as much as
she had wrongly held God in contempt."
In 1969, the Roman Catholic Church officially overruled Pope
Gregory's interpretation but it dominated Western interpretation and tradition
- and still does.
By the 10th century Mary Magdalene the holy harlot was
fully formed. Abbot Odo at Cluny Abbey wrote that after an existence devoted to
'sensual pleasures' Mary Magdalene helps, by a reformed life and zealous
ministrations to the daily needs of Jesus, to rescue females from the
condemnation Eve brought upon women at the beginning. The description of Mary
of Magdala as the new Eve with the parallels of Eve's disobedience in the
garden of Eden, being redeemed by Mary of Magdala's obedience in the garden by
the tomb also associated both women with the sexual sin and temptation that
only women bring into the world!
The contemporary scholar, Marina Warner writes
"The Magdalene, like Eve, was brought into existence by the
powerful undertone of misogyny in Christianity, which associates women with the
dangers and degra- dation of the flesh. "
And she illustrates the double edged nature of the character Mary
Magdalene by adding "For this reason, she became a prominent and beloved
saint. "1
The Roman missal in 1570 described Mary Magdalene on her saint's
day as "penitent"; this was her defining characteristic for exactly 400 years
until 1970 when the label was removed.
In most paintings of the character Mary Magdalene she is depicted
lying down, kneeling at Jesus' feet, clinging to him in the garden, listening
in Bethany, weeping at the cross.
Mary Magdalene is so often, as Ingrid Maisch calls her "the woman
on the floor" - shamed, humbled, moved: she is often naked - or at least her
breasts are uncovered - and there is a jar of ointment, a skull and crucifix -
illustrating her immersion in the suffering of Christ and her own humiliation
and shame. She is, according to the artists, despite her rehabilitation,
"available".
In preparing for this talk I asked several people who sit in both
Anglican and Roman Catholic churches regularly what they knew about Mary of
Magdala. All of them mentioned her licentious part, most thought she was the
woman who kissed Jesus' feet and only when prompted did they remember that she
was the first to receive news of the resurrection.
Yet this view of Mary of Magdala is not substantiated by
any of the New Testament writing about her. The stories associated with
her: the two anointing stories, the Samaritan woman, even suggestions that she
was the woman caught in adultery, listening to Jesus in Bethany, are all
stories about unnamed women except the Mary in Bethany. The gospel writers all
give Mary of Magdala a unique and prominent position in their accounts, they
name her when she appears, and so it is now accepted in the believing community
of the Church that these stories are not about Mary of Magdala. (She certainly
can't be the Samaritan woman at the well as Magdala isn't in Samaria). These
characteristics of a sinful past combined with current sexual power are
not defining elements of the Biblical Mary of Magdala.
The Eastern Church has not suffered from this false picture of
Mary; it is almost totally a Western misinterpretation. Ironically, since women
do not take leadership roles in the Orthodox Church, plenty of writers
associate Mary of Magdala not primarily with sexuality and penitence but as the
bearer of the good news of the resurrection. Gregory of Antioch, writing in the
6th century, has the risen Jesus saying to the women on Easter Day
"Proclaim to my disciples the mysteries you have seen. Become the first
teachers of the teachers. Peter, who has denied me, must learn that I can also
choose women as apostles. " 2 This is writing from one of the
early church fathers!
It is this picture of Mary of Magdala that is rooted in the
Biblical story. So what do we know about her from the New Testament?
-
Luke 8. 2-3: she is introduced to us as one of a few women
who obviously had money to support Jesus in his itinerant ministry. She has had
seven demons go out of her - but these are not explained.
Each age has tried to explain them: Medieval theologians
interpreted them as the seven deadly sins, with emphasis on lust. Martin Luther
interpreted them as seven devils. Modern theologians interpret them as
convulsions, similar to the man who lived among the tombs, a form of
disability. Others write of a goddess cult con- temporary with Jesus, which had
seven steps of initiation.
[One important point here is that Luke who makes this comment
about Mary of Magdala often describes women as needy and requiring healing
contrasted with male disciples who choose to follow Jesus. It is possible that
Luke's only explanation for a woman being authoritative on matters of faith is
that she is possessed or grateful, (e.g. the slave woman in Philippi. Acts
16.16-18)] (Esther de Boer p.50)
-
Whatever the truth, the second thing we know for certain about
Mary, is that she came from Magdala.
