Chancellor’s Lectures 2016 ‘The traitor, the coward, and the whore? - a fresh look at Judas Iscariot, Pontius Pilate, and Mary Magdalene, and their significance for today.’ Lecture Three, Monday 9 May Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the third in my series of four Chancellor’s lectures for 2016: ‘The traitor, the coward, and the whore? - a fresh look at Judas Iscariot, Pontius Pilate, and Mary Magdalene, and their significance for today.’ When I came up with the title for this series, I was hoping for something striking; what I hadn’t anticipated was causing publicity problems: in the digital world of enewsletters and social media, using the word ‘whore’ is asking to be relegated to junk mail and rejected by fire-walls. Well, tonight we come to the justification for that word, as we explore the portrayal of Mary Magdalene in the New Testament and subsequently. We will also look at the non-Biblical Gospel of Mary, [slide] a hugely influential but misleading sermon by a sixth century Pope, depictions of Mary Magdalene in art, the Dan Brown blockbuster The Da Vinci Code, and more besides. Finally, we will explore what we can learn about Jesus, and about following Jesus, from this relationship with Mary Magdalene. This is an ambitious agenda for a single lecture, so I had better get on with it, beginning with the Gospel of Luke. In Chapter 8 verses 1-3, [slide] Luke describes how three women travelled with the disciples, each of whom had been healed, including Mary who was called Magdalene, from whom seven spirits had gone out. Mary was a common name, so she was identified as coming from a village called Magdala (derived from the Hebrew migdal, meaning tower) on the western shore of the lake of Galilee. These three named women (the other two were Joanna and Susanna), along with the many others Luke says also travelled with Jesus – used to provide for them out of their means. Mary Magdalene is mentioned just twice more in the Gospels – at the death of Jesus and on Easter Day. There is much we might like to know about Jesus’ band of followers. What were the relations between this mixed group of men and women? Were any of the disciples’ wives present? And was Jesus married? A mature Jewish man in Jesus’ time usually would be. The Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke all mention that Simon Peter had a mother-in-law, so he must have been married; and it is possible that scripture is simply silent about Jesus’ wife. On the other hand first Judaism does have traditions of celibacy; for example soldiers on active service, and priests during their periods in the temple. Traditional church teaching has always insisted that Jesus was single and celibate, a judgement I shall return to later. At the crucifixion, the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke all describe the male disciples as having fled, with only a few women present. Luke does not name them, while Matthew and Mark both mention Mary Magdalene and Mary the Mary of 1

James and Joses, with Mark adding the name if Salome. In John’s Gospel the list is Jesus' mother and the sister of his mother, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene. As for Easter Day, the Gospel of Mark [slide] emphasises that the women come early in the morning, the time of the sunrise and new life. They bring spices to anoint Jesus’ body, but find an empty tomb; or nearly empty, for there is a young man sitting there, surely an angel, who gives them a message for Peter and the disciples: Jesus is going ahead of them to Galilee, where they will see him. Mark then ends his gospel by saying the women were amazed, afraid and silent. How significant was it for Mark that these first witnesses to the resurrection were women? At the time in Jewish law a woman’s testimony was of little value; it was certainly unusual for women to testify to anything, let alone the resurrection. But in the new world of the gospel it is the women who will pass on the angel’s message. Earlier an unnamed woman has anointed Jesus as a sign of his coming death, then women are the only ones who stay with the dying Jesus, and finally it is women who come to the tomb. Mark has clearly invited his readers to see the climax of his gospel through women’s eyes. Let’s look briefly at the Gospels of Matthew and Luke to see if they affect Mark’s portrayal in any way. In Matthew, Mary Magdalene and another Mary go to the tomb, without spices this time, and also see an angel. The difference here is that as they leave the tomb ‘with fear and great joy’ they also encounter the risen Jesus, who repeats the angelic message about telling the disciples to go to Galilee, where they will see him. Luke’s Gospel is often thought to be the one most sympathetic to women, but not here. A group of unnamed women are first to the empty tomb, where they find two figures in dazzling clothes telling them Jesus is risen. Only in Luke are they not told to pass on the news to the disciples, but they do anyway, with Mary Magdalene now named. The disciples don’t believe them, but Peter runs to the tomb to check. Peter is Luke’s favourite disciple, and the women have no further role in what follows. In John’s Gospel, [slide] however, we are back with the prominence Mark gave to Mary Magdalene. Robin Griffith-Jones, in his book Mary Magdalene – The Woman whom Jesus Loved, suggests that John’s Gospel is designed to have the same effect on its readers, as Jesus has on the characters in the text. Readers are encouraged to enter imaginatively into the experience of the first disciples, Nicodemus, the Samaritan woman, the cripple, the blind man, and Lazarus. All this leads up to the climax of the Gospel, where Jesus encounters Mary Magdalene on Easter Day: ‘All that readers undergo in the course of the gospel enables them to ‘be’ Mary Magdalene at its end.’1

