Mary Magdalene and The Da Vinci Code

Sermon preached at All Hallows by Annie Heppenstall-West on 24 July 2005

I mentioned to a friend recently that I was preaching on Mary Magdalene, and her response was, ‘hey, The Da Vinci Code! Isn’t it great!’ I hadn’t read it at that point, but this is the extended version of what I like to think I would have said…

Out of interest, who’s read The Da Vinci Code? The Da Vinci Code is a book that builds up an adventure story around a central idea, that ancient religion (and it’s implying that ancient religion is the true religion)… ancient religion centres around worshipping the feminine. Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene, and they had a daughter. The author makes out that a secret society kept this tradition of Mary alive, venerating/worshipping her as the one who bore the child of Jesus. This idea, that Mary was the most beloved disciple, was said to be communicated in particular ways, including the work of Leonardo Da Vinci, who painted a picture of the Last Supper. In this picture, so the writer of The Da Vinci Code tries to convince us, the beloved disciple is a woman: Mary Magdalene. And so the story goes on.

Goddess worship, Jesus’s lover, royal blood lines, esoteric societies, the veneration of a woman because of her intimacy with Christ… The Da Vinci Code is one person’s best-selling fantasy about how we can look at Mary.

It’s fun, in a way, and at times this supposed ancient worship of the feminine sounds appealing, but the book is fiction. In fact it’s dangerous fiction. In the first centuries after Jesus there was a fascination with secret knowledge – esoteric knowledge – and groups grew up alongside the early church claiming to have secret teachings of Jesus. They were called Gnostics, from the Greek word gnosis, knowledge. Their teachings, like The Da Vinci Code, often detract from what is really important about Jesus. They give an invitation to take the gospels less seriously, an invitation to cloud the clarity of Jesus’s message with a sultry, sexy, secret-society gloss which doesn’t really get us anywhere; not in faith terms, anyway.

So. Film producers and writers of fantasy like Mary Magdalene, she’s a good money-spinner. But where did this idea come from, of a female partner for Jesus? It’s not a new idea. The Gnostics started the ball rolling. There are Gnostic writings which describe Mary as the lover of Jesus.

In the Gospel of Philip, which is a 2nd- or 3rd-century compilation of traditions about Jesus, we read:

Jesus loved her more than the other disciples and used to kiss her often on her lips. The rest of the disciples, they said to him, ‘Why do you love her more than all of us?’…

For the writers of fiction there is plenty of mileage in writings like these, trying to bring out the human side of Jesus, answering a need we seem to have, for him to have been in love with somebody special… And there is a place for romantic love as an analogy of the love between the human soul and God; mysticism has been defined as erotic theology, and there is space in faith to explore this. Take for example the Song of Songs, which has been read as an analogy of love between Christ and his beloved follower: Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth! For your love is better than wine, your anointing oils are fragrant, your name is perfume poured out…’ ( S of S 1:2–3). This is OK. It is taking earthy, physical experience, and letting it speak to us about God. In the first chapter of John’s gospel we read, ‘The word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.’ The word becomes flesh, physical, to reveal the glory of God. This is the way with scripture, especially as we see today, in John’s gospel: through the physical we learn about the spiritual. That’s OK.

But some Gnostic groups saw Mary as the one who had secret wisdom, given by Jesus, because he loved her more than the others. He loved her, and he told her secrets: ‘the word became flesh and dwelt among us and told his favourites a special secret about God.’?? Now, that’s not OK. It’s exclusivist. In John’s gospel Mary also has a special message to communicate from Jesus, but the difference is that it is not a secret. It is for everyone: the word that he is risen from the dead, and all glory is to God, as we heard in the gospel reading today. She is the apostle of the apostles.

But not everyone was into Mary. If you read Luke’s gospel you see there was a conflict going on between different communities; the writer of Luke doesn’t like Mary taking such a prominent position at all. Luke is writing from a different community from the one John writes from, one which knows about Mary but holds Peter up as the first apostle. This community thinks women should be kept in the sidelines: respectful, humble, gentle, supportive women, but not teachers and evangelists. If you look up the accounts about women in Luke, there are lots of them, but they don’t have leadership roles. It is as though they are modelling what expectations of women were in that community.

Where, in John, Mary has prominence, in Luke it is Peter. You can see this tension easily enough in the gospels – check your bible later and compare Luke and John’s accounts of the empty tomb. And it’s in the Gnostic writings too: here’s a passage from the Gospel of Mary:

Mary has spoken to the disciples concerning teachings she has received from Jesus. ‘After examining these matters, Peter said, ‘Has the Saviour spoken secretly to a woman and not openly so that we would all hear? Surely he did not want to show that she is more worthy than we are?’ And Levi replies, ‘If the Saviour made her worthy, who are you indeed to reject her?’

In time, the rivalry faded out and Peter basically won. Today in the church it is still Peter who has prominence, and Mary has been elbowed out. But who was she? Was she Jesus’s lover? Was she leader of a gnostic cult? Was she some jumped-up woman threatening Peter’s position?

