Mary the Tower (John 11:17-27)

This message was originally given on the first Wednesday of Lent, February 21, 2024, at Gethsemane Lutheran Church in Hopkins, MN.

The livestream of this service, including Holden Evening Prayer,
​may be viewed here.

This evenings text gospel text is
John 11:17-27

image: Wood Plaque
St Mary Magdalene by Robert Lentz

---

Good evening, Beloved of God, and welcome to Lent, and to this journey into some of our historical church roots through ancestors of the faith you may or may not know. As we’ve mentioned, over the course of the next 6 weeks, we will be introducing you to towering ancestors from each continent whose witness and ministries have shaped the church eternal and guide us even still, whether or not we knew their names before now. 

And it’s my honor tonight to peer into the life and ministry of one of our most misunderstood, misidentified, troped, and erased ancestors whose life offers deep roots in the ground and wide-ranging perspective at its spire. Her name is Mary called Magdalene, or -- literally, in the Greek -- Mary, the Tower. Hold on to her name, and let’s begin where we meet her first in the Gospels, which is not John 17 but Luke 8:1-3 where she is named in brief alongside “many women” who became Jesus’s disciples after he healed them of illnesses and demons. These women, according to author Cynthia Bourgeault, form an “opposite and equal female presence” among Jesus’s followers which tells us “participation in Christ’s inner circle was determined not by gender but by their degree of understanding and commitment. And all four gospels infallibly place Mary called Magdalene within that inner circle.” 

Back to Luke 8: Mary called Magdalene’s particularity here is that she was “liberated from seven demons.” Now, further into Luke 8 we meet the only other possessed person whose demons were also named with particularity -- he’s the man so tormented by the demons named Legion that he’s literally been living in a graveyard. I’m naming him here to underscore that demon possession ravaged a person to such a degree that those who were freed from many at once, be it seven or Legion, would’ve had a uniquely powerful understanding of what it meant to be liberated and transformed. We’ll come back to this.

The next time Mary Magdalene is named is when all four gospels, which rarely agree on anything as a quartet, place her as a witness to Jesus’s crucifixion, burial, and as the first person to Jesus’s empty tomb. Already, we can see that her importance within Church history has been diminished; her roots -- our roots -- haven’t been well-tended.

But there is also at least one more episode after her naming in Luke 8 and before her presence at Jesus’s death, burial, and resurrection, that Mary called Magdalene shows up, and it’s one where her identity has been obscured and erased for literal centuries, partly because there are just so many Mary’s in the gospels; and partly because early manuscript editors literally erased and replaced her with another person. 

I know this sounds wild -- and it is -- but track with me for a minute as we Word Nerd into the groundbreaking work of singer-songwriter turned Biblical Scholar Elizabeth “Libbie” Schrader, whose call to follow Mary Magdalene led her to discover some pretty critical Things in the recently digitized Papyrus 66, which is the oldest and most complete manuscript of John’s gospel still available, dating back to around the year 200. 

The long and short of it is this: While examining John 11 in Greek on Papyrus 66, Shrader found while reading verse one that at some point in time, the Greek letter iota was literally scratched out and replaced with a theta in the name ultimately rendered as Martha in all proceeding texts and translations. Meaning, there were originally two Marys named along with Lazarus in this verse. So the original text reads like this: “a certain man was ill, Lazarus of Bethany, at the village of Mary and his sister Mary…” 

What that means is that editors also changed the word his to her, in order to perhaps clarify a grammatically confusing sentence. But the original text should have read something like this (as written by Diana Butler Bass): “A certain man named Lazarus is ill, and he has this sister, Mary. They lived together in the village of Bethany, and Mary is Lazarus' sister.” 

Some 2,000 years later, Elizabeth Schrader stumbled onto the fact that someone had altered the oldest text of the Gospel of John and split the character Mary into three. Mary became Mary and Martha. 

Continuing through the entire manuscript of John 11 and 12, she found that its editor had changed every original “Mary” to “Martha,” and turned a story of Lazarus and his sister into Lazarus and his sisters. Every pronoun was changed, every singular was changed to plural, such that the story we’ve been reading, in which the singular sister Mary became a pair of sisters from Bethany who also show up in Luke 10, is utterly different from the one originally written. This doesn’t mean that Martha of Bethany didn’t exist -- she is a real and separate person in the Gospel of Luke. It just means she is not found and does not belong in John’s gospel. And by divvying up Mary Magdalene’s original role in the Fourth Gospel, she becomes a confusing trio of women in John. But, Schrader says, “If Lazarus’s sister Mary is Mary Magdalene, then she becomes a far more authoritative figure in the Gospel of John.“

And that’s what her research reveals: There is actually just one woman in today’s gospel: She is the Mary called Magdalene, sister of Lazarus, the disciple Jesus liberated from seven demons. She is the Mary who alone is named by all four gospels as a witness to Jesus’s crucifixion, an attendant at his burial, and as the first person see and proclaim the risen Christ -- the proclamation which lives as the deepest and most fundamental root of the Christian Church. 