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Robin Griffith-Jones (2008) Mary Magdalene – the woman whom Jesus loved Norwich: Canterbury Press, p36.

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‘In the beginning was the Word’, John’s Gospel famously begins, ‘and the word was with God, and the word was God.’ Here is an immediate example of the way John is steeped in the Old Testament, clearly referencing the opening words of the whole Bible: ‘In the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth…’. According to the book of Genesis, the culmination of God’s creation is a human being, Adam, who is charged with tending the Garden of Eden. Because Adam was alone, God also created Woman. They do not remain in Eden for long, though, as they are deceived by a serpent and expelled. God’s plan for humanity, however, will not be foiled; John’s Gospel declares God’s response: the very Word of God will become flesh, and as a human being, make His home among us in the person of Jesus Christ. It is an extraordinary claim, and the Gospel will give those who read it the means to understand and respond by themselves becoming children of God. I have not the time to fully expound how John enables the reader to enter imaginatively into the experience of the succession of characters who encounter the ‘Word made flesh’ in Jesus: so I will focus on the women who encounter and gather around him. These are: the Samaritan woman at the well, Martha and Mary in Bethany, then Mary again with the ointment, and finally Mary Magdalene. The Samaritan woman has sometimes had a bad press from (male scholars), and it is true that she has been married five times and now has a sixth husband. But nowhere in John chapter 4 is it said she is immoral; it is true, however, that her conversation with Jesus has an intimacy about it. John’s readers learn that in relating to Jesus this kind of intimacy is appropriate; he is, after all, an attractive and compelling figure. Finally, the woman goes off to her home town, wondering aloud to her people, ‘He cannot be the Messiah, can he?2 This happens early in the Gospel. At its midpoint, another woman is more definite: ‘Lord, I believe that you are the Messiah’.3 This is Martha, whose brother Lazarus had died. She fetches her weeping sister Mary. In their faith and grief, they speak to readers of how to relate to Christ in situations of pain and loss; and on this occasion Lazarus is raised from death. In the second half of the Gospel, John uses two figures to portray what it is for like for readers to become followers: the one he refers to as the ‘beloved disciple’, and Mary Magdalene. One whom Jesus loves, and another who loves Jesus, a man and a woman. In Chapter 13 Jesus washes the feet of the disciples, doing with water what Mary of Bethany has earlier done for him with expensive ointment. Judas, of whom we heard so much in my first two lectures, cannot see the point of Mary’s actions; Simon Peter is similarly uncomprehending about Jesus’ footwashing. The reader is finally ready