Well, none of these suggestions gives us the whole picture, I don’t think. To discover Mary I suggest we go deeper into the gospel of John, and look at her in the context of a few other characters. As we do so, I think something relevant unfolds for us about ministry.

This idea that Mary is the lover of Jesus is insubstantial, if we rely on gospel evidence. Yes, she follows him around, yes she sees him die, yes she wishes to tend his body after death, and yes, Jesus appears to her first, after his resurrection. But that does not necessarily mean they are lovers. They love each other, but they need not be partners. If we are looking in the gospels for evidence that Jesus had a special somebody, we are told who Jesus’s beloved disciple is, and it’s not Mary, despite the writer of The Da Vinci Code’s suggestion. The beloved disciple who is described as sitting close enough to Jesus to rest his head on Jesus’s chest, is definitely a man; in Leonardo Da Vinci’s painting, a beautiful young man.

We have to put the brakes on at this point, before getting too excited about the issues that seem to be here, and remind ourselves that this is a Mediterranean culture influenced by the Greco-Roman world two thousand years ago, and relationships were expressed differently from ours. Males and females kept within same-sex groups far more, bonds developed differently, and marriage was seen not so much as an idyllic love-match but a working partnership for economic stability, in which to raise children. Sexual relationships outside marriage were high-risk, especially for a woman, clandestine and minimal. Our Western relationship and gender patterns don’t quite match up. So anyway, if we are looking for romance in the gospels, we don’t get that far with Mary, who is not presented as the beloved disciple. So why is she significant?

Well Mary is one of a number of women who take prominent positions in John’s gospel. John is not writing romantic fiction about Jesus the man, he is writing about God, our path to God, our experience of God, Jesus as divine. In so doing John does for women what The Da Vinci Code never does, nor the Gnostic texts. He does not elevate Mary because she is a woman, because she is a sexual being capable of bearing children. It is not her potential maternity that makes her special, nor the fact that she may or may not be in erotic relationship with the Teacher. That is beside the point. Yes, we can draw out a mystical love theme in contemplating Jesus’s relationship with Mary or with the beloved disciple, we can use the physical to draw us into God. But the writer of the gospel is showing us something else about Mary, that can get lost if we just stop with the sex thing. We’ve got to look beyond the physical with John, he’s taking us to another level of meaning. The flesh reveals God’s glory; it is not an end in itself.

So the writer of John’s gospel gives Mary a serious role in her own right. She is part of an emergent ministry team, which is to launch the way of Jesus into the world. Perhaps she is his lover, perhaps she is his wife or his sister or his fianc é e or his cousin, it doesn’t matter. What matters in terms of the gospel, is that she is the one who goes and tells the others that Jesus has risen from the dead. Mary is the primary evangelist and apostle, who is the first to receive the good news, the gospel, and who receives the instruction go and tell. She is the primary bearer, not of a child, but of the gospel given to her by Jesus.

I said that Mary Magdalene needs to be seen in the context of a few other characters. So who are these people? For a start they are all women. First, we have Martha. What does Martha do in John’s gospel? In the story of Lazarus, where he dies and his sisters send for Jesus, she declares Jesus to be Messiah. John 11:27, ‘Yes Lord, I believe that you are the Messiah, the Son of God, the one coming into the world.’ Martha gives us our statement of faith. Yes Lord, I believe that you are the Messiah, Christ, God’s chosen, God’s anointed one, the true King. Martha voices the creed of the confessing church: Jesus is Messiah; Jesus is Lord.

And what about Lazarus and Martha’s sister Mary, Mary of Bethany? In Luke’s gospel we love Mary B for sitting quietly at Jesus’s feet while Martha loses her rag with him, but in John’s gospel this Mary is much more active. She institutes the definitive act of service, foot-washing, and does it with real presence. Having your feet washed by a woman was normal. She gets a mention because of the brilliant, beautiful, extravagantly sensual way that she does it: ‘Mary took a pound of costly perfume made of pure nard, anointed Jesus’s feet and wiped them with her hair. The house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume.’ (John 12:3)

This has got to be one of the most sensual passages of the New Testament, if you stop and think about it. She takes his feet in her hands and massages them with the most expensive essential oils money could buy, a whole jug full, not one of these little bottles for a fiver. She massages his feet with oil and wipes them with her hair. You need to be pretty intimate with someone to do that. Is this Jesus’s lover, not Mary Magdalene but Mary of Bethany?? But still we don’t get an answer, no bedroom scene, John moves us on and shows us what he wants us to see in it: an expression of devoted service. Look beyond the physical, says John, the physical exists to reveal God.

Jesus goes on to use foot-washing as a statement for his own disciples at the Last Supper, less than a week later. He says to them, after he has washed them, ‘what I have done for you, do for one another.’ But surely he is thinking, ‘what she has done for me, so I do for you.’ Thus, Mary of Bethany is a role-model for loving service in action, someone prepared to demonstrate genuine tenderness to another, even daring to express really intimate tenderness, at the risk of being terribly misunderstood. So Martha and Mary are significant figures in the Mary Magdalene group of women, who next?

