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Jesus saith unto her, Mary; she turned
and saith unto him, Rabboni!
John 20:16

The saint whom we are venerating today must be distinguished from two other female figures in the New Testament, with whom she has been conflated: the anonymous woman of the city, who was a sinner, who came into the house of the Pharisee with whom Jesus was dining and wet his feet with her tears, wiped them with her hair, kissed them, and anointed them with ointment (Luke 7:37-38), and another anonymous woman who, when Jesus was at Bethany in the house of Simon the leper, came up to him with an alabaster flask of expensive ointment and poured it on his head, as he sat at table (Mark 14:3 par).
            Mary Magdalene is not anonymous; she was one of Jesus’ disciples.  Luke tells us that seven demons had gone out of her (8:2).  Writing to the Corinthians, Paul asserts that Cephas, i.e. Peter, was the first to see Christ after he was raised on the third day (1 Corinthians 15:3-5), but John’s gospel corrects this claim: it was not a male disciple who was the first to see the risen Lord; it was Mary Magdalene (20:16).  He tells her, “Go to my brethren, and say unto them, I ascend to my Father, and your Father, and to my God, and your God” ( v. 17).  For dutifully carrying out these instructions (v. 18) Mary Magadalene has been properly called, “The apostle of the apostles.”
            But it is in the sacred writings of ths Gnostics that Mary Magdalene comes fully into her own.  In the Gospel of Philip we read, “Jesus loved Mary Magadalene more than all the disciples and used to kiss her often on the ….”  [Here there is a gap in the manuscript.]  The male disciples were jealous and asked Jesus, “Why do you love her more than all of us?”  The Saviour replies by throwing their question back at them: “Why do I not love you like her?” 
            At the end of the Gospel of Thomas Simon Peter says, “Let Mary leave us, for women are not worthy of life.”  The Gnostic corpus of Nag Hammadi includes a text attributed to Mary Magdalene, “The Gospel of Mary.” 
            Dan Brown’s wildly popular book, The DaVinci Code, taps into a widespread perception of the absence of the feminine in institutional Christianity, the Virgin Mary notwithstanding. The male hierarchical principle personified by Simon Peter has been dominant, and this has severely weakened the power of the Christian message. 
            In her book, Women’s Ways of Knowing, M.F. Belenky distinguishes female “understanding” from male “knowledge.” 

Understanding involves intimacy and equality between self and object, while knowledge implies separation from the object and mastery over it. Understanding entails acceptance. It precludes evaluation, because evaluation puts the object at a distance and places the self above it.       

            When women were admitted to ordination, it was hoped and even anticipated that this would bring about a significant shift in the church.  This seems not to have happened.  Rather, while claiming ordination as their right, women have adapted to male-dominated hierarchical structures.
            The ordination of women in the Anglican Church was still at issue when I was teaching, as a Roman Catholic, in New York City. There I got to know, at Union Seminary, the distinguished Canadian Church historian, Professor Cyril Richardson.  He was all in favour of women’s ordination, but to make clear the specific contribution which he hoped that women’s ministry would bring to the church, he proposed that they should be called not “priests” but “priestesses.”  It is a pity that no one seems to have gotten this message.            

July 22, 2007

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