TRINITY · 22 JULY
Saint Mary Magdalene
Apostle to the Apostles · First Witness of the Resurrection · She Who Stood at the Cross
Magdalene — MAG-dah-leen · Magdala — MAG-dah-lah · Apostola Apostolorum — ah-pos-TOH-lah ah-pos-toh-LOH-rum · Provence — proh-VONS · Rabboni — rah-BOH-nee
O Almighty God, whose blessed Son didst restore Mary Magdalene to health of mind and body, and didst call her to be a witness of his resurrection; Mercifully grant that by thy grace we may be healed of all our infirmities and know thee in the power of his unending life; through the same thy Son Jesus Christ our Lord.
She stood at the cross when the men had fled. She was first at the tomb on the morning of the first day of the week. She was the first to see the risen Lord. She was the first to receive the commission to carry the news of the Resurrection — Go to my brethren and say unto them, I ascend unto my Father and your Father, and to my God and your God — and she went. This is why Gregory the Great and the entire Eastern tradition give her the title Apostola Apostolorum (ah-pos-TOH-lah ah-pos-toh-LOH-rum) — the Apostle to the Apostles: the first sent with the first news of the central fact of the faith. The Resurrection was first announced to a woman, by the Lord himself, and that woman was Mary Magdalene (MAG-dah-leen). Before Peter, before John, before any of the Twelve, she knew. The whole Gospel turns on the moment when the risen Christ says her name — Mary — and she turns and says Rabboni (rah-BOH-nee) — Teacher — and the world is irrevocably changed.
The New Testament tells us three things about her: that she was from Magdala (MAG-dah-lah) on the western shore of the Sea of Galilee; that Jesus had cast seven demons out of her; and that she was among the women who followed Jesus and ministered to him from their own resources. She is present at the Crucifixion in all four Gospels. She is present at the burial in three. She is the first witness of the Resurrection in all four. The Western tradition, following Gregory, identified her with the unnamed sinful woman who anointed Jesus’s feet in Luke 7, and with Mary of Bethany, the sister of Lazarus — an identification that the Eastern Church has never accepted and that modern scholarship generally rejects. Whether the identifications are correct or not, the scriptural portrait is rich enough on its own: a woman delivered from a severe spiritual affliction, bound to Jesus with a loyalty that was not broken by the cross, who became in the hour of the Resurrection the first evangelist of the new creation.
Her subsequent ministry is preserved in two separate and incompatible traditions. The Western tradition, centred on Provence (proh-VONS) in southern France, holds that she travelled with Lazarus and others to Gaul after the Resurrection and preached the Gospel in Marseille and the surrounding region, spending her last years as a hermit at what is now called Sainte-Baume. The Eastern tradition, associated with Ephesus, holds that she accompanied the Virgin Mary and John the Evangelist to Ephesus, where she died and was buried. Both traditions are ancient; neither can be verified; both may contain truth. What is certain is that she did not simply disappear after Easter morning. She received the commission; she carried the news; she continued in the community of the disciples throughout the Acts period. The tradition of her subsequent missionary activity is the natural consequence of what the Gospels record. She was sent. She went.
Her feast on 22 July falls in deep Trinity-tide, in the long green season of ordinary faithful love — which is where she belongs, this woman whose love was not broken by the cross or the tomb, who wept in the garden and was the first to hear her name spoken by the risen Lord. She is the patron of all who have loved in the dark, who have stayed when the others left, who have gone early to the tomb not knowing what they would find. She stands at the head of the cloud of witnesses as its most intimate and most faithful member — the one who was there at the beginning and the end, at the cross and the empty tomb, the woman who heard the Lord say her name in the garden and carried that word to the ends of the earth. Whatever she accomplished after Easter morning — in Provence or Ephesus or wherever else the tradition sends her — she accomplished in obedience to the first Resurrection commission ever given, and the harvest of that obedience is known in full only to the God who spoke her name in the garden of the new creation.
O Almighty God, who didst call thy servant Mary Magdalene to be the first witness of the Resurrection and the first bearer of the Easter news; Grant that we may hear our own names spoken in the garden of the new creation, and may carry with her joy the word that the Lord is risen, to all who wait in the darkness of the sealed tomb; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, one God, world without end.
Amen.