Encounters with Jesus

Mary Magdalene Out of Love for Jesus

In the Gospel account, three figures overlap: Mary, the sister of Lazarus; Mary of Magdala; and the anonymous sinner who washed Jesus’ feet with her tears. Each of them was won over by the encounter with Christ. And to think that “Jesus fixed His gaze on her, He gazed at her as He walked along, without stopping”

BY STEFANO ZURLO

More than a well-defined woman, she is a human type. Mary Magdalene is an omnibus-name, a caption under numerous pages of the Gospel which may refer to different people: above all the anonymous sinner who washed Christ’s feet with fragrant oil; then the pure and faithful Mary of Magdala at the foot of the Cross and the first great witness to the Resurrection on Easter morning; and finally, Mary the sister of Lazarus, whom John conflates with the woman who washed His feet. The Eastern Church has always maintained the existence of three independent figures, but the Western tradition has merged them into one, sewing together with only one thread some scenes from Jesus’ life, and celebrating the saint’s day on July 22nd. In reality, this mending operation does not convince anyone any more; all you have to do is leaf through the Jerusalem Bible or spend some time with the pages of Giuseppe Ricciotti’s Life of Jesus Christ to understand that critics have opened this holy container in order to attribute to each figure her own identity. “Since the time of Gregory the Great,” Rudolf Pesch writes, “the Western Church has in the tradition, liturgy, legends, art, and popular devotion identified Mary Magdalene with Mary of Bethany, the sister of Lazarus and Martha, and also with the unnamed ‘sinner.’ Even though New Testament studies have long agreed with the position of the Eastern Church, which distinguishes between the three women and venerates Mary of Bethany alongside Mary Magdalene, this identification endures in our missals. But for how much longer?”
The question remains; the biographies have not been harpooned to the wall of history as has happened with Pilate, and they waver in the balance between chronicle and popular rumor: Mary Magdalene went to Marseilles–as the medieval tradition has it–and remained in penance in a solitary hermitage in the mountains of Saint-Baume for thirty years; her body is in the Abbey of Vezelay in Burgundy.

In the house of the Pharisee
We are groping in the dark but, if we leave out Mary of Bethany, the other two women have one trait in common which permits us to describe them together. This is the extraordinary charm Christ has over them, and precisely their contact with Him makes of them two fantastically anti-moralistic figures. Seen through the spectacles of good sense and good manners, they are embarrassing and, precisely because of this, very modern.
Let’s take the sinner: Jesus is seated at the table in the house of a Pharisee. She enters and, “standing behind Him at His feet, weeping, she began to wet His feet with her tears, and wiped them with the hair of her head, and kissed His feet, and anointed them with the ointment.” The host warns his guest, “She is a sinner.” What kind of sinner? We ask the question today with a touch of morbid curiosity. A prostitute, as the tradition tells us? The answer cannot be taken for granted. “For the Pharisees,” Ricciotti explains, “the term sinner had various meanings: it could mean a woman of perverse habits, just as it could mean a woman who did not observe the Pharisees’ rules; in the Talmud a woman who gives her husband food to eat for which the tithe has not been paid is considered a sinner.” It is hard to think she was really a prostitute. In all probability, they would not have let her even go into the house. Or, at the least, the Pharisee would have stopped the scene. Instead, he is forced to swallow the bitter pill: he has in front of him an important lady.

Upsetting all the patterns
On these bases, Giacomo Contri demolishes the traditional prayer card image and constructs a much more complex figure, full of nuances and suggestions: that of a proper, cultivated woman with class, a lady with perhaps a tempestuous life but well known in the most exclusive circles. This woman, rich or poor, cultured or ignorant, is thunderstruck by Christ and is used by Our Lord like a battering ram to upset all the patterns of good upbringing and etiquette. “Jesus said to him, ‘Do you see this woman? I entered your house, you gave me no water for my feet, but she has wet my feet with her tears and wiped them with her hair… Therefore I tell you, her sins, which are many, are forgiven, for she loved much; but he who is forgiven little, loves little.’” What sins? According to Contri, there is no need to go peeping under the covers–everything that is done “without Him,” far away from Christ, is sin. And she brings into play all her prestige and charm in order to perform the most praiseworthy of actions: she makes a “political” choice, she lines up on the side of Christ. She was won over by Him.

Zacchaeus, the Samaritan woman, and Mary Magdalene
Fr Giussani writes, “It is certainly because of the way He looked at her that the Magdalene went to Him; it depended on the way He looked at her.” Who knows if, the day before, in the middle of the street, “Jesus fixed His gaze on her, He gazed at her as He walked along, without stopping,” without even saying a word. It was enough; Jesus “looked at things for what they really were–you look at something for what it really is when you see it as God sees it.” And when you see things from that perspective, life changes: “The gaze of that man was enough and her life changed. And since that moment she would no longer look at herself, would no longer see herself, would no longer see relationships with men, with people, with her home, with Jerusalem, she would no longer be able to look at all these things except within the gaze of His eyes.”
The next day she throws herself at His feet, she washes them with her tears, and dries them with her hair. And God’s point of view overturns the world’s: “Modern culture,” Giussani goes on, “not believing in anything, believes only in so-called value, which is to say in man’s strength, in the strength with which man puts into action a goodness or a virtue.” Mary Magdalene, just like Zacchaeus and the Samaritan woman, does not satisfy these canons: “These three figures were despised by the crowd.” And yet, “in the Gospel the figures in that crowd who triumphed are these three.” Three great sinners, three figures of dubious repute, to be avoided, three people (even if there are dissenting opinions concerning Mary Magdalene), with whom a respectable man would not even have coffee, melt in front of Him and become His witnesses with an ardor, a transport, and enthusiasm which are worth much more than their shortcomings, their faults, their defects.

At the tomb
Here is the event: Mary Magdalene, with her unseemly and overdone gesture, entrusts herself to Christ, and that decision erases all the barriers, all the prejudices, all the distances. She–like Zacchaeus and the Samaritan woman–becomes the measure of a new and greater humanity.
The same way of measuring, completely incompatible with the mentality that is a slave of form, emerges at the moment of the Resurrection. This time the protagonist is Mary of Magdala, the woman who stayed at the foot of the Cross with Our Lady. Early Sunday morning she goes to the tomb, sees a person she mistakes for the gardener, then He reveals who He is. “Woman,” John tells us, transcribing the dialogue between the Lord and His disciple, “why are you weeping? Whom are you seeking?” She, thinking he is the custodian of the garden, says to Him: “Sir, if you have carried Him away, tell me where you have laid Him, and I will take Him away.” Jesus said to her, “Mary.” So then she turned to face Him, and said to him in Hebrew: “Rabbuni,” which means “Teacher.” Jesus said to her, “Do not hold me, for I have not yet ascended to the Father…”
It is an overwhelming story, which truly upsets all the patterns. Mark’s embarrassment is almost palpable when he notes, “Jesus appeared to Mary Magdalene from whom He had cast out seven demons.” Vittorio Messori writes in Dicono che è risorto [They Say He is Risen]: “Mark is forced to admit that Jesus reserved His first appearance (the one that establishes the Church herself) not only to a woman, but a former hysteric or one possessed by a demon, if not (maybe) a former prostitute.” Then Messori amuses himself, with a pinch of treachery, by tracing in the Gospel text “the emergence of a sort of unconscious protest.” What happened is politically incorrect, it makes many people turn up their noses; to tell the truth it is not at all edifying. But the poor Evangelist has to report what happened, and it is not his fault if this is how things went. This is an embarrassing chapter, to say the least, if we remember that women, even women with spotless reputations, did not enjoy great consideration in those times: “The testimony of women,” Josephus Flavius tells us in his Antiquitate Judaicae, “is not valid and is not heeded among us, because of the flightiness and impudence of that sex.”

Noli me tangere
Christ once again flings wide, in a few lines, the doors of a different world, where the last are the first and where love wins out over sin. The Magdalene–even if it would be more correct to use the plural–opens this road to us, just as she pointed it out to the generations of the Middle Ages and the Counter-Reformation: the prototype of the penitent and an extraordinary example of humanity redeemed by Christ, all the way to the encounter with the Master at the tomb, a face-to-face encounter immortalized by countless painters. This is the exceedingly famous episode of the Noli me tangere (Do not touch me). Giussani dwells in particular on the one drawn by Fra Angelico to accompany us to the dizzying heights of Christian experience: “As soon as she sees Him, that is to say, as soon as she becomes aware of Jesus, she throws herself at Him. And Jesus stops her with His hand. You see Mary’s two hands and Jesus’ hand stopping her, which is the image we have always given of virginal possession, which tends to totality. But up to the moment when this tending to totality is a hand’s breadth away from the other’s face, one truly possesses, much more than if he threw himself at that face; throwing oneself onto the face of the other, the hand becomes more like an animal’s paw.”
This is Mary Magdalene’s great lesson: she, so beautiful, sensual, and uninhibited, she whom two thousand years of iconography have made us see with long, loose, flowing hair, arrives out of love for the Lord at the purest of relationships, completing the most enthralling journey anyone can imagine.