Ss Peter & Paul, Kettering
Mary Magdalene
Grace to you, and peace from the living God, in the name of the Lord Jesus, and greetings in the Spirit to the saints in Kettering, from the saints in Bentleigh, in suburban Melbourne, Australia. Thank you to Dominic and to all of you for inviting me to preach today and to share in the eucharist with you. I’m hoping that you’ve had enough practice listening to Australian accents with the tennis and the cricket commentary, that we’ll be able to come to a good understanding of the saint of the day, Mary Magdalene. She’s been one of the Church’s heroes ever since Easter morning, and she’s well worth our attention.
She wasn’t always a hero, of course. She started out stark, staring mad. Luke’s gospel tells us that Jesus had cast out seven demons from her. Seven is not a lucky number in this case. Those demons made her a madwoman. A danger to herself and to others. Shrieking mad, muttering mad, self-harming, aggressive, depressed and depressing, something sub-human that no one in their right mind would want to be near. Mary Magdalene started out quite mad.
But then came Jesus of Nazareth, and he cast out those seven demons, did Jesus of Nazareth, and overnight Mary Magdalene went from mad to useful. Luke’s gospel tells us that Mary Magdalene was one of a handful of women who travelled with Jesus and the men disciples and provided for them and for the mission out of their resources, out of the women’s resources. Mission is expensive, in the first as in the twenty-first century. And Mary Magdalene was genuinely, generously, practically, gratefully USEFUL.
I can relate to that, good middle class girl that I am, eldest child in the family, vicar of a middling parish, over-developed sense of responsibility. Anyone else here believe we’ve been put on earth to be useful? And if we don’t have to be mad to begin with, so much the better? Is useful what life’s all about?
Well, no. Mary Magdalene is not a saint because she was useful, and I’ll never be a saint in Melbourne, and you’ll never be the saints in Kettering, if we settle for simply ‘useful’ as our vocation. Mary Magdalene went from mad to useful; from useful to useless; and from useless to mad again.
The Jesus of Nazareth story goes on. Jesus himself moves on from sensible, practical mission (like healing people and casing out demons, like feeding people and telling really nice parables) to other, scarier things (like parables that tear strips off the powers that be, like teaching that sets him up for political confrontations and social downfall). Mary Magdalene watches and listens and worries for him; she can see what’s coming; she can’t stop him; she can’t leave him. It gets worse. She can’t save him; she can’t protect him; she still can’t leave him even when the Romans nail him up to die. John’s gospel says she was there at the crucifixion; she was there when they do that hasty burial in the garden. She’s there; and she’s absolutely, utterly, terminally useless.
I can relate to useless, too, and maybe so can some of you. Someone, or some cause that you care about, a person or an issue or even a church you’ve wrapped your life around and given and given - and received, of course - and for some reason - sickness or betrayal, accident or stupidity, malice or honest mistake - it all goes haywire and there’s just so much apina nd anger in thea ir, so much sadness and no solutions anywhere. Even if you didn’t cause it, you can’t fix it. Whatever’s gone wrong, your best efforts, your best ideas or your love or your money or your time or even your prayers can’t fix it, when the bottom falls out of the world.
Of course, we try resistance, and denial, in the face of that awful uselessness. Mary Magdalene tried, too. She’s still hoping and trying to be useful come the Sunday morning, trekking back to the grave with her best perfumed oil to be useful for the last time to the dead body of her life-saver, her dear dead teacher.
Sometimes God lets us sit, stunned and stupid and beyond our wits’ end, to prepare us, to make us desperate enough, for what comes next. Because what comes on the far side of useless is really scary. At least as frightening as the seven demons were at the beginning. What happens after useless is another kind of mad: resurrection mad.
See what happens to Mary Magdalene. She arrives at the grave and there’s no body in it. She tells Peter and the other disciple, they check it out, then scratch their heads and go home. Notice that there’s no ‘Come on, Mary, let’s go home together and have some breakfast and see if we can figure this out.’ The useless, tearful woman is left standing there, in the middle of a terrible emptiness.
But then there are the angels... and the gardener with the voice that’s suddenly recognisable when he says her name... and there’s her voice recognising him - ‘Teacher!’... and there’s her getting her instructions: don’t hold onto me, do go and tell the others... And it’s mad, it’s irrational, it’s impossible, and no one will believe her, and she’s clearly been driven insane by grief or whatever, hardly surprising given the case history, of course - she goes, and she tells, mad Mary Magdalene: ‘I have seen the Lord!’ - and because of her resurrection madness no Christian anywhere can tell the story of Easter morning without telling the story of this mad, marvellous saint and hero and apostle to the apostles.
Yet the reason we tell the story at all is not to keep Mary’s memory green or to cherish this extraordinary disciple. We tell the story to fuel our own future, and to turn middling Australian Anglicans and modest Kettering members of the C of E into mad women and mad men and mad kids, on the Mary Magdalene resurrection model. So where are you in the story?
There are probably a few in any congregation with demons - middle class ones, most likely, our demons, domestic demons that get their claws into the likes of us. A drinking problem, an eating disorder, a controlling personality, an uptight stinginess, an addiction to gossip or shopping or small-scale cheating, a habit that may be legal but isn’t healthy, something in our life that controls us rather than us controlling it, let alone God controlling us. To anyone with any kind of demon, today’s news is: Jesus can make you useful.
Chances are, in our case, a lot of us are already useful. It’s an OK part of being a disciple, is usefulness. The stage where I tell Jesus what I’m going to do for him. Glad, grateful, generous, disciplined, even sacrificial usefulness. Yet to anyone for whom, in your Church life so far, the high point of pleasure and pride is in being useful, today’s news is: faced with what Jesus did, and what Jesus does, your best efforts will always prove absolutely useless.
It’s likely, in a congregation like this, that for a few of you this penny has already dropped. The realisation that being useful is not enough, and even that sometimes it’s an illusion. That Christianity is not primarily about what we can do for God and our neighbour. Perhaps that feeling of being useless is a dark place for you, an angry6 or a tearful place; or perhaps it’s actually peaceful and pleasant to let go of the drivenness that used to make you act as if the Kingdom would come tomorrow if you just worked a bit harder. If you, today, are at the point of the story where you are looking at your own uselessness in the cold light of day, today’s news is: Jesus will not leave you there, and he will certainly not give you back your old clarities, but Jesus is calling you into a new kind of madness on the far side of it all. Resurrection is the destiny prepared for us by this Jesus.
So who, here is willing to risk the whole world labelling us insane - either again, or for the first time in your so-far most orderly life? It doesn’t sound much like suburban Melbourne, and it may not sound much like downtown Kettering. It sounds like a danger to the cautious and the comfortable and the predictable and the proper everywhere. Even so, will you risk it?
As you taste the body and the blood this morning - and there’s a mad concept if ever there was one - will you hear Jesus’ Easter morning voice speak your baptismal name? And will it call you into resurrection madness, stark, staring apostolic madness, wild-eyed, stammering, poetical ‘I have seen the Lord!’ madness? Attention- seeking, extravagant, irrationally imaginative, boundlessly creative and startlingly energetic, Mary Magdalene madness?
Yes; and yes; and perhaps with tears in our eyes, and certainly with a spring in our step, please God, let it be yes, and yes, you and me and mad Mary Magdalene together.
Elizabeth Smith, July 22nd, 2007
Office Address:
The Rectory
Church Walk
Kettering
NN16 0DJ