Magdala was probably a prosperous trading town by the Sea of
Galilee. It was probably on the modern site of Mejdel - Jesus would certainly
have visited the town, it being six miles from Capernaum.
The inhabitants of Magdala were probably farmers who
cultivated the fruitful plain of Gennesar, and fishermen active on the Sea of
Galilee. It is possible that fabric was sent to Magdala to be dyed.
Mary, assuming she was a youngish woman when she travelled
around with Jesus, would have heard about the terrible battle in Magdala during
a rebellion put down by Romans in 53 B.C.E. when 30,000 prisoners were taken.
The historian Josephus describes this costly encounter.
She may well have still been alive during the later battle (67
C.E.) of which Josephus writes
"The entire lake was stained with blood and crammed with
corpses, for there was not a single survivor. During the days that followed, a
horrible stench hung over the region." 3
Mary would have seen violence in her life and Jesus'
crucifixion was one part of that. She would have suffered from the Roman
occupation of Magdala - a town with a reputation for bloody uprising.
-
She was probably, almost certainly Jewish - as she is named by
the Jewish name for the city (the Roman name was Tarichea), and she is the only
woman who is not described and defined by her family: Mary, mother of Jesus;
Mary, mother of James; Mary, sister of Martha and Lazarus.
(Incidentally, the only reference to sexual licence is not in
the Bible itself, but in a Rabbinic midrash on the Book of Lamentations, where
Magdala is mentioned as somewhere where adultery is practised.)
-
Mary of Magdala was almost certainly in the inner circle:-
When the women are at the tomb on Easter Day, in Luke's
account (24.7-8) the angel says to the woman "Remember how he told you that the
Son of Man must be delivered up..."
If we look back in the gospel, we see that it was when Jesus
was in a small intimate group that he did indeed say this (Luke 9. 18-22). It
is clear then that Mary of Magdala was a disciple of Jesus, even without the
title.
Why had Mary followed Jesus? Leaving aside Luke's only explanation
- of need or gratitude -
-
She grew up in a city that had suffered and was yet to suffer
terrible bloodshed - she could then have been receptive to Jesus' non-violent
message of "Blessed are the peacemakers".
-
In Magdala, Jewish and Greek culture lived side-by-side under
Roman occupation. Different nationalities came to trade in Magdala - perhaps
she was drawn to Jesus' teaching on unity bonding people across external
differences.
-
The natural surroundings of Magdala were rich. Jesus' nature
metaphors and farming stories would have chimed in with her experience of a
rich natural environment. 4
It is clear that she was close to Jesus and was a key figure in
his inner circle. His imminent torture and execution must have caused her great
grief. Yet a reclaimed picture of Mary of Magdala, rather than the composite
"holy whore" Mary Mag- dalene, gives us a model of discipleship for our lives
particularly through times of suffering, that is remarkable and unique.
Unlike the artists' depictions of Mary across the centuries where
she is bowed down and shamed, she is a woman who stands her ground and lives
courageously.
She is "standing" watching as Jesus is crucified in both Luke and
John's accounts (Luke 23.49, John 19.25) and in the reading from John 20 we
heard this evening, she is standing and she turns repeatedly, indicating that
she is still standing. She is not "the woman on the floor" of art. She, along
with Mary, Jesus' mother, steadies her gaze on the suffering of the man she
followed. She stays when other disciples fled or denied him. She was, in being
present at Jesus' crucifixion, undoubtedly in personal danger - although she
might have hoped that as a woman she would be less prominent than if she had
been a man.
Mary of Magdala is a woman of independent means who was faithful
to Jesus be- yond his death. The reading from John 20 is a core text for our
reclaimed under- standing of Mary of Magdala. Directly contradicting Paul's
instructions to Timo- thy in his first letter "I permit no woman to teach or
have authority over a man: she is to keep silent." (1 Tim 2.11-13)
Mary is given a new role. Jesus tells her
She is not to be silent, she is to speak.
She is explicitly
to teach her brothers by speaking of her experience.
She is to be an agent
of God's revelation to the world. 5
“Mary of Magdala is a Biblical saint who speaks to us in
our modern world:
There is a text, written at the latest in 150 C.E.,
discovered at the Nag Hammadi site, known as the Gospel of Mary. In it, Peter,
Andrew, Levi and Mary of Magdala discuss the path of discipleship after the
crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus. In this, and other early texts
discovered this century, such as the Gospel of Thomas, and the Gospel of
Philip; she is depicted as a person with great insight and an intense spiritual
relationship with Jesus.