That Mary -- who is neither Mary nor Martha of Bethany, but the One called Magdalene --  that Mary’s legacy rises even higher the deeper we dive into John 11. So let’s do it:

I want us to notice first the intimacy implied by verse 5: “Jesus loved Mary Magdalene and Lazarus” so much that he took all his disciples with him to their home. In fact, they all loved Mary and Lazarus so much that a grieving Thomas says in verse 16 they should all go to the now-dead Lazarus that they may die also.

Upon their arrival, our Mary runs to Jesus in tears and grief, lamenting that Jesus could have saved Lazarus’s life -- a miracle she knows and trusts Jesus was capable of based on her own experience of radical liberation and transformation by Jesus’s hand. And the dialogue that follows culminates with Mary’s confession that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God. 

By the way -- side note -- another early church father Tertullian confirmed in his writings around 200 CE that our Mary Magdalene was indeed the “Martha” who confessed Jesus as Messiah here in John 11. 

This revelation must not be missed, friends: Mary called Magdalene is one of only two disciples who confessed Christ as the Messiah according to the gospels: The other was Simon called Peter. Mary the Tower and Peter the Rock were the two confessors of Christ’s reign.

And yet, for millennia, our our misnamed “Martha”s identity and legacy as one of only two who confessed Christ as Messiah has been obscured, diminished, and forgotten. 

Had her name and identity been rightly handed down, the true fullness and authority of Mary Magdalene’s discipleship and closeness to Christ could have utterly reshaped the Church we’ve come to be. Instead, for a lot of people she is no more than a side note, a woman whose identity in the gospels has been conflated with other women, and who’s recasting by Pope Gregory 1 in the year 591 as a sinful, scandalous woman reshaped her personhood and diminished her intimacy with Christ and erased her embodied experience of his gospel of liberation. 

But here is what we know: She was a liberated woman whose freedom from oppression bound her to Jesus as one of two disciples close enough to him to name who he was. She was one of a handful of disciples -- all of them women -- who remained with Jesus throughout his crucifixion and burial; and she is the only disciple named by all four gospels, indeed the only person named at all by two of them, as present at Jesus’s empty tomb. 

It was there at his tomb where, according to John’s gospel, Mary alone met the risen Christ face to face, and knew who he was because of how tenderly and intimately he named her.

And friends, her legacy didn’t end there. 

Her centrality and authority among the early church is well-documented, within the patristic’s writings as well as within the gnostic gospels which reveal her to have been Jesus’s closest and most beloved disciple -- a closeness which produced tension between her and Peter, the Rock her apostolic equal, who envied her closeness to Jesus and her prominence among his following, and also regarded her as inferior because she was a woman.

She also happened to be the reason for our long-standing tradition of dying eggs at Easter. How? Well, according to Eastern Orthodox tradition, “She visited Emperor Tiberius to issue a complaint about how Pontius Pilate handled Jesus’s trial. As she described the events of the crucifixion and resurrection, the Emperor dismissed her story, saying 'That could no more happen than the egg in your hand could turn red”. Promptly, Mary Magdalene prayed and the egg turned red.'" To this day, most Eastern Orthodox icons of the St Mary Magdalene depict her holding a red egg.

So why do I bring Mary Magdalene to us tonight, as the first root of ancestral journey through Lent? Because of the dichotomy before: She is at once known to be a close and intimate friend of Jesus who recognized his deity, supported his ministry with her own means and resources, and stayed with him to and even through his death and resurrection. She is, according to every account we have, both canonical and not, the first to witness and proclaim the risen Christ -- the Apostle to the Apostles whose love for Christ both in life and death made her the First Apostle after whose witness all apostolic faith and confession is fashioned. 

And yet, she is unknown. Erased and replaced with another person in modified manuscripts. A woman turned into a scandal whose greatest feature became the scarlet letter affixed to her chest rather than the scarlet egg held in her hand as she stood boldly, confidently, and fearlessly before the Emperor who crucified her Lord.

And it begs the question: Who else has been minimized, diminished, replaced or erased within the story of God -- both within Scripture and in the millenia since? Whose witness have we minimized or diminished, based on their gender, history of illness or possession, their race, or social location? 

And how have you felt reduced and erased in your own life, by people who are either envious of your God-give authority, or who simply view you as lesser?  

Beloved of God, in Mary Magdalene we are given an invitation to dig, examine, explore, and uproot stories that are either incomplete or untrue, and re-root ourselves in the story of God, alongside sisters like Mary the Tower whose roots were the first to anchor Christ’s church, and whose legacy is not unknown -- only covered. 

May we, in these forty days, uncover more, for the sake of all our liberation and wholeness in Christ Jesus.