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John 4.29 John 11.27

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to hear of the crucifixion and resurrection, and to enter into the experience of the final person John introduces in relation to Jesus: Mary Magdalene. In the Garden of Eden, God’s purposes are spoiled by the serpent. In the New Testament, Judas hands over Jesus to his enemies in the garden of Gethsemane. In John’s Gospel, Jesus is buried in a garden. Two nights pass, and then on the first day of the new week comes Mary Magdalene, and finds the tomb empty. Her first reaction is to run and tell Simon Peter and the beloved disciple, who enter the empty tomb before returning to their homes. We are not told Peter’s reaction, but the beloved disciple ‘saw and believed.’ Mary Magdalene, however, stands weeping outside the tomb. [slide] Two angels ask her why. They are sitting at where the head and feet of Jesus would have been, in a manner reminiscent of the angels flanking the empty throne of God in the Holy of Holies within the Jerusalem temple. [slide] Here is William Blake’s representation of the scene, before the resurrection has begun. Mary wants to care for the broken body of the man she loved, but he is not there. [slide] She has misunderstood the empty tomb, and she compounds this when she turns around, wrongly supposing she is meeting the gardener. But then Jesus speaks her name; ‘Mary’. She turns to him in recognition and reaches out for him. Again, it is an intimate scene (nowhere else does Jesus address a disciple in this way) but he resists her touch, saying rather she must tell the others he is ascending to God. Again a woman is asked to spread the news about Jesus. Who are these two, in a springtime garden as the sun rises? Robin Griffith-Jones writes: ‘They are Adam and Eve, together again and at one… Mary Magdalene is in paradise, and so are John’s readers… God once walked in Eden in the cool of the day, but Adam and Eve hid themselves in shame… Now at dawn the Redeemer and the redeemed… are together again in Eden, and all creation is made new.’4 Mary Magdalene may have misunderstood at times, as John’s readers will have done, but here we see that deep love leads to the very first encounter with the risen Christ. John’s Gospel is a powerful, subtle, and beautiful text. It needed to be. John portrayed God as seen in the ‘Word made flesh’, reaching down from heaven in the earthly life of Jesus Christ, with a woman the first to see him raised from the dead. But there were other texts and other claims: texts that never made it into the Bible, proclaiming that true believers could aspire to visions of heaven, and that the image of God to be restored in such believers was exclusively male. Welcome to the world of the Coptic Gospel of Thomas, which ends as follows: [slide] Simon Peter said to them, ‘Let Mary go out from among us, because women are not worthy of life. Jesus said, ‘See, I myself shall lead her, so that I will make her male… for every woman who makes herself male will enter the kingdom of heaven. 4

Robin Griffith-Jones (2008) Mary Magdalene – the woman whom Jesus loved Norwich: Canterbury Press, p47.

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The Gospel of Thomas goes right back to the end of the first century, but was only rediscovered in the 1940s at Nag Hammadi in Egypt. Since then it has achieved much popularity as a possibly suppressed text that gives us a window on to Jesus unmediated by the church. But while the Church’s record on women is mixed, to say the least, imagine what it might have been like if the Gospel of Thomas had become a key text! At least for John’s Gospel, Mary Magdalene is an icon of all believers, whereas for the Gospel of Thomas she is an icon of what must be overcome before the human spirit can be worthy of life. I mentioned that the Gospel of Thomas was found at Nag Hammadi in the 1940s. So were many other non-biblical texts, often texts that emerged from a highly popular yet diverse philosophy known as ‘gnosticism’. The term comes from the Greek word for knowledge, ‘gnosis’, and the gnostics were a major rival to what became known as orthodox Christianity in the first Christian centuries. The Gospel of Mary, [slide] of which more a little later, was already known before the Nag Hammadi discoveries. But what was new was a treasure trove for students of Mary Magdalene. In the Gospel of Philip, for example, she is the companion of Jesus who kissed her often, and loved her more than the rest of the disciples. In the Dialogue of the Saviour, Jesus praises her for her complete understanding. Taken along with the Gospel of Mary, the story of Mary Magdalene’s visionary journey to heaven, here we have, potentially, an iconic woman for our times, no doubt reflecting the prominent role many other women held in Gnostic communities. Now Gnosticism was a complex movement with a complex cosmology, and to tell of its subtleties of it would take another lecture. All I can do this evening is give a flavour of the portrayal of Mary Magdalene, and her significance for the gnostics. Take, for example, the key metaphor of the ‘bridal bedroom’. This metaphor is used both for the beginning of the Christian life in baptism, and its final consummation in the heavenly realms. In the Gospel of Philip, each individual gnostic, of either gender, is like a woman who must be united with an angelic counterpart in heaven, as a wife is united with her husband on earth. The Gnostics imagined a tripartite reality; [slide] three distinct yet overlapping realms: the Fullness, a domain of the Spirit; Heaven, lower than the Fullness and the domain of the angels; and Earth, lowest of all and the domain of human beings, in which the human spirit is trapped in our material bodies. In each of these realms is the Lord: in the fullness he is the Christ, in Heaven he is the Saviour, on Earth he is Jesus. And in each of these realms he has a female counterpart: in the Fullness, Mary his mother; in Heaven, his sister, Wisdom, also known as Mary; and on Earth, Mary Magdalene. One fundamental difference between the Gnostics and orthodox Christianity was their approach to material existence and the human body. The Gnostics were antimaterialist, for them the body was merely a shell, whereas orthodox Christians 5

