MISBEHAVING WOMEN: The Gospel of Mary Magdalene

Acts 1: 12-26

I once saw a bumper sticker that read, "well-behaved women do not change history." Mary Magdalene was one such woman in scripture who refused to behave, refused to stay in line, refused to remain silent. Even though the price would be efforts by others to erase her from history. Mary was what I like to call a choicemaker. Choicemakers decide on a course and despite the hardships do not look back. There are no guarantees. There is only the chance to learn, grow, and follow your dreams

Imagine how different history would have been if when the time came to fill the vacancy left by Judas' death the apostles had had the courage to break with convention and elect Mary of Magdala to the rank of apostle. Women seeking ordination centuries later would not find themselves forced to defend their right to preach, teach, and assume positions of leadership in the church. Thousands of women might have been spared burning at the stake, spared from being brandished a witch or heretic, escaped depression and madness, freed from feeling maladjusted spiritually because of their spiritual gifts, and saved the pain of ridicule and ostracization for being born female instead of male.

Indeed, reading the first chapter of Acts one gets the impression that electing a woman to replace Judas was the furthest thing from the minds of those left to pick up the pieces after the movement was forced to go underground. The disgrace felt by all by Judas's betrayal and suicide, coupled with the scandal of Jesus public execution on a cross, had managed to leave the remaining followers nervous and fearful about doing anything that might attract any more attention to themselves. It's difficult to believe, however, given her gifts and qualifications that the name of Mary of Magdala name never came up as a likely person to fill the vacancy. More difficult to believe is the notion that the women who'd worked closely with her, women like Susanna, Joanna, Mary, the mother of James and others, who knew first-hand Mary's qualifications and sacrifices for the ministry never spoke up to protest the men's obvious reluctance to tap her for the position.

Tradition has it that the Beloved Disciples whom John speaks of throughout his gospel was none other than Mary Magdalene. A close look at the feminine features of the disciple sitting closest to Jesus at his right side in Leonardo da Vinci's famous "Last Supper" mural suggests that the painter was perhaps familiar with this tradition and used the mural to poke fun at the church's conventional image of twelve men surrounding Jesus at the supper.

Actually, Mary Magdalene fades off the scene after the gospel dispenses with the account of her encounter with the Resurrected Savior and her subsequent witness to the disciples about what Jesus proclaimed to her (Luke 24: 1-12). You would think from the record that Mary quietly receded into the background and gave the spotlight over to the men. But extant records from the second century of gospels that never attained the same status as the four we now have in the Bible suggest that Mary Magdalene went on to become an important teacher during those early years of the church. Extrabiblical documents, one of them the "Gospel of Mary" written in Greek which dates back to the second century, exalt Mary Magdalene over the male disciples of Jesus and provide important information about the role of women in the early church.

In the Gospel of Mary, emboldened by her conversations with Jesus at the tomb Mary confronts and reveals to Peter the error of some of his teachings. From this gospel we see hints of some leadership tensions that arose in second-century Christianity. Peter and Andrew would eventually emerge in history as representing the orthodox position which denied the validity of esoteric revelation and rejected the authority of women to teach.

Strange isn't it: even though Peter's boldly quotes from the prophet Joel one chapter later here in Acts (2:17-21) to argue that the Holy Spirit emboldens men and women both to preach with authority, his argument never translates into a principled stance on his part to recognize the women who followed Jesus as equal partners in the ministry.

Nevertheless, the Gospel of Mary is our proof that some in the early church disagreed head-on with Peter and the other disciples about women's role in the ministry. In this gospel that never made it into our Protestant canon Mary is portrayed as the Savior's beloved, possessed of knowledge and teaching superior to that of the public apostolic tradition. Her superiority is based on vision and private revelation and is demonstrated in her capacity to strengthen the wavering disciples and turn them toward the Truth.

Curiously, both the gospel accounts we've come to know and love, and the book of Acts which narrates the early decades of the church's beginning, never bother to say anything explicitly about Mary's special gifts as a teacher and theological thinker. Her leadership gifts are alluded to in the gospels in the many places where she's mentioned first in the list of the names of women who followed Jesus (Luke 8:1-3; 24:10; Mark 16:1; John 20: 1 ). And, of course, the fact that Jesus chose to reveal Himself first to her (and the other women at the tomb) while instructing her to return and convince the disciples of everything she'd seen and witnessed speaks volume about His confidence in her abilities as a speaker and teacher (Luke 24:1-12; John 20: 1-8). If Mary, or one of her beloved followers, hadn't left us the Gospel of Mary we might never know of her unique intelligence.

Worst yet, we might never have known that there were those in the early church that welcomed and celebrated women's leadership in the movement. We wouldn't know that despite the recent scandals some followers refused to return to the status quo by relegating women to their traditional roles as supporters but never leaders in the faith. The fragmentary evidence of the gospel of Mary suggests that like Paul some parts of the church went so far as to recognize women's gifts in the church; but unlike Paul did not turn around and silence women for the sake of the social order.

The lesson here is that God offers every one of us choices, decisions, the opportunity to learn and grow from our experiences, and the invitation to work with God in shaping who we will become. Like Mary of Magdala, life will have its share of failures and of unchosen circumstances; but it is not just what happens to us that shapes us, but what happens inside us that makes all the difference. We can and do survive deprivation, loss, a broken heart, assault, illness, and having to start over because we learn how to step back from the pain of what's happening to us and see the hint of a new life opening to us.

Fortunately, there have always been women (and men) like Mary of Magdala who refused to live their lives according to conventional norms. As a choice maker you learn to pause to sort out your priorities and motives, and the potentialities of a situation. You have to think through what your choices are, consider what choices will cost you emotionally, predict as best you can where the decision might lead you, figure out intuitively what matters most to you, and pray to God for guidance. On the basis of who you are and what you know, you must make a decision about which path to take. Living one's life as a choicemaker means learning to distinguish real love from the fantasy of being rescued. Being a choicemaker means learning to distinguish between being tolerated and being respected. The Peters of the world are intent upon ignoring you. The Pauls of the world are determined to silence you. But you must decide that greater is the gift of God within you than the gifts men (and women) withhold from you.

So, what do you when you're Mary Magdalene and the job you wanted the most has been denied you because of race, color, or some other factors about you which you cannot control? After the men refused to elect her, it's likely that Mary broke off to start her own ministry, one that recognized women as equal partners in the new kingdom founded by the late Jesus. Mary teaches us that you either grow or allow yourself to be diminished by the decisions of others. The difference between the woman who shirks back at decision-making time and the one who gathers herself up and tries again is that the latter is able to separate what happens to her from what happens within her. Even if she blows it, she never sees herself as a failure at heart. She figures out what she's supposed to learn from her experiences and resolves to reinvent herself. Messing up is the risk you take for stepping out. But it's also the feedback we need for how to take our pain and use it for growth.

Renita J. Weems, Ph.D.