July 22, 2001
© 2001 Grant M. Gallup
Judith 9:1, 11-14 Judith prays God's blessing on her wily deception of
General Holofernes before she goes to his tent to decapitate him and take away
his head in her handbag..
Psalm 42:1-7 Quemadmodum - As the deer longs for the waterbrooks
2 Corinthians 5:14-18 From now on we regard no one from a human point of view
John 20:11-18 Mary Magdalene went and preached to the disciples
Call her Mary Magdalen, or Mary Maudlin, her name comes from Magdala, the town she was born in, and not from her weepy reputation, acquired when she mourned at the tomb of her rabbouni, Jesus. She doesn't deserve this to happen to her name. Right from the beginning, a male-dominated church has tried to keep Mary Magdalene from the primacy of honor as the First Apostle of the Resurrection. In Nikos Kazanstaki's novel, the Last Temptation of Christ, the Magdalene has an important place, and in Jesus' fantasy while hanging on the Cross, they eroticize their relationship. Fundamentalists demanded the film be destroyed and no one ever be allowed to see it, and others who saw it said it was a beautiful work of art that would increase the faith and spiritual growth of thoe who see it. Mary Magdalene keeps coming up in discussions of Jesus and sexuality, another way perhaps of dismissing her as an object in our stories and not a subject of her own.
Richard Crashaw hinted instead at a relationship of loving persons, in his "Come See The Place Where the Lord Lay":
Show me himself, himself (bright Sir) O show
Which way my poor tears to himself may go,
Were it enough to show the place, and say,
Look, Mary, there see, where thy Lord once lay,
Then could I show these arms of mine, and say,
Look, Mary, here see, where thy Lord once lay.
In the garden when Jesus appears to her after she finds the tomb is empty, she is said to suppose that he is the gardener, the hired man of the graveyard, who is only an acquaintance, and not her Friend from Galilee. The Risen One may be no more remarkable in appearance or in voice than the common laborer, not with dazzling visage in raiment white and glistering as in the Collect for the Transfiguration, but more an ordinary person with calloused hands wearing old work clothes. She's weeping when the Sudden Stranger appears and she speaks to him through tears, "If you have taken him away, tell me where you have laid him and I will go and remove him." This woman with a reputation as weak and wimpy believes herself capable of single-handedly carrying the dead weight of a thirty three year old husky working class male out of a graveyard. This is a strong woman, our sister in whom we have always seen something of ourselves--a mix of strengths and weaknesses, but a people like her, fit companions for the Judith we met on the way from Holofernes' battle tent in the first reading, his bloody head in her lunch bucket, victory for our whole nation and every tribe in her hand, and the message Praise God Praise God Praise God in her mouth, our God is still with us, still showing power and strength against our enemies. The Lord has struck down Holofernes by the hand of a woman." .
Judith reminds me of Nora Astorga, who is one of the twelve apostles in the mural of the Visitación at Casa Ave Maria in Managua. In the days of the Sandinista struggle against the Somoza tyrrany in Nicaragua, she went to keep a date with a Somocista colonel, a man famous for torturing captured revolutionaries, but took with her surreptiously a squad of guerrillas who turned the trysting tables and when he resisted, like Judith she brought him to justice on the spot. At the Triumph of the Revolution in July of 1979 she was appointed ambassador to the United States, but Reichs Chancellor Ronald Reagan refused her diplomatic credentials, as "persona non grata" for her "terrorism." Like the Church, indeed, she was "terrible as an army with banners." The Nicaraguan government then appointed her ambassador to the United Nations, so she went anyway to New York to speak for her people in that Assembly. A brave and articulate voice for the oppressed.
