early blurts of a theolog

 

 

 my first public sermon

SERMON PREACHED AT CHRIST CHURCH, HEATHMONT

St MARY MAGDALENE (July 22^nd) 1984

 

 John 20: 1-18

 

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O Lord our strength and our redeemer.

 

Today is set aside in our church calendar for reflection on the life and witness of Saint Mary Magdalene.

As is so often the case of those early followers of Jesus, we know next to nothing about Mary Magdalene. We know, from this account in the fourth gospel, and from parallel accounts in Mark and Luke, that she, together perhaps with Mary the Mother of Jesus, perhaps with some other women, was the first to see the Risen Lord. And we know from Saint Luke’s account that she was a woman who had formerly harboured seven demons. The number “seven,” incidentally, at that time meant not necessarily one more than six, but “the ultimate,” “infinite,” or “innumerable.” Mary, then, was a lady who had a lot of problems.

Somehow in Christian tradition it has become assumed that Mary Magdalene was a prostitute. There is no sound scriptural evidence to support this tradition. And it seems to me that in the “folklore” presentation of Mary as a prostitute we have clouded two more essential aspects of her circumstances. By placing her in a box marked “prostitute” we have limited the scope of the “seven demons,” the “ultimate badness” that once inhabited her, and we have glossed over the primary problem that a woman in her position had to face, the problem of her woman-ness. Women, though respected to a limited degree for the functions they could perform, had, in first century Palestine, few more rights than the rights of our car today.

So, as we focus our attention today on Saint Mary Magdalene, what have we to learn?

If our Lord was prepared to entrust a woman, one formerly seen as ultimately bad, with the single most important message in human history, “I have seen the Lord,” then we as beneficiaries of that message should look very closely at the way in which we communicate the news of the Risen Christ.

In a day in which we claim, rightly or wrongly, relative equality of sexes, we should be seen to be working together to proclaim the gospel. Women and men with equal status, entrusted by our Lord to use different but equal gifts for our urgent work.

Too often though it seems we radiate only an impression of complacency and conservatism.

I guess for Mary herself the immediate result of Jesus’ entrusting of the glorious message to her was one of an inner feeling of self-worth. “I am okay. My master and my friend has given me a job to do.” Do we instil this kind of self-respect in our neighbour?

I sometimes wonder if our apparent failure to communicate the gospel to our neighbours isn’t directly the result of our failure to entrust the good news of our new life to the countless outcasts that are around us. Well I wouldn’t devalue the kind of training I am receiving as a future minister of word and sacrament, at the same time I have to stress that at the end of my training I am no better qualified to communicate the love of Jesus to my neighbour than is any other person.

I sometimes wonder if we aren’t gagging Jesus because of our inbuilt ideas of professionalism in the church. We leave the task of evangelism to the Billy Grahams, the task of pastoral care to the priest or pastoral worker, we leave the task of intercession to the intercessor, the task of reading the word to the reader.

Yet it seems to me that the only qualification Mary Magdalene had in order to set in motion the wheels of Christianity was a sheer, burning, naïve enthusiasm: “I have seen the Lord.”

To communicate that message we need to learn to work together. We need to learn to trust one another, as our Lord trusted Mary. We need to learn to encourage one another, to recognise and to emphasise one another’s gifts, as our Lord recognised in Mary a readiness to communicate, to bubble over with the news. Mary expressed the news with no great and articulate sermon but with that magnificent blurt, “I have seen the Lord.”

Mary blurted out those words, never stopping to consider the possible response of the shattered and frightened disciples. The disciples gathered there must have thought this woman crazy, reverted perhaps to her former demon possessed state. Later it was to become a frequent accusation levelled at the early Christians that they were drunk or crazy. Perhaps we too – and I definitely include myself – should learn to be drunk, crazed by the overwhelming news of the Risen Lord burning within us.