Well, we’ve heard so much this week about women in leadership, it looks like it’s perfect timing to celebrate the feast of Mary Magdalene (which was honored this past Monday)! If you’re like me though, it may take a minute to make a connection between female leadership and Mary Magdalene, because I don’t think we generally see her as a leader. I told some of you that the Gospel we have just heard is my favorite one…We have options for the texts we want to use on Easter Sunday: John or, depends on the liturgical year we’re in, Matthew, Mark or Luke. Yet I always pick John, I always pick this passage that is also the one ascribed to the feast of Mary Magdalene. And it’s good one because it’s a very beautiful passage and yet it’s not that good because I think we can end up seeing Mary Magdalene as being the one who used to cry. Cried so much that Jesus himself had to come and comfort her, because nothing else would do. In the South of France, where Mary Magdalene is supposed to have lived the rest of her days, people have this expression: Crying like a Magdalene. And when people say that, it isn’t very nice generally. Crying like a Magdalene is crying like a baby at best, and at worst it’s having a really ugly cry. This way of understanding Mary Magdalene has even been reinforced when we associate her, as we often do, with the woman crying at Jesus’s feet, an unnamed sinner in Luke’s version, Mary of Bethany in John’s. For most of us, this is what we remember about Mary Magdalene. A follower of Jesus maybe, but mostly a sinner in need of forgiveness, a passive and weak character. Even more than that, you may be aware that Mary Magdalene does not have a good reputation: In the Church, she has often been seen as a prostitute, in popular culture, a femme fatale, but always one of ill repute, always a temptress. A lot of ink has been spilled over the fact that she may have tempted Jesus himself.
Right…but what do we know exactly? Not much but if we go back to the Scriptures, which leaves much room for imagination, yet there is one thing that’s very, very clear and it is that Mary Magdalene was a woman in leader. So let’s have a closer look at that:
Mary Magdalene is the only woman who is named by name in all four Gospels (In Mark, even Mary is only referred as Jesus’s mother) and in each Gospel, Mary Magdalene is on the scene of Jesus’s crucifixion, burial and resurrection. Each time she is mentioned, her name comes first in the group of women. In fact, it seems that she had the same role Simon Peter played for the group of men. Each time the group of men is named, Simon Peter comes first too, so it seems that they were on the same ground. Actually, some unofficial, apocrypha Gospels mention a lot of disputes between the two, Simon Peter refusing to acknowledge Mary Magdalene’s authority in teaching, one of the reasons, some assume, she may had to leave for Gaul, where like the other Apostles, she spent some time evangelizing, teaching and preaching before she retired in cave to live as a hermit. We’re not sure about that part but if we just stick to Scriptures, stick to our Gospel today, we know that she was actually an Apostle: she evangelized, taught and preached even to Simon Peter himself and the rest of the disciples because she is the one who carried the good news of the Resurrection, and that’s the reason she is often called “The Apostle to the Apostles”.
Based on all of that, it should be kind of obvious that, no matter what we have said through history and still today, Jesus empowered women to do ministry, and not just the ministry of housekeeping or “churchkeeping”, but a bold and assertive ministry of authority and proclamation. And yes we know that, and we still have to be reminded of that, and yet this is not what really captured my attention, and what I want to talk about today. What I think is fascinating is the connection between the two Magdalenes, the one who cries, and the one who leads. I think it’s fascinating that, in the Gospel, this woman is both women. It hit me because we’ve heard so much this week about women in leadership, and I keep hearing on the news what President Biden said about candidate Harris, talking about her as if he was praising her, like she really had this gift for leadership, he said: She’s tough. And I am certainly not going to discuss our candidates’ qualities or lack thereof, I don’t know if Harris is tough or not and that’s not my point, but I just want to focus on the way we talk about leadership and women in leadership and it seems to me that it is sad that to be deemed a good candidate for leadership you necessarily had to assume qualities that had been considered as masculine virtues: You’re tough. You don‘t let things get to you. You don‘t break. You power through.
Well, that’s certainly not what comes to mind when I look at Mary Magdalene. If anything, she lets everything gets to her, she has no boundaries, she’s impulsive (when she crashes the dinner party to anoint Jesus), she’s clingy (Jesus tells her: Do not hold on to me), she breaks down in tears more than once, she says nothing when men make fun of her or criticize her (See Mark 14), she’s absolutely defenseless, in short she does all the terrible things women can do and should never do – even according to women themselves. And yet. And yet, she is the one who knows how to ask for forgiveness, she is the one who is self aware, she knows she does not know when the disciples are so full of themselves they can’t her Jesus’s teaching, she is at the cross, in the horror of it all, she takes it all in, she is not afraid to stay with Jesus until the end when Simon Peter has long fled and hid away. She may have had fond feelings for Jesus but she wasn’t just a romantic or a sentimental person, to withstand what she had withstood, she must have been really tough. Or maybe not tough: but loving, persistent and resilient. She breaks down, she gets up and she keeps going. And I think this is really, really important, because I think it’s the kind of leadership Jesus embodied too: loving, persistent and resilient, virtues that have often been seen as feminine but don’t have to be. Jesus embodied all of this and I think our world is longing for caring, diligent and flexible leaders, not just in politics but everywhere: in church, at work, at home, each time advice need to be given and decisions need to be made, and it’s not just in relationship with others, it may also be the way we want to govern ourselves, our own inner kingdom inside of us. The Gospel calls us again and again to be tender, gentle and determined people, fully aware of their own weaknesses and fully relying on the power of the Holy Spirit.
So yes, yesterday like today Mary Magdalene could be for us an example of leadership for all of us. But there is even more to that I think. Mary Magdalene’s tears make much impression on us and are often mentioned in the Gospel because in the world of the Bible, tears are generally not a sign of weakness, if anything they are holy and prophetic: King David wept on his sins, Jeremiah and the prophets wept on the fate of their people, Jesus himself wept on Jerusalem’s rejection of her salvation. Holy weeping has a name in the Bible and it’s called lamenting. And when I think about it, I wonder if it’s something we are still able to do in our days. Because to find inner peace and the ability to keep going we try to be tough, we don’t let things get to us, we power through. Yes, and we may keep going but it won’t bring us any real comfort and it certainly won’t bring the comforter back to us.
Holy crying, lamenting is this cry of the soul that can be consoled only by her savior, it’s an acknowledgment that there are things that are too much for our hearts and strength and that only Jesus can fix, restore, and redeem. Lamenting is the deepest prayer of the soul who says: I cannot do this on my own. Nothing else but my savior will do. According to our Gospel today, it’s the prayer Jesus had to come back for, it’s the prayer Jesus cannot resist.