As for Mary Magdalene—what do we really know about her and about her relationship with Jesus? Was she in fact married to Jesus, as some now claim? And did the two of them really have a daughter named Sarah? And did Jesus actually intend for Mary, rather than Peter, to become his chief apostle? That's a first set of questions.
And as for Dan Brown's THE DA VINCI CODE, which otherwise seems a pretty pedestrian potboiler—what can possibly account for its astonishing popularity? Its sales are now approaching 50 million copies, and the movie's worldwide, first-weekend gross topped $225 million, the second highest figure in all of film history. (Now, in the interest of full disclosure, I need to confess to you that these figures include one mass-market paperback and $14-worth of senior-citizen movie tickets bought by Margaret and me!) Anyway, here, I think, is the real question and issue: Do we need, at least in part, to account for such astounding figures as these by acknowledging that in some way this work has managed to tap into some very deep layers of people's distrust of organized religion and by trying to analyze what those layers of distrust really are?
Well, with regard to this last question, Brian McLaren, a contemporary commentator on the American religious scene, has, I believe, analyzed the phenomenon brilliantly. He writes (quote): "I think a lot of people have read the book, not just as a popular page-turner but also as an experience in shared frustration with [those forms of organized Christian religion that are] status-quo[-focused], male-dominated, power-oriented, [and] cover-up-prone... We [Christians] need to ask ourselves why the vision of Jesus [and Mary] hinted at in Dan Brown's book is more interesting, [more] attractive, and [more] intriguing to these people than the standard vision...they hear about in church.... I...think that the...issue of [the] male domination [of the church] is huge and that Brown's suggestion that...Jesus [himself] was not as misogynist or anti-woman as the Christian religion often has been is very attractive.
"Brown's book is about exposing hypocrisy and cover-up in organized religion, and [about] exposing organized religion's grasping for power. Again, there's something in that that people resonate with in th[is] age of pedophilia scandals, televangelists, and religious political alliances. A[nd a]s a follower of Jesus I resonate with the[se] concerns as well." (in SOJOMAIL for May 5, 2006 [visit www.sojo.net]) End of quote from McLaren.
Now, I personally believe that in this context we Christians can begin to respond effectively to this widespread distrust of the patriarchy and hypocrisy found in organized Christian religion by addressing the first set of questions I raised—about who Mary Magdalene really was. And although, as you'll see by the end, I wholly disagree with Dan Brown's views on who Mary was, let me start out by granting the truth of his more general point. For up to now, Mary Magdalene has not been properly identified and celebrated by most of us in Christ's church.
Yet I believe that the church's false identification of Mary does not originate with the image of her presented in Christianity's four canonical gospels, the four first-century gospels found in our Bible. And I believe that the remedy to the church's false identification of Mary lies precisely in recovering the images of her found in these four gospels rather than in accepting as true Dan Brown's really quite bizarre misinterpretations of some second-century gospels that are not part of our Bible. So let me explain myself.
In today's First Lesson, the Gospel of Luke tells us, in the quasi-medical language about demons typical of that time, that Mary has been healed by Jesus of a quite serious malady—perhaps a disorder like epilepsy—and that she has now become one of Jesus's principal traveling companions and supporters, and a major disciple. And later in this gospel, Luke tells us that Mary is not just a fair-weather friend to Jesus but accompanies him all the way to Golgotha, standing watch with him during his crucifixion (Luke 23:49; cf. also Mark 15:40 and Matthew 27:55-56) and then being present during his entombment (Luke 23:55; cf. also Mark 15:47 and Matthew 27:61).
And in today's Second Lesson, the Gospel of John tells us that come Sunday morning and the discovery of the empty tomb, the risen Jesus chooses to appear first of all to...—that's right, this same Mary Magdalene. And John goes on to tell us that Jesus promptly commissions her to become an apostle to the apostles. That is, he commissions her to proclaim to his other principal disciples the good news of his having been raised from the dead. And Mary proceeds to do just that. She announces to the others, "I have seen the Lord," and she goes on to report to them the things the risen Jesus has told her.
That's who Mary Magdalene really was. Yet from at least the sixth century onward, the primary image of Mary presented within the church has been one that's quite different from that—an image of her as someone who in fact she never was! It's the false image of her as a flame-haired prostitute—oh, a penitent one, to be sure, but a tart nonetheless. This shifting of images within the church is, I'm afraid, one that's all too typical of patriarchal institutions—this move to reduce an authoritative woman to a sex-object.
For you see, after the departure of the risen Christ, the patriarchy prevalent in the ancient world came to reassert itself within the structures of the emerging Christian community. Women's initial roles of leadership within the church came first to be challenged and then to be actively undermined and eliminated. And the literature of second-century Christianity, written long after both the disciple Mary Magdalene and the disciple Peter had died, portrays these two towering figures of early Christianity as symbols for the two opposing viewpoints in this struggle over women's place in Christ's church—Mary being the classic figure lifted up by those who continued to endorse women's right to positions of leadership, and Peter being the classic figure lifted up by those who opposed such a right for women.