One of the sayings in the Gospel of Mary is that "the fetter of
oblivion is temporal." This is a saying that could well be applied to Mary
herself. She has been trapped in church tradition that has very little basis in
the Bible, and is contradicted by other contemporary writings.
In the Gospel of Mary, she addresses Peter, Andrew and Levi.
"They were grieved and wept greatly, saying "How shall we go to
the nations and preach the gospel of the kingdom of the Human One? If they did
not spare him, how will they spare us?"
Then Mary stood up, embraced them all, and said to her brothers
-
"Do not weep and do not grieve, and do not make two hearts, for
his grace will be with you all and will protect you. Rather let us praise his
greatness, because he has prepared us. He has made us Human Being."
6
For Mary of Magdala, it is her very humanity that is God's
preparation for suffering and for praise. She embraces her humanity in this
way, and so it is doubly ironic that she has become a symbol for particularly
women, but men too, rejecting what can loosely be called "the flesh" and
preferring "the spirit".
I am not of course claiming that these events actually
happened as portrayed in the Gospel of Mary but that in her arguments with
Peter, it is clear that in the 2nd century, issues of male/female
leadership were live.
The ancient tradition of Mary of Magdala as apostola apostolorum
("apostle of the apostles") is used today by Pope John Paul II. However, her
place as a Biblical saint, as an apostle, as a woman who spoke with authority
about what she knew of the suffering and pain of life, is still in doubt in
churches today.
Mary of Magdala is a constant figure in Jesus' last days. She is
standing close by as he dies, and she visits the grave after his death. She is
not "in hiding for fear of the Jews" as John describes the eleven
disciples.
Mary of Magdala draws us closer to the events of Holy Week. She
shows us
- Solidarity with the dying Christ and thus with the suffering of
humanity in our world today.
- Sympathy, even empathy with those who are tortured and executed
in our world today.
- Fidelity to a person beyond death : she faces his death
courageously and un- flinchingly.
- She is a public person, not hiding her allegiance to, or her
grief for, Christ.
- She displays imagination to overcome personal resignation and
global fears that may have paralysed her : that is, she is receptive to the
news of Jesus's resurrection, and her interpretation of her meeting with the
'gardener' set her free, and set her feet on solid ground.
- She displayed endurance and courage when her good news and her
new insights had to be defended - when she was not believed.7
A central question of any culture or community is; Who has the
power to tell the story of God? As the tradition of Mary Magdalene has been
handed down, she has been handed over; to betray her has been easy, as she has,
with Mary the mother of Jesus, fulfilled two stereotypes of women: virgin and
whore. Only last Sunday I heard a man describe Mary Magdalene as the fallen
woman with a hint of excited pity. She is still proclaimed prostitute.
So what does this re-claiming Mary Magdalene mean? Perhaps it
doesn't matter that we made a mistake about her past; we can put it right now.
Is it just a matter of scholarship?
No it isn't; because just as the tradition about Mary Magdalene as
holy whore led women and men to believe in a particular way about their
respective roles, so this reclamation can infuse and inspire Christian women
today.
Three thoughts
1. Speaking publicly about what we believe to be true
Mary Magdalene spoke publicly about what she knew to be true,
about her own experience of faith.
Down the centuries, a few women have followed her; Julian of
Norwich, Catherine of Sienna, Teresa of Avila being three of the headline names
- and the truth is that women's experience of God, prayers, thoughts and dreams
has always been there but not spoken out or recorded as authoritative in the
way that men's experience has. In our own church communities today, any
specific reference to women's writing, preaching or praying is often greeted
not with calmness or even enthusiasm but with a sentence containing the words
"politically correct" in it. It is still the case in Church and Society that
our public spaces, public conversations and interpretations are dominated, both
in numbers and emphasis by men. It is quite a subtle culture that has devalued
the concept of political correctness and has made it soulless, humourless and
derisory. It is still the case, as the Guardian journalist Jill Tweedie wrote
that it seems that men's interaction with each other is based on the assumption
that they all know "what's what"; the shared pool of knowledge is assumed and
discussed without too much explanation for the uninitiated. There are of course
many other axes that cut across gender; education, racial and cultural
background being some of them, but that doesn't alter the fact that gender is
an important factor.
Feminism, as a word and as a concept, is defined by men and then
by many women, particularly of my generation as "passe".
This is a sorry state the Christian churches are in. If you'll
pardon the pun, certainly within church hierarchies, gender is not a "sexy"
subject to acknowledge; words like feminist, female, male, gender or sexist
have a faded look to them, they feel stale and they often generate more heat
than light. Please don't misunderstand me here; I want to address these issues
and am happy to call myself a feminist. (I'm reminded here of the writer
Rebecca West's famous remark, "People call me a feminist only when I express
sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat.")
"Speaking publicly" does not only mean giving talks; it means
speaking in a Bible study group, or in front of the minister who you suspect
might disagree with you. It means being on the reading rota at church - and
encouraging other women to lead the prayers. It also means using as far as we
are able natural forms of expression when we talk about our faith to anyone -
woman or man. It means being sensitised and staying alive to whether there is a
balance in our own faith community; that women and men are helping to tell the
story of God.
It is true that the majority of people in our congregations are
women and that much of women's spirituality is by definition expressed
privately; but it is undoubtedly true that the prevailing culture of Christian
churches is very often male; the leaders, the stewards, the musicians, the
language, the ceremony, the management structure, the decision-making process.
How women exercise authority is also part of this element of Mary
Magdalene's story. An anxiety about collusion in a system where we "don't quite
fit", combined with a periodic confidence in our own ability to "do it
differently" can either paralyse women or encourage the "Queen Bee" syndrome;
following the example of our only female Prime Minister who appointed only two
women to junior positions in government in eleven years. Despite these
temptations, women are finding an authoritative voice and exercising
ecclesiastical power; and thank God for all those women in our churches who are
constantly breaking new ground; we stand on their shoulders.
One of our challenges is to re-shape and re-mould church
structures - together - to resist the temptation to "run a tight ship" charting
our own parish (or ecumenical equivalent) course; to use, perhaps a model of
God sisters, or its successor, the pejorative "gossip" to be in touch
ecumenically, up and down and preferably across our hierarchies, lay and
ordained.
What Mary Magdalene teaches us is that it is part of a woman's God
given calling to speak publicly about what she believes. Women's spirituality
as a whole is not to be defined or confined to the private sphere.
The American novelist Barbara Kingsolver published this year a
beautiful novel called "The Poisonwood Bible". In it she describes a woman who
is living in a home situation that is survivable but is crushing her. She
illustrates a flavour of what I am trying to articulate about women in
Christianity.
"If there was still some part of a beautiful heathen girl in
me, a girl drawn to ad- miration like a moth to moonlight; and if her heart
still pounded as Georgia nights when the peeper frogs called out from roadside
ditches, she was too dumb- founded to speak up for herself Once or twice .... /
may have locked the doors and breathed into my own mouth in the mirror, putting
on red lipstick to do the housework. But rarely. I encountered my spirit less
and less. " 8
To proclaim the fragile, unshakeable miracles of our daily lives
as women is a God given task; to "encounter our spirit more and more" and to
speak it out.
This means that women can never be "chaplains to the status quo";
we will always be urging the Christian churches to be midwife, bringing to
birth faith and hope as Mary did on Easter morning. And sometimes, perhaps on
days like these, we can put on red lipstick to do the housework.
2. Ritual Purity
Christian women are vitally placed in society. As we have
witnessed the betrayal of Mary Magdalene inviting more centuries of "tainting"
language about us, so we speak from our historical and current experience to
challenge notions of ritual purity wherever we find them. Christian women,
along with our Jewish and Muslim sisters, have endured centuries of "tainting"
language that was repeated in the Church of England over the debates preceding
and after the ordination of women. The insults we have had to bear are nothing
in comparison with the extreme notions of racial purity that lead to rape being
used as an instrument of war in Rwanda and Central Europe or the sick notions
of racial and sexual purity that fired the imagination of the nail bomber who
terrorised London in April 1999; all of these the notions of sexual purity that
seek to exclude, to control and to "neaten" what is our God given gift of
sexuality.
For us in 21st Century UK, it is much less likely,
thank God, (although, of course, not impossible) that we will encounter extreme
notions of purity that seek to bind us, circumcise us, beat us or rape us.
But notions of ritual purity are alive in our church communities
today. We can for example, become denominational purists (although your
presence at an ecumenical gathering such as this indicates, I hope, that I'm
preaching to the converted!). However there is in Christendom a kind of purism
that in ecumenical dialogue leads to everyone secretly thinking that their
denomination has actually got it right; the right balance between Word and
Sacrament, priestcraft and lay participation; church order and theological
bias.