The Book of Judith was written as a tract for difficult times, to assert that God is still the Lord of History, and that God can deliver us through the strength of women. Judith is a name which meant simply "Jewish Woman" -- and she is no Phyllis Shafly, anti-equal rights amendment, and she is even no Sarah, wife of Abraham, trotting off to the kitchen to whip up biscuits and buttermilk for the visitors while the menfolks chat. Judith teaches us that Jewish girls know something besides recipes for Chicken Soup with Liver Dumplings. She got dressed up for Holofernes, perfumed herself and "got his nose open" for her, as we used to say on the West Side of Chicago. She could open the perfume bottle but she could open a scabbard, too. She prayed God to help her and got the general bolo in his tent and took his head off with his own sword, then dropped it in her servant girl's lunch bag and went on about God's business. Her prayer to God from the Deuterocanical book named for her is what we heard for a snippet lesson, a prayer recognizing that God is "helper of the oppressed, upholder of the weak, protector of the forlorn, savior of those without hope." As well as women, Gay men and Strait men both need to hear of Judith, and other women of the our Story, and especiallyof Mary Magdalene, the first Witness. Peter and John had indeed seen the empty tomb, but it was Magdalene who had come up with the Lord from Galilee, who had sat at his feet, from whom he had cast out seven demons, but whom male-processed tradition said was a Woman of the Streets. If she had been, good for her ! for she repaved those streets and rerouted them into the King's Highway. She was in that case not only the first Woman to become an Apostle, but she was No Lady. She cannot be dismissed into insignificance in the Ruling class. Mary offered to carry away a cadaver, but the Risen One calls her name, "Miriam", and then she knows him and calls him by the affectionate diminutive, Rabbouni, "Padrecito" which she had always used. Jesus says to her Don't Cling To Me. Don't hang onto me in the old dispensation--I have not yet ascended, I have not yet been raised above the limits of Time and Circumstance, that will transform our relationship. We all learn early in life how to manage funerals, and it is a developmental task to take children and young people to obsequies to apprehend good-byes. But learning Resurrection will transform us all, and we are not at once prepared for it, and it catches us off-guard . Jesus says our intimacy is now not to be denied or disowned, but will be given an eternal and transcendant dimension, ascended to the Source. We cannot grab onto the past and cling to it, but will learn to live in the Resurrection relationships, enhanced and transfigured. Jesus doesn't say "don't ever touch me again" but "let's wait till we get God into this process, God's not finished with us yet. For many of us, we cling to the familiar forms of the past, old names and titles, old habits and old hugs, and change is too much for us. Psychologists say that change is often experienced as death, not resurrection, and so we name at first as loss the changes we see in life, liturgy, ministry. We often cry with Mary, "They have taken away my Lord and I know not where they have laid him." The gardener who is the Risen Lord is not the dead first-century rabbi of the Pharasaic school, the neo-cynic teacher, the tragically misguided eschatological visionary. He is the Christ, looking for each of us in the midst of change and death, and calls us each by name. Our relationships are raised up, and live again, but changed. Jesus waits for our glimpse of recognition and will not go with us back to the way things were. Paul emphasizes for us the New Way of Seeing Things. "If anyone is in Christ, there is a new Creation, and the old has passed away. Behold, the New has come." Magdalene and Paul learned it, at the Tomb and on the Damascus road.
Paul says this too--From now on we do not judge anyone by merely human standards, the old limits of our sarx, our flesh. Even if we did once know Christ as one who might be mistaken for the gravedigger, we do not so judge any longer. That is not how we know him now.For anyone who is in Christ, there is a new Creation. Our village Jesus now has a cosmic last name, and it is the Anointed One, the Chrismed One, the Christ of God. Mary Magdalene was the first of those whose relationship with Jesus was made new, as we are called to be transformed in our own relationships of intimacy and isolation, of closeness and distance, not to deny the eros or the physicality but to see beyond and touch the triumph of Love beyond the tomb, there witnessing at the Throne of Life.
GRANT GALLUP
CASA AVE MARIA
MANAGUA, NICARAGUA C.A.
gallup@tmx.com.ni
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