This month, as we farewell Tricia Norman after two decades of extraordinarily generous, thoughtful, and skilled pastoral care to our communities, it seems appropriate – especially as we commemorate the feast of the admirable Mary Magdalene in July – to celebrate some of the women in the gospels. They all contributed most generously, in ways we don’t always realise.
Sometimes it’s hard to sort them out. There are so many Marys, and other women are mentioned only in passing, as if they were peripheral to the Jesus story (not true).
If we have trouble, much of the blame can lie at the door of no less influential a figure than Pope Saint Gregory the Great. In a sermon in Rome on 14 September 591 he managed to combine three quite separate women: Mary of Magdala, Mary of Bethany and the unnamed penitent prostitute of St Luke’s gospel. His mistake lasted over a thousand years. One can say the Church moves slowly but it’s hard to believe that the papal error was corrected only in 1969.
In the meantime, European artists had had a field day. It was generally accepted that red hair was by far the most sensuous colour for a woman, and of course sex workers and courtesans left their hair flowing loosely over their shoulders; respectable women bound their hair up, and according to whatever was fashionable covered their heads with a cap, veil, bands or a bonnet. Picturing the penitent prostitute, the hair grew longer and more exotic, often reaching over bare bodies to her toes. It was in fact an excuse to combine the religious and the gorgeous. Despite the skull and the heavenward glance, Titian’s Magdalene (below right), is hardly sacred. In Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, her hair appears free – image not shown here – but it is actually tied back except for a few curls around her face. A respectable, well-born woman, she wears a fine veil over her head and shoulders, which you can just make out across her forehead.
In the gospels the women’s figures are far more grounded – and admirable.
To start with, there are three Marys.
First, and obviously the most significant, is Mary the mother of Jesus – one of the best known women in world history. And yet we have relatively few facts about her. She lived in Nazareth, a tiny rural town (storing olives, corn, a wine press probably) with a population of only a couple of hundred people. The village lies up north in Galilee, roughly mid-way between the Mediterranean coast and the lake of Galilee, and a few kilometres from the large Graeco-Roman city of Sepphoris where a skilled carpenter could get work.
We first meet her at the Annunciation in Luke’s gospel, and in Matthew at the nativity and the flight into Egypt. We know nothing of her family or background although the protoevangelium of James, written mid-second century and so rejected by the church, gives us Anna and Joachim. Mary then appears twice in the Temple in the childhood of Jesus, at the marriage feast of Cana, the crucifixion and lastly with the apostles round her at Pentecost. Nothing more.
Then there’s Mary of Magdala – the Magdalene
About an hour’s drive north-east of Nazareth, and you come to the lake of Galilee, and probable site of Migdal/Magdala – the town of the gospels. This Mary first appears in Luke who describes Jesus as casting out her “seven devils”; another way of saying that he cured her of a grave/all-consuming illness. (Seven in biblical terms implies completion, devils are a way of measuring the gravity of an ailment, physical or psychological.) In this passage from Luke, we also learn that three women: Mary of Magdala, Joanna wife of Chuza – who was Herod’s manager, and so very well connected politically – and Susanna, actually paid for the expenses of Jesus and his close followers ‘out of their considerable means’.
These three are women of authority and substance in their society, a long way from the penitent prostitute that medieval legend loved. This Mary is always named first when the gospels mention a group of women who follow Jesus from Galilee going south to Jerusalem; she is at the crucifixion in all the gospels, having the courage to stand near the Roman executioners in support of a condemned criminal when the male apostles have fled. Women and foreign soldiers is a pretty brutal mix. She then leads the group of women who discover the empty tomb – the first witnesses to the possibility of resurrection. Most importantly Mary, distracted by grief “they have taken his body away” questions the gardener – and then realises that he is the risen Christ. Jesus’ saying to her “don’t touch me” – the famous ‘noli me tangere’ indicates at once his sense of fragility, and their usual degree of friendship. For some hours she IS the church, the only person who believes in Christ and knows the Resurrection. Pope Francis called her the apostle to the apostles.
She is magnificent. To confuse her with the unnamed prostitute who bathes Jesus’ feet with her tears, really reflects the early medieval church’s view of women as a whole.
The third Mary is Mary of Bethany – a town 160 kilometres to the south down in Judea, on the south eastern slopes of the Mount of Olives and just a few kilometres from Jerusalem. This Mary has a brother Lazarus and sister Martha all of whom are such close friends of Jesus that he stays in their house.
Most famously she sat at Jesus’ feet as a man would do, listening to his teaching rather than filling the usual role of women and preparing the meal that their hospitality demanded. Jesus describes Mary as “having chosen the better part”, but my sympathy has always been with Martha on this occasion. A house full of men and the ancient Jewish tradition of hospitality which was not just good manners, but a sacred moral and legal obligation; the Martha’s of this world have contributed so much.
The sisters have no compunction in sending for Jesus when their brother lies ill and then ”Now Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus. So when he heard that he was ill in the place where was…” The point is made that going back to Bethany, which was so close to Jerusalem put Jesus in real danger; he had so angered some of the locals that they wanted to stone him. In the delay Lazarus dies. It is Martha who goes out to meet Jesus and tells him bluntly “if you had been here my brother would not have died”. After her great statement of faith Martha tells Mary who in turn meets him in tears. And then “Jesus wept”. Only one of two occasions when he is recorded as moved to tears – the other time being over the fate of the city of Jerusalem which will be utterly razed to the ground and its people slaughtered.
It is Martha, the practical one, who warns against opening the tomb of someone dead for four days. The old King James version of the bible has a marvellously blunt translation “he Stinketh”. While later translations have ‘stench’ or ‘a terrible odor’, but Martha makes her point, and the raising to life again of their brother and his friend is all the more awe-inspiring.
Six days before the Passover Jesus again stayed in their house in Bethany. Martha again served them supper, then Mary took a pound of Spikenard oil, of the value of a year’s labour for a workman, anointed Christ’s feet and wiped them with her hair. It was at once an act of the most profound humility – the lowest slave washed the road-muddied feet of the guest – and a pre-figuring of the way the women would anoint his dead body in a few days’ time. Her relationship with him is profound.
Two other Marys are mentioned in the gospels – Mary wife of Cleopas who John names among the group of women at the foot of the cross, together with Mary the mother of James and Jose who had both followed Jesus down from Galilee and also stood at the cross. Little more is known of either of them, but the two women are imagined (below) either side of St John as Jesus’ body is lowered from the cross in the moving Netherlandish painting commissioned by the Leuven Guild of Archers.
Image 1: Saint Mary Magdalene taken to heaven by angels by Antonio Vivarini (Source: image by Sailko, Wikimedia Commons)
Image 2: Penitent Magdalene – a former harlot – by El Greco, 1576. Budapest Gallery (Source: Public Domain, Wikipedia Google Arts & Culture)
Image 3: Penitent Magdalene by Titian, 1565. The Hermitage, St Petersburg (Source: Mathiasrex, Wikimedia Commons)
Image 4: Christ in the House of Martha and Mary by Johannes Vermeer. National Gallery of Scotland (Source: Public Domain, Wikipedia Google Arts & Culture)
Image 5: The Raising of Lazarus by Giotto. Scrovegni Chapel, Padua (Source: Public Domain, Wikimedia Commons)
Image 6: Descent from the Cross by Rogier van der Weyden. Museo del Prado, Madrid (Source: Mattes, Wikimedia Commons)
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Helen Fox says:
Farewell to the generous and compassionate Tricia, she will be missed. Thank you Sandy on this thought provoking piece. I’ll read it again and spend some time reflecting on the Marys and what they represent.