NOTHING SECRET ABOUT THEIR LOVE AFFAIR

Memorial of St. Mary Magdalene
Jn 20:1-2, 11-18

Today we commemorate the blessed memory of St. Mary Magdalene, a disciple of the Lord. St. Mary Magdalene is one of my favorite saints.

At the outset, let us erase from your minds the common notion that Mary of Magdala was a prostitute. Nowhere in the Scripture can we find a description that Mary Magdalene was a loose woman. She was a troubled woman though. Luke 8:2 tells us that the Lord freed her from seven demons. Bible scholars tell us that during Jesus’ time being possessed by demons, whether one or seven demons, did not necessarily mean being sexually permissive. Even what appears today as simple illness was looked upon as being possessed by the devil during the time of Christ. That she was afflicted by seven demons could have meant that Mary Magdalene was very sick, even fatally ill. The Lord, however, healed her and set her free.

It seems that Mary Magdalene is now commonly associated with prostitution because of the arrangement of the narratives in the Lucan Gospel. In Luke 8:1-3, the list of the women who followed Jesus and attended to his needs and that of His disciples includes the name of Mary Magdalene. It is unfortunate that these verses immediately follow the story of an unnamed woman who suddenly came in while Jesus was dining in the house of one of the Pharisees. That woman was said to have a bad name in the town. When she heard that Jesus was dining in the Pharisee’s house, she gatecrashed the party, washed the feet of the Lord with her tears, and wiped them with her hair. Then she covered His feet with kisses and anointed them with expensive, aromatic oil. For such an expression of love, Jesus forgave that unnamed woman of ill repute all her sins and used the occasion to teach His host and the other guests the lesson that he who has been forgiven little shows little love while he who has been forgiven more shows greater love. That woman remains unnamed up until today, but popular piety, without any biblical basis, named her Mary Magdalene.

Too bad for Mary Magdalene, for the Lord had freed her from seven demons but we seem to have chained her to a prostitute’s bed. Today, the highly popular book, “The Da Vinci Code” even proposes that she was the wife of Jesus and sired Him a daughter and that the Church intentionally kept this secret through the years while Leonardo Da Vinci encoded this juicy item in his obra maestra, “The Last Supper”. How trivial!

But Mary Magdalene’s love for Jesus was far from being trivial. She loved Him more than she loved her self. She was there, attending to His needs while He went about with the work of the ministry. She was there with Jesus’ mother, standing at the foot of the cross while He sealed His ministry with His own Blood. She was there, weeping outside the tomb while He called out her name and sent her to be an “apostle to the apostles”. Hers was a love that served the Lord, a love that consoled His mother, a love that was given a new way of looking at events in life to recognize Jesus, and a love that proclaimed Him already risen from the dead.

She loved Jesus so much because Jesus loved her more than she knew. This is what should happen to us, too. The tremendous love of the Lord should make us love the Lord more and more each day. Our grateful love for the Lord should make us rise each time we fall, wipe the tears we wept over our broken dreams, and move on in our Easter mandate to bear witness that the love of the Lord is stronger than death, stronger even than hell.

This love is not kept hidden by the Church from the knowledge of the faithful. This love is not encoded in some work of art. This love is far beyond marital relationship. It is the love of a disciple for her Master. It is the love that we should discover, learn, and emulate, not decode, trivialize, and generate money from through either a book publication or a movie production.