Mention Mary Magdalene and someone will say, “She was a prostitute, right?” In fact, nothing in the Gospels states this was her profession. True, we are told that Jesus cast out seven demons from her, but her sins are never described. When he forgave her, she left her old life behind and became a faithful follower until the end.
In my younger years, I turned my back on God and committed a boatload of sins. The Good Shepherd carried me gently back to the fold in my 40s, and forgave me everything. I love Mary Magdalene because she met the Good Shepherd face-to-face and had a total change of heart.
She is celebrated as a saint in the Eastern Orthodox and Catholic churches, plus some Protestant churches. On her feast day in the Catholic church, we read from the Song of Songs: “I will rise and will go about the city; in the streets and the broad ways I will seek him whom my soul loves.” And then: “I found him, whom my soul loves; I held him, and I will not let him go.”
Some authors have portrayed the relationship between Mary and Jesus as romantic, but not a shred of biblical evidence supports this. It’s exceedingly rare to show platonic love between the sexes in the movies, even though in ordinary life, many such relationships exist. One of the most beautiful is that between Jesus and Mary Magdalene.
All the apostles, except John, abandoned Jesus when he was crucified, but she stood beneath the cross with John, along with Jesus’ mother, and other women. Mary Magdalene watched as Christ forgave the ones who crucified him and showed mercy to the thief dying next to him. She watched as he died slowly of suffocation, and saw his broken and bruised body removed from the cross.
The meeting at dawn between Mary and Jesus in the garden, where he was buried, reveals how important she was to him. On the first Easter, she runs to the tomb, finds it empty and weeps, because she thinks his body was taken away. Then she notices a man standing there, and assumes he’s the gardener, although it is the Lord. How perfect that she mistook him for the gardener, given that God created our first parents in the Garden of Eden and the Son of God agonized in the Garden of Gethsemane.
He asks her: “Woman, why are you weeping? Whom are you looking for?” In reply, she asks whether he’s taken the body away. Jesus once said the sheep recognize the shepherd’s voice, and will only follow that sound. Now Christ speaks her name, “Mary,” and she immediately knows who he is. She says one word to him: “Rabboni,” which means teacher.
He gives her a final mission, which is telling the other disciples that he is going to “My father and your father, to my God and your God.” Mary Magdalene loved her teacher dearly and didn’t abandon him, and was blessed with meeting the Risen Christ before others did. She rushes to deliver the amazing news to others: “I have seen the Lord.”
Let’s hope one day we’ll meet the Divine Gardener, who will call us tenderly by name. Let’s pray to be like Mary and remain faithful until the end. And let’s always look for God in the everyday twists and turns of life, so we can say: “I found him, whom my soul loves.”
Lorraine’s email address is lorrainevmurray@yahoo.com.