believed that God looked upon creation (and human bodies) and saw that they were ‘very good’. But given that the Gnostics believed the pairing of Jesus and Magdalene was essential for salvation, what did they think they had done with their bodies? In the Gospel of Philip, we never quite discover. Suggestive language is used of the pair; I have already referenced the text, ‘[Jesus] loved her more than all the disciples and used to kiss her often upon her [….]’; precisely where he kissed her we never find out, as that bit of the document is missing! But it is never said that Jesus and Mary Magdalene live as man and wife, and the Gospel of Philip is ambivalent about marriage: on the one hand marriage engenders children who may grow up to be Gnostic, on the other hand we are really called to a higher union, from which sexuality may be a distraction. Let’s move on to that Gospel of Mary, only part of which survives in a fifth century Coptic document. Here Mary Magdalene is a figure of great authority, but this is sometimes resisted. The best known example comes near the end of the Gospel, when Simon Peter says to her, [slide] ‘Sister, we know that the Saviour loved you more than the rest of women. Tell us the words of the Saviour which you remember – which you know, but we do not…’. Mary Magdalene does as Peter asks, but he then turns hostile and says to the disciples, ‘Did [Jesus] really speak with a woman without our knowledge and not openly? Are we to turn about and all listen to her? Did he prefer her to us?’ Then Mary wept and said to Peter, ‘My brother Peter, what do you think? Do you think that… I am lying about the Saviour?’ Finally, Levi says to Peter, ‘Peter, you have always been hot tempered… if the Saviour made her worthy, who are you to reject her? The Saviour certainly knows her without faltering. That is why he loved her more than us.’ The Gospel of Mary clearly draws on the Gospel of John from the New Testament. In John’s Gospel, Jesus does indeed speak words only Mary Magdalene hears, and in the Gospel of Mary this role is magnified to the point where she becomes the beloved disciple as well. And just as Mary Magdalene’s role in John’s Gospel has frequently been referenced in contemporary debates about authority in the Church, it seems likely that the arguing in the Gospel of Mary reflected disputes within Gnosticism about leadership and gender. Mary Magdalene’s finest moment comes in the final Gnostic document I shall mention: Pistis Sophia (which means Faith Wisdom). Here Mary stands head and shoulders above the male disciples. Of the 115 questions put to Jesus, sixty seven come from her. She is the earthly embodiment of ‘Faith Wisdom’ herself. This is a world away from the Gospel of Thomas, where Mary’s womanhood is something to be overcome and left behind. While the Gnostics were most numerous and influential from the second to the fourth centuries and then declined, since the Nag Hammadi discoveries of the 1940s there has been a revival of interest in their writings. But the date of their writings make it 6