At the foot of the cross, certain people stand together. Here’s a question for anyone who is still hanging onto the Da Vinci Code stuff about Jesus and Mary: if Mary Magdalene is so close to Jesus, why does he ignore her and speak only to John (or whoever the Beloved is) and his mother?

It’s because the gospel writer is not trying to describe Mary’s relationship with Jesus at this point; as I have said, he is not in the business of writing romantic fiction. It is enough that she is a witness. Her dynamic with Jesus is not what matters here. John is about expressing divine truth. Here, the limelight falls on a different woman: Jesus’s mother. It is she who is entrusted with the pastoral role of extending her mothering to the beloved disciple, who can represent any and all of us in our discipleship. She is to see Jesus’s closest friend as her son, and that means Jesus is declaring him to have been like a brother to him. The disciple is to see her as mother: this is a statement of relationship, and it indirectly implies brotherhood between Jesus and the beloved.

They are close, yes, how close we don’t know because we aren’t told, but here Jesus is asking for the Christian community to see each other as members of a family: brother and sister, mother and son. There is no innuendo, whatever was going on between them is none of our business. The gospel writer takes up this special relationship and uses the moment to define and model pastoral and community relationships. relationships of love, but not the sexual politics enjoyed by film scriptwriters and novelists. He is putting together a document which is helpful to the emerging church, a document which gives women a very high profile, in fact a document which gives the key ministerial roles to women. But a document which also tells the community how they are to regard one another: as sisters and brothers, mothers and fathers. Such is the way to keep a community together.

At the crucifixion, then, Mary Magdalene is a silent sister; her moment comes later.

So in John we find a very positive way of looking at Mary Magdalene, and other women too; a way that liberates Mary in particular from this obsession with producing a love-match for Jesus. Jesus was not, in the course of his ministry, about goddess worship or veneration of the child-bearing female, nor was he about secret societies and pursuit of spiritual wisdom through the erotic; all this is fantasy, a projection of our own Western, materialistic body-beautiful culture, where sexual relationship is seen as the be all and end all, set up as the object of human fulfilment. From John’s point of view it’s not, and he never suggests that it is.

John has a deeper relationship which he is telling us about: remember, in John the physical is real enough, but it points to the spiritual. John is talking about relationship with God. This is our primary relationship too, people get hung up about their sex lives, they even get hung up about Jesus’s sex life; but what if we look beyond, and accept that it doesn’t stop there? What about the health of our prayer lives, our spiritual lives? I’m thinking now of that tent that Tracy Emin put on display, with the names of all the people she’d slept with written on it. Really profound, Tracy, thanks… but if somebody gave you a tent and said write on this all the people you have genuinely shared God’s love with, who would you write down? And what kind of love do you have for those people? There is a sacredness of relationship when God comes into the picture, and this is what John’s gospel asks us to contemplate. Tracy’s tent is a bit like what The Da Vinci Code does to the gospels, I think.

Anything that we set up, tent or otherwise, as more important than relationship with God is in danger of becoming our Baal, our false god, that we prioritise and celebrate above all else; something to worship. Suggesting that the main point about Mary is that she is Christ’s lover is, at its crudest, to flag up sexual encounter as the deepest meaning to be gained from the gospel. Well, it’s not. Of course it’s not. It doesn’t say, in the first chapter of John’s gospel, ‘And the word became flesh and lived among us and got laid by Mary Magdalene.’ It says, ‘and the word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.’

Jesus was preaching the good news that God’s kingdom was and is drawing close to ordinary people, men and women, and he was telling them how to claim that kingdom for themselves and live out God’s truth, in terms of love, justice, peace and restoration of true community. It’s a living, political, dynamic, subversive way of being. Love! Justice! Peace! Restoration of true community, brothers and sisters! Nothing should cloud this message; it is the message Mary was given to proclaim, and it is what defines our lives as Christians.

So moving on from all this Da Vinci Code stuff about honouring women by honouring their potential to reproduce, in John’s gospel the women are key figures representing four pillars of ministry:

We have a model for pastoral love in Jesus’s mother: see my beloved brother as your son, my sister as your daughter…

We have confession of faith, a creed, in Martha’s declaration, I believe you are the Messiah! Jesus is King!

We have an example of intimately loving service within the community, in Mary of Bethany’s foot-washing.

And we have the evangelistic apostleship of Mary Magdalene: go and tell. ‘Don’t cling on to me, go and tell the others. Go and tell. Be the one I can trust with the most important message since time began. Be the one to bear the message to rock the world. Go and tell.’

John’s gospel gives us an early model of team ministry, a gem from a real community in the early church, grappling with these teachings of the kingdom. It is interesting to ask, what kind of community, what kind of worship style and organization of ministry, would this Johannine community have had? Was there something that we can rediscover, ourselves? And how different might the church be today, if instead of starting with Peter and the three synoptic gospels, it started from John’s gospel and Mary Magdalene’s team ministry?

Amen.

This page was last updated on Sunday, 25 September 2005

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