Possibly more prevalent are notions of theological purity; that
so-called conservatives have nothing to learn from so-called liberals, that
self confessed catholics have nothing to learn from evangelicals and so on.
There is here too a fear of "contamination" as we decide daily whose voice to
listen to in the media, which books to buy, whose talks to go to, which church
to visit.
As Christian women, after the example of Mary Magdalene, is it not
one of the voices we have, that the discernment of purity is as damaging as it
is noble? In Church and in society women have something to say about our own
experience of mess, of being labelled "other" and, stereotypically, "illogical,
mysterious, whimsical", even "unreliable". There's often something not quite
"clean" and "straightforward" in language about women and so we may find that
for us the whole notion of purity is at the least unhelpful, at the most
bankrupt.
Because we have outrageously been seen as a polluting influence,
particularly in religion, we reclaim Mary Magdalene and oppose such labelling
racially, sexually or in religions.
Wherever we discern the misuse of power on the grounds of purity,
whenever we see a group of people ringfenced as untouchable or undesirable, we
have authority to speak.
3. Communion with one another
From Mary Magdalene's Biblical story and her story subsequently,
Christian women can rediscover the notion of solidarity and communion with one
another.
Whatever our role in our own community as women, it is important
that we don't deny one another or wilfully misunderstand one another; we can
celebrate the enormous diversity among women. It's not enough for example for
women in the West to say, "It's over - the battle's won - everything's OK for
me," when two thirds of the world's refugees are women. It is not enough for
Anglican priests and Free Church ministers to say, "It's over - the battle's
won - everything's OK for me," when women are still excluded from the
episcopate and so many of our sisters in the Roman Catholic Church are still
waiting to be priested. Similarly, those of us who have stayed in the
institutional Church need to hear the voices of those who have left, those who
have charged the Church with irredeemable sexism.
Those who move in the public spaces of the Church should affirm
and value women who teach and share the faith at home.
We must ourselves watch for an over - anxiety about ritual purity;
as if there were a set of purity rules amongst women for how we are to think,
believe and behave. We are bound to other women across continents and across
the centuries.
This is not simply an affirmation of individuality, a therapy-
speak "I'm OK - You're OK" although that is of course important. This is a
recognition that as Christian women we are bound together by our feminine
nature and our Christian nurture, and that while we may hold different
opinions, we are one in the spirit of God.
To be from time to time self consciously female interpreters of
Scripture, Tradition, Experience and Human Society is a God-given privilege and
one that requires us to acknowledge and accept ourselves as women. We are led
then to look at the women in our own personal family histories, to find women
in public life with whom we are bound, to value our friends as women and to
recognise that our own personal journey is shaped by these women as we value
our different yet intertwined lives.
For myself, I'm not too anxious about which gifts women are born
with and which gifts we develop; all I know is that from my own experience,
women's gifts have been to be fiercely protective, to be grief-stricken, to
listen, to be attentive, to bring to birth life in others, to dream, to
prophesy and to encourage; to wait, to sing, to cry more easily and to endure.
These are some of our God-given songs to sing with our own voices.
Mary Magdalene and those women who follow her life of discipleship
are women of courage, of faith and of integrity.
We still need from time to time to talk amongst ourselves, to
claim our histories across denomination, cultural and religious boundaries and
to celebrate what binds us to one another.
We celebrate today the whole ministry of women as we create spaces
in public religion and private prayer, as we read Scripture amongst ourselves
and in the face of the whole congregation. As we pray to God in words we have
found; as we speak publicly about what we know to be true, even when we are not
heard or believed. As we challenge notions of ritual purity whenever they
exclude and abuse and as we affirm that women as well as men are made in God's
image; we share the grace, the privilege and the delight of being women with
faith in God and faith in ourselves.
Lucy Winkett
St Paul's Cathedral July 2000
References
1 Marina Warner p.225
2 Esther de Boer p.22
3Josephus, Jewish War III, 529
4 Esther de Boer p.41
5Ingrid Maisch p.181
6Gospel of Mary, 9.20
7 Ingrid Maisch p. 181
8 Barbara Kingsolver "The Poisonwood Bible"
References from:
Esther de Boer; Mary Magdalene: beyond the myth, London
1997
Susan Haskins; Mary Magdalen. Myth and Metaphor, London
1993
Ingrid Maisch; Mary Magdalene: the image of a woman through the
centuries, Minnesota, 1998
Marina Warner; Alone of all Her Sex, London 1976 |