likely they did not have alternative historical sources on which to base their claims; rather they are dependent on documents such as the Gospel of John – but radically reinterpreted. I have spoken so far of the Gospels themselves, and of a number of Gnostic documents. But what of the ways in which the Church has interpreted the Gospel material about Mary Magdalene? In the third century the great Egyptian scholar Origen read the Gospels as carefully as anyone ever has. As modern scholars do, he noted all the differences of detail, such as in the three gospel stories where Jesus is anointed by a woman. [slide] In Luke chapter 7, an unnamed woman buys an alabaster jar of ointment, bathes Jesus’ feet with her tears, kisses his feet, and anoints them. She is described as ‘a woman in the city, who was a sinner.’ In John chapter 12, Mary (Martha’s sister) anoints Jesus’ feet with expensive perfume made from pure nard. And then in Mark chapter 14, an unnamed woman breaks open a jar of ‘very costly ointment of nard’ and pours it on Jesus’ head. Origen’s conclusion was that Jesus must have been anointed on three separate occasions by three separate women. Such became the general line in the Eastern Church. In the Western Church, however, these several women became one named woman: Mary Magdalene. This is because of a famous sermon preached in Rome by Pope Gregory the Great. The year was 591, and Gregory proclaimed: [slide] ‘She whom Luke calls the sinful woman, whom John calls Mary, we believe to be the Mary [Magdalene] from whom seven devils were ejected according to Mark. And what did these seven devils signify, if not all the vices?’ Earlier we heard of Luke recording that Mary Magdalene had seven demons cast out of her; Gregory is quoting a similar text from the additional verses added to the ending of Mark’s Gospel. According to Mark, Mary has brought spices to the tomb. How fitting, says Pope Gregory, that the same woman who anointed Jesus in his lifetime, would come to anoint his body after death: ‘It is clear that in the past Mary Magdalene, intent on forbidden acts, had applied the ointment to herself, to perfume her flesh. So what she had used on herself, to her shame, she was now offering to God, to her praise.’ And so story of Mary Magdalene was set in the western imagination. She was the whore of my title, a reformed prostitute who came to love Jesus, the man who had cast seven demons out of her. From then on she accompanied Jesus, supporting him out of her own resources. She is there at the foot of the cross, and the first to whom the risen Jesus appears, commissioning her to give the news to his disciples. In terms of biblical and historical truth, there is much here to criticise, particularly the wholly unwarranted linking of Mary Magdalene with sexual sin. This is groundless, but to be fair to Pope Gregory, even in this calumny there is something of beauty. Mary Magdalene, fallen, penitent, forgiven, restored and deeply loving, becomes an icon of humanity, in a way that sinless Mary the mother of Jesus never can be. While we might indeed question why a woman was made the symbol of the sinfulness we 7

all share, it is also true that a woman became the symbol of life forgiven and transformed. And this is the way Magdalen is regarded for the next fourteen centuries, until in the late 1960s the Roman Catholic Church acknowledges that its picture of her as a prostitute and the archetypal sinner, was without foundation. But such an acknowledgement cannot undo the effect of centuries of devotional and theological writing: or indeed the manifold semi-erotic depictions of Mary Magdalene in paintings, [slide] clad only in her hair, which go back to the middle ages and continue into our own day – even if in this Lady Chapel window in Chichester Cathedral, [slide] she does at least have some clothes on. Note the colour of her hair; you may remember from my last lecture that Judas was also said to have been a redhead. Here is yet another example: [slide] The middle ages were also the time of pilgrimage, often to the shrines of saints, where their earthly remains, or relics, still had the power to heal. So where is the body of Mary Magdalene? According to the Eastern church, her body ended up in Constantinople, whereas in the Western Church, in the eleventh century, the Pope agreed with abbot Geoffrey of the Burgundian abbey in Vezelay in France, that his community housed her bones. Various explanatory accounts were given, including the involvement of Mary Magdalene, Martha and Lazarus in the evangelisation of France. Here is a sixteenth century image of Mary preaching in Marseilles [slide] which, however historically unlikely, is a powerful countercultural image at a time when women did not tend to be seen in the pulpit. A version of this legend forms part of the plot of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code [slide] which David Bentley Hart has unkindly by wittily called ‘surely the most lucrative novel ever written by a borderline illiterate’. Here, when Mary Magdalene comes to France, she is bearing Jesus’ child, and gives birth to a daughter in Marseilles. This bloodline is then preserved through the Merovingian dynasty that ruled Gaul until the eighth century, and their successors. The plot of the novel revolves around the attempts of the Church to keep the truth about Mary Magdalene, Jesus, and their child, from reaching the general public. Well, it’s fiction. But the extraordinary thing about the success of the novel and subsequent film was the author’s claim, based on books such as The Templar Revelation and The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, that all this was true – and many readers were disposed to believe him, or at least to wonder if there might be something in it. After all, I have already acknowledged that the Church’s long held claim that Mary Magdalene was a prostitute is groundless. Dan Brown refers to this ‘slander’, but also makes claims that are quite false, such as the Gnostic texts about Jesus and Mary being suppressed because they portrayed a human Jesus, rather than divine figure of the Gospels. This is the opposite of the truth, for the biblical Jesus eats, drinks, weeps, suffers and dies in order to redeem the world, while the Gnostic Jesus belongs to the realms of the spirit, more divine than human. 8

I am intrigued as to why it matters to so many that Jesus and Mary Magdalene were, or might have been, married. Perhaps in our age we simply think too much about sex, or live in a time where many relish any chance to undermine old certainties and hierarchies. Maybe, but arguably there is more to the matter than this. Consider the great Christian claim that all people are made in the image and likeness of God. In a fallen world, we are called to recover that image. By becoming more Christ-like, we become more fully human, and bear more perfectly the image of God. What a powerful prospect this is! And yet what does it mean in practice? What is it about Jesus Christ’s nature and life we are invited to rediscover in our own? Last time, you will recall, I spent some time reflecting on what it means to describe Jesus as both ‘fully human, and fully divine’ in the light of his relationship with Judas. Let us do the same with reference to Mary Magdalene and marriage. Does the ‘full humanity’ of Christ, for example, mean experiencing sexual attraction to others? The fourth century writer Julian of Eclanum thought so, but that Jesus had resisted ‘natural lust’ through the perfection of his will – and that the rest of us ought to be able to do likewise. Augustine of Hippo had a lower view of will-power, and thought that God’s grace was needed if human frailty was to be overcome. For him, Jesus was spared the temptations of sexual desire because he had born of the Virgin Mary. Julian responded that such a Christ was not fully human. This ancient debate gives us the clue to what contemporary questioning about the marital status of Jesus and Mary Magdalene are really about: what it is to be fully and perfectly human. In analogous fashion to my argument that Jesus Christ was not omniscient, all-knowing, when he chose Judas; so this time I want to suggest that in principle he could have been sexually active – for this is intrinsic to being ‘fully human’. This is not to say that he was so, let alone that he was married and had children. But nonetheless I dare to say that the highest conformity to the will of God does not necessarily involve celibacy. We live in very different times to Julian of Eclanum, Augustine of Hippo, and the Gnostics. The Christian churches are more open to the positive value of sexual love than they used to be; just look at the changes in the wording of the marriage service. And so perhaps it is not surprising that many enquirers, some of whom have read or seen the Da Vinci Code, wonder whether Jesus might have been married. Why should the churches just assume he was celibate? Why not allow, enjoy even, the possibility that Jesus might or could have been married, and move on? We can also look at Mary Magdalene in a different way from most of our predecessors. Rather than assuming she was a prostitute, she is now the woman falsely charged (by men) with prostitution. So Mary can become an example and an inspiration, not least in the intimate and deeply loving way in which she relates to Jesus in the Gospels, as well as the way in which she is, in Augustine’s phrase, ‘apostle to the apostles’. 9

I conclude with reference to this cathedral’s Mary Magdalene chapel in. It contains two rather different images of her, the first in Victorian stained glass, [slide] where she carries what is presumably aromatics for anointing Jesus’ body. She is remarkably priestly, wearing something that looks like a cope, and her long red hair is largely concealed. Beneath this window is Graham Sutherlands ‘Noli me tangere’. [slide] Painted in 1960 at the instigation of Dean Walter Hussey, it was installed in a wholly redesigned chapel in April 1961. Not everyone approved. Mabel Norris, described in the Cathedral history as ‘a 46 year old spinster of no fixed address, but smartly dressed and spoken’ expressed the feelings of some when she attacked the picture with a biro. ‘This picture fills me with loathing’, she said. In his autobiography, Patron of Art, Dean Hussey seems more worried by a sermon preached by my predecessor Cheslyn Jones. The sermon was ‘not at all hostile’ but in it ‘he referred to S. Mary Magdalen as looking as though she was saying to our Lord ‘Come up and see me sometime.’ The Chancellor was an able man and a fluent speaker who sometimes, it seemed, didn’t quite think out what he was saying.’5 Whether intended humorously or not, Cheslyn Jones was alluding to that tradition begun by Gregory the Great’s sