In Palestine people did not have surnames. Men were differentiated from others of the
same forename by reference to the name of their father or brother. So in the gospel Simon is called son of John
and Andrew is called brother of Simon Peter.
There are people who think that Jesus Christ was the name by which Our
Lord was known from his birth as if Christ was his surname!
Jesus was not an uncommon name so Our Lord was
referred to as Jesus, the son of Joseph the Carpenter. The apostles James and John are
differentiated from others of those names by being called the sons of
Zebedee. Matthew in his gospel tells us
that one of the women near the cross of Jesus is ‘Mary, the mother of James and
Joseph.’ Mark refers to her as ‘Mary who
was the mother of James the younger and Joset.’
One of the women whom John names as being near the cross of Jesus is
‘Mary, the wife of Clopas.’
You may have noticed that the one Mary I have not
mentioned is Mary of Magdala – named after the village from which she
came. She is named in all four gospels
as discovering the empty tomb on her own or with other women disciples. John’s gospel also shows the Risen Lord
sending Mary of Magdala to announce the good news of the Resurrection. ’Jesus said to her, ‘Do not cling to me,
because I have not yet ascended to the Father.
But go and find the brothers and tell them: I am ascending to my Father
and your Father, to my God and to your God’.
So Mary of Magdala went and told the disciples that she had seen the
Lord and that he had said these things to her.’ (20:17,18) Because of this the
early Church called her ‘the apostle to the apostles.’
There is no mention in any of the gospels of Mary
Magdalene ever having been a fallen woman.
Her reputation has been besmirched for well over a thousand years. If by the mercy of God I will ever achieve
the great privilege of being admitted to the glory of heaven, I will be able to
meet Mary Magdalene glad that I have spoken up for her while on earth. And while on earth I might benefit from her
intercession and come closer to the Saviour she so loved and served.
How did it come about that so many people for so
long a time had such a false picture of Mary of Magdala? It would seem that Pope Gregory the Great –
the saint who sent St. Augustine and his band of monks to England – had
something to do with it. Around the year
590 AD, Europe was being devastated by the plague of Justinian which arrived in
540 AD, followed by waves of bubonic death that lasted for hundreds of years. A population of around fifty five million
people in the later Roman Empire is thought to have been halved. Pope Gregory emphasised penitential forms of
worship as a way of warding off diseases and in some of his homilies he
identified Mary of Magdala as the unnamed woman of ill-repute who bathed the
feet of Jesus with her tears and dried them with her hair and whose many sins
Jesus declared forgiveness (Luke 7:37-50)
The Gospel’s reference to Mary ‘from whom seven demons had gone out
(Luke 8:2) became wrongly interpreted as implying that she was guilty of the
seven capital sins rather than being healed of an illness. So Mary of Magdala became the supreme example
of the weeping repentant sinner doing penance which has given us the titles for
the Magdalene Homes and Magdalene Laundries.
The Roman Missal in use from the Council of Trent
until 1969 described Mary Magdalene in the prayers of the Mass on her feast day
as ‘penitent’ and the gospel for her feast was that of the sinful woman. Nevertheless her role as ‘apostle to the
apostles’ was acknowledged as the Creed was said, as on the feast day of the
twelve Apostles. In 1969 her name was
cleared and the label penitent was removed.
The gospel on her feast (July 22nd) is now that of her
commissioning by the Risen Lord to ‘go and find the brothers and tell them ‘the
good news of the Resurrection. But we
never hear this gospel read on Easter Sunday or indeed on any Sunday. I wonder why?
The gospels show us a Mary of Magdala who was one
of the many followers of Jesus who provided for his ministry ‘out of their own
resources.’ (Luke 8:1-3) She was a
faithful and courageous and loving witness to his life, crucifixion, burial and
Resurrection. She was given the task to
find the brothers and tell them. The
brothers still are in need of being found and being told the good news.