And so Dan Brown is correct in pointing us to a strong tradition about Mary Magdalene's prominence among the disciples, a tradition attested to in two second-century gospels that were not included in our Bible-the gospels of Mary (that is, Magdalene) and of Philip (see the mass-market edition of The Da Vinci Code [Anchor Books, 2006], pp, 268, 266).
But Brown is quite wrong—and, indeed, trivializing—when he offers his understanding of the importance of this tradition. In both the novel and the movie, he has the character Sir Leigh Teabing instruct the heroine, Sophie Neveu, that these texts first of all prove that Mary Magdalene was married to Jesus (p. 266), and second of all prove that Jesus "intended for the future of His Church to be in the hands of Mary Magdalene" (p. 268), and not in the hands of Peter. And Teabing seems to imply that if the church had been in the hands of the physical descendants of Mary and Jesus, rather than in the hands of the spiritual descendants of Peter, we would today be celebrating a Jesus who was strictly human—albeit wise and inspirational—strictly human, and not at all divine (pp. 253-254, 270, 274, 276).
But please note that Brown, under the guise of feminism, is really perpetrating something quite patriarchal. He, too—like the traditional church he's criticizing—has stripped Mary of her apostolic authority and has identified as the seat of her power and importance her sexuality. In Brown's novel, Mary is not at all the chosen and authoritative witness to Jesus's resurrection, for Brown, the humanist, never once in all his novel alludes to Jesus's resurrection! No, Mary's importance in the novel is that she's the disciple whose female body gave birth to Jesus's offspring.
Well, at least for Brown Mary is no longer a prostitute, but for him her primary identity is still sexual. She's not the apostle of the risen Lord attested to in our Bible. Instead, she's the mother of Jesus's bloodline and as such the proof that Jesus was strictly human and not also divine.
Now, I would need far more than just the ten fingers on my hands to count the ways in which Brown misrepresents poor Mary—and also the church! The reason the church has not thought of Mary as the wife of Jesus and the mother of their daughter Sarah is because, in fact—despite Brown's claims—there's not one shred of credible evidence pointing either to Mary's wifehood or to her motherhood.
For instance, whereas Brown claims that the second-century Gnostic gospels of Mary and Philip celebrate the sexuality and marriage of Jesus and Mary and that this somehow demonstrates that Jesus was strictly human and not also divine—whereas Brown claims this, the truth of the matter is that the main purpose for these Gnostic gospels, like Mary and Philip, was precisely to affirm that our human flesh and the physical world that ensnares our souls have no goodness to them whatsoever. These gospels celebrate not marriage but celibacy, and far from attesting that Jesus was wonderfully and vibrantly human, they emphasize that his true self, his true being, was buried deep within his body of flesh and was in fact a fully divine soul needing to be liberated from his humanity.
So the reason why the Christian community excluded from our Bible these two gospels—and the other Gnostic gospels—is not because they portray Jesus and Mary as sexual beings, which, by the way, they don't. No, these Gnostic gospels were excluded from the Bible precisely because they deny the genuine humanity of the Messiah and express contempt for the fleshly dimensions of our human existence!
And as for the battle within early Christianity over gender roles, the best rejoinder to the patriarchal assertion that Peter held primacy over Mary Magdalene—the best rejoinder to that is not the specious argument that Mary really held primacy over Peter. No, the best rejoinder is that following the resurrection Mary Magdalene and Peter were in fact equally authoritative witnesses to the risen Jesus. In this year of 2006, when our denomination, the Presbyterian Church (USA) is marking the 50th anniversary of our ordination of women as ministers of Word and Sacrament and the 75th anniversary of our ordination of women as elders, it's important for us to acknowledge that the apostolic equality of Mary Magdalene and Peter is a theological understanding that can strongly undergird the magnificent statement that we regularly proclaim when we recite together our denomination's most recent confession of faith, the line that reads: "[God the Holy Spirit] calls women and men to all ministries of the Church." ("A Brief Statement of Faith," l. 64)
So, Brown has handed to the Christian community, quite unwittingly, an opportunity. First, he's handed to us an opportunity to enter into conversation and dialogue with all those hurt by and distrustful of Christianity; and second, he's handed to us the opportunity within that conversation to acknowledge humbly that the church has indeed behaved patriarchally and hypocritically; and third, he's handed to us the opportunity within that conversation to affirm that Mary Magdalene has once again become for us a model for women's roles of leadership within the church. But she is a model for us not because she married Jesus and bore their daughter, which she didn't. No, she is a model for us because she stands as an authoritative witness to the truth of our Easter faith, because she stands as an authoritative witness to the truth that the Christ who welcomed Mary as a traveling companion, supporter, disciple, and apostle—that that Christ still lives.
Let us pray:
O God, help us to recall, and to retell, and to embody the stories of the women of the church. And create in us a spirit like that found in Mary Magdalene—a spirit open to Your word, eager to receive and act upon Your good news, and decisive in implementing here on earth a full measure of Your truth and love. In the name of the risen Christ, we pray this. Amen.