Easter Sunday, 2009
Text:
The Rev. Jerry Kistler
St. Stephen’s Reformed Episcopal Church
“The Woman at the Tomb; The
Bride of Christ?”
A weeping woman lingers by an empty tomb, wondering
what has happened to the body of the one she loved. When Jesus suddenly
appears, she mistakes Him for the gardener. But then when He speaks her name,
she takes hold of Him so tightly that he has to tell her to let Him go. The
story ends with the mourner turned into a missionary, running and telling the
others the good news of what she had seen and heard. [Dr. Ray Pritchard, “Why are you weeping?”]. He is risen! The Lord is risen, indeed!
Alleluia!
But who is this woman? What
do we know about her? And why is she such an important figure in the telling of
the great event we celebrate today? What does Mary Magdalene’s role in the drama
of the Resurrection teach us about the real meaning of Easter?
You know, there’s so much
about Easter that we celebrate and have fun with every year that has really nothing
to do with what this holy day is all about – the Easter bunny, and all of that.
But I’ll bet that you didn’t know that there is one very familiar Easter
tradition that comes down to us from an apocryphal story about Mary Magdalene.
You know what it is? It’s the tradition of the Easter egg.
The story goes that, shortly
after Jesus’ Ascension, Mary Magdalene came to
Well that’s one tradition
about Mary Magdalene. But what we learn about this woman with any degree of
certainty comes to us, of course, from the four Gospels of Sacred Scripture.
They don’t tell us much, but what they tell us is significant as it relates to
the true meaning of Easter.
St. Luke writes in the eighth
chapter of his Gospel: “Now it came to pass, afterward, that He [that is, Jesus]
went through every city and village, preaching and bringing the glad tidings of
the
There are a few things that
we should take note of in this passage. First of all, that Mary was a woman who
had been possessed by seven demons. Not just one demon, but seven. Imagine it. That
might bring to mind Jesus’ words of warning against the tendency we all have to
try to do a little moral house-cleaning - to try to clean up our lives without really
relying on the Spirit of God to affect a change of our hearts. We’re just setting
ourselves up for an even greater fall. He says, “When an unclean spirit goes
out of a man, he goes through dry places, seeking rest; and finding none, he
says, “I will return to my house from which I came.’ And when he comes, he
finds it swept and put in order. Then he goes and takes with him seven other
spirits more wicked than himself, and they enter and dwell there; and the last
state of the man is worse than the first.” Or in this context we might even
read, “the last state of the woman is worse than the first.”
You see, Mary may have been
the perfect illustration of what Jesus was taking about. Whatever sin she was
involved in which brought the demon into her life, she may have attempted to
reform herself. She may have attempted over and over to change her behavior, to
get herself straight. But in the end her last state was worse than her first.
Who of us can’t identify with that? But you see, it was only when Jesus came
into her life and set her free from her demons that her house became not only
clean, but occupied. She had a new Master. That’s what Jesus was talking about.
It’s not enough just to get rid of your demons. You need to have Christ
dwelling in your heart by faith to experience a true transformation of your
life. And this is what Mary experienced in
her life. She was transformed,
not just reformed - changed from the
inside out by the power of Christ entering into her life, not by her own
attempts to pull herself up by her own moral bootstraps. She’d tried that, and
failed over and over. You’ve tried that, and failed over and over. But Christ
delivered her, and Christ is alive today to deliver you as well.
So what was the result of
this deliverance in Mary’s life? She became a follower of Jesus – quite
literally. Wherever He went she went with Him, all the way to the end of His
life and beyond. She became not only a follower, but as we read in this passage
from Luke, she also became a funder of His mission.
Apparently, Mary was a woman of some
substantial means, and she joined with the other woman to become Jesus’ primary
support in carrying out His ministry. But isn’t that the way it always is? Almost
from day one the Church has been made up of more women than men, and all
throughout Church history, it’s been the women who have been some of the
greatest supporters of the Church’s mission, starting all the way back with the
widow and her two mites. Who says women don’t have an important role in the
Church? Right here, it’s Mary, and the other women, who out of gratitude for
the deliverance Christ has accomplished in their lives, become His primary
means of support. Doesn’t that make Mary almost a perfect symbol of the Church
as a whole? More on that in just a minute.
The other really significant
thing about Mary is her name – Mary Magdalene. Isn’t it interesting that Luke
refers to her as “Mary, who is called Magdalene” – not ‘Mary Magdalene,” but
“Mary, who is called Magdalene,”
There is a tradition, at
least in the western Church, that Mary was a prostitute, and I’m sure you’ve
heard that. The way this was arrived at was by identifying her with another
woman in the gospels, and without going through all the details, I think there
might be good reason for doing so. This other woman is the unnamed “sinful
woman,” who comes to Jesus while he dines at the Pharisees house, who carries
in an alabaster flask of fragrant oil, and who then falls down at his feet
weeping, and washes his feet with her tears, dries them with her hair, and
anoints them with the oil. Luke introduces this woman in the passage
immediately prior to naming Mary Magdalene as one of the women who “afterward” began
following Jesus and providing for Him out of her own substance. Wouldn’t that
have been completely natural, after what He’d done for her? This “sinful woman” was herself a woman of great
means. The alabaster flask and the oil it contained were incredibly expensive.
And it’s been understood that the sin which this woman was guilty of was of
such a grievous nature as to make her untouchable – which could really only be
the sin of adultery, or fornication, or promiscuity. This is why the Pharisee
said to himself, “If this man were a prophet, He would know what sort of woman
this is that touches Him.”
Well, this sinful woman may
in fact have been Mary Magdalene, and the fact that the tag ‘Magdalene’ stuck
is an indication that she was a converted woman of ill-repute from a town of
ill-repute.
Now here’s where it gets
really interesting. There’s a very popular book out today, which to date has
sold over 60 million copies worldwide, which makes as part of its central
thesis the claim that reason the Church continues to identify Mary as a former
prostitute is the legacy of a great conspiracy in the early Church to defame
Mary in order to cover up her dangerous secret. You know which book I’m talking
about. Yes, The Da Vinci Code.
And the great secret the early church was trying to cover up is true the
identity of the Holy Grail. The great dangerous secret is that the Holy Grail
is not the cup which was used by Christ as the Last Supper, and caught his
blood at the cross. No! The Holy Grail is the person of Mary Magdalene herself,
who was secretly married to Jesus before his death, and who carried on His
royal bloodline by giving birth to his child. And according to the book, the
monks of the Priory of Sion carefully guard the
secret location of Mary’s tomb and serve to protect the bloodline of Jesus that
continues to this day.
Please! This is pure fiction,
folks. We don’t have the time to go into all the holes in this theory. We’d be
here all morning.
And yet the question still
remains, why is Mary so central, in all four Gospels, to the telling of the
account of Jesus death and resurrection? Dan Brown says it’s because she was
His wife. Is there anyway in which that could be true? Having been liberated
from demonic bondage, she pledged herself to follow him wherever he went. And so it came to pass that when our Lord
hung on the cross, she stood nearby with Mary his mother. When they took his
body down from the cross, she was there close at hand to see that awful, gory
sight. When they placed him in the tomb, she was there also sitting opposite
the ledge where they laid Him. On Saturday evening, after the Sabbath concluded,
she purchased spices in order to finish the job of anointing and embalming the
body which had hastily been done on Friday before the sun set. Early on that
Sunday morning, before the sun had risen, she and the other women ventured
through the darkness to the garden tomb, expecting to have to find someone to
help them move away the stone. [Dr. Ray Pritchard, “Why are you weeping?”].
And seeing the tomb open, she ran to tell the disciples. The disciples came and
saw and went away leaving Mary alone at the tomb. And then it was to this
woman, not to Mary his mother, not to any of his disciples, but to this
redeemed sinner from Magdala that Jesus gave the
honor of being the first person to see him alive and to hear his voice. Why?
Why this woman? Because, don’t you
see, she is the perfect symbol of the
true Bride of Christ – the redeemed people of God, all of us who have been
freed from the bondage of our sins, and been given new life in Him. She is the
perfect representative of the Church whom Jesus loved “and gave Himself for
her, that he might sanctify and cleanse her with the washing of water by the
word, that He might present her to Himself a glorious Church, not having spot
or wrinkle or any such thing, but that she should be holy and without blemish”
(Eph. 5:25-27). And so when He spoke her
name, she was no longer “Mary who is called Magdalene,” Mary of the ‘curling
woman’s hair” of a disreputable town; to Him she was just “Mary.” No truer
representative could there be of those Jesus came to die for and to rise again
to give them new life.
When I look out into this
congregation I see a lot of Mary Magalenes. Not many
of you were notorious sinners like the woman who washed Jesus’ feet with her
tears. But some of you were. Not many of you are rich and have given to the
support of the ministry to the extent that Mary did. But some of you have. But
every one of you has come here today seeking Jesus, because you know deep down
in your heart that you can’t clean up your own life; you can’t reform yourself;
you can’t pull yourself up by your own boot straps. And the good news today is
that the Church is not an empty tomb. He is here! He has risen! And he has
risen to call each of you by name and to give you that new life he died and rose again win for you. “[For] you, who were once alienated and
enemies in your mind by wicked works, yet now He has reconciled in the body of
His flesh through death, to present you holy, and blameless, and above reproach
in His sight.” (
If Mary experienced that kind
of redemption, how do you think it affected her life? How do you think she should
have lived in response? If we are Mary - if we are perfectly represented by her
- how should we live?
His is risen!
And you are risen with Him! Allellua!
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