Christ Church

Woman, why weepest thou? Whom seekest thou?

A confusion or a profusion of Mary Magdalenes? Or just Mary Magdalene’s profuse confusion? She “supposing him to be the gardener, saith unto him, Sir, if thou hast borne him hence, tell me where thou hast laid him, and I will take him away.”It is surely one of the great moments of mistaken identity! It leads to one of the greatest moments of witness to the Resurrection in the encounter and exchange between Mary Magdalene and the Risen Christ recalled in this morning’s Gospel. Yet her confusion, like Thomas’ doubting in the same chapter, all contribute to our faith and understanding.

Today, in the Providence of God, The Feast of St. Mary Magdalene coincides with The Eighth Sunday after Trinity. She is the great witness of the Resurrection, apostola apostolorum, an “Apostle to the Apostles,” as some have styled her, the first witness to the Resurrection, as Mark in his Gospel explicitly states, and thus, by extension, more theologically speaking, to the Gospel of Christ itself. The Gospels, after all, can only have been written in the light of the Resurrection. That is a key point with respect to our understanding. All four Gospels name Mary Magdalene as a figure at the death and resurrection of Christ, a witness to the Crucifixion and the Resurrection.

And yet, there is, perhaps, no greater perplexity and confusion than with the figure of Mary Magdalene. It begins, I surmise, with a statement made by Mark and Luke about Mary Magdalene as the one “from whom [Christ] had cast seven demons,” as Mark puts it, or, as Luke simply says, “Mary, called Magdalene, from whom seven demons had gone out.”This introduces a whole new dynamic and, I think, an intriguing one that has led to much confusion and perplexity and, I fear, no end of fancy and fiction.

The interpretive narrative currently in vogue is that Mary Magdalene became seen more as the figure of repentance and less as the primary witness of the Resurrection. That is really a false dichotomy, a false or at least unhelpful opposition, and one which obscures more than it clarifies. Mark clearly connects both repentance and resurrection in one economical phrase: “on the first day of the week, [Christ] appeared first to Mary Magdalene, from whom he had cast out seven demons.”She is both a figure of repentance and a witness to the Resurrection.

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How can any one satisfy these men with bread here in the wilderness?

We are in the wilderness, an empty and solitary place, a desert, to be exact, and yet the desert becomes a paradise where we are fed with more than what we need. Wilderness and paradise are powerful and important scriptural images in the Christian pilgrimage of faith. What do we mean by wilderness? What do we mean by paradise?

The latter is a Persian word used in Genesis about creation as a garden, the proverbial garden of Eden “in the east,” as Genesis 2 explains, in which God plants our humanity. That connection between Paradise and a garden which, as Dante envisions, is “full of every seed,” includes as well the idea of trees and a forest such that Paradise is not only imaged as a garden but as la divina foresta, a divine forest in contrast to the dark and savage wood that is wilderness, too; a particularly apt image for Canada. The image of trees recalls us to “the tree of life in the midst of the garden” and “the tree of the knowledge of good and evil” in the Genesis account of the paradisal garden of Eden.

The contrast is between an original harmony of man with the natural world, a harmony with God and with one another, a place of innocence, and the loss of that harmony and innocence; thus paradise becomes the wilderness of our exile. Is our pilgrimage, then, about reclaiming paradise?

We are stardust
We are golden
And we’ve got to get ourselves
Back to the garden

The refrain of Joni Mitchell’s song “Woodstock” seems to make this claim. And in the Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young rendition of her lyrical ballad, it has become, quite “uncritically,” as Camille Paglia notes, “a rousing anthem for the hippie counterculture” in the forging together of the “Romantic ideals of reverence for nature and the brotherhood of man.” Joni Mitchell’s own rendition, Paglia suggests, offers an altogether different interpretation. “With its slow, jazz-inflected pacing,” she writes, it becomes “a moody and at times heartbreakingly melancholy art song,” indeed a critique of the unbearable shallowness of the sixties’ dreams and aspirations; in short, “an elegy for an entire generation, flamingly altruistic yet hedonistic and self-absorbed, bold yet naive, abundantly gifted yet plagued by self-destruction.” Such things haunt our own culture and disordered world.

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Love your enemies, do good to them which hate you

It doesn’t get much more radical and more challenging than this. A parade of seemingly impossible and impractical demands. Love your enemies? Do good to them which hate you? Bless them that curse you? Pray for them which despitefully use you? Don’t just turn your cheek away from him that smites you but offer the other cheek as well? Hit me again, Sam! To the one who takes your cloak, let him take your coat too? Give to everyone that asks you? To him that takes away your goods, do not ask to have them back? What is going on here?

As utterly impossible and, perhaps, utterly ridiculous as these demands might seem, they simply belong to a rich and powerful tradition of ethical understanding, to what is sometimes called ‘the golden rule,’ summed up here by Jesus who says “as ye would that men should do to you, do ye also to them likewise;” a concept of reciprocity. He elaborates upon this concept as being the very nature of love and mercy, qualities that have everything to do with the goodness of God alive in us, principles of the highest ethics of justice and the Good. They counter and correct the more commonplace tendencies of our instrumental use of one another. Indeed, “lend,” Jesus says, “hoping for nothing again”! Try telling that to the financiers of Wall Street or to the Davos elites of our world and day.

Nothing could be more radical, it seems, than this Gospel. Yet it belongs to the radical nature of our incorporation into Christ as the Epistle reading from Romans makes so abundantly clear. Baptized into Christ, we are baptized into his death so that we may be partakers of his resurrection, walking now “in newness of life.” And so we are bidden “be ye therefore merciful even as your Father also is merciful.” Here the impossible becomes not only possible but necessary.

Love your enemies. This is one of the great Christian contributions to the moral discourse about the virtues of the soul, especially justice. Is it right to give back to your neighbour who is gone mad the axe which you borrowed from him? It is his but he is mad and therefore a danger to himself and others; in short, an enemy of all, an enemy of the human community. This is Plato’s argument against the commonplace but mistaken or at least incomplete idea that justice is about giving to each what is their due. The deeper question is precisely about what do we owe to one another? Or is justice simply doing good to your friends and harm to your enemies? Again, Plato in the Republic makes the strong point that justice cannot be about harming anyone or anything. “Love your enemies, and do good,” Jesus says. Somehow we have to think the Good in order to do what is right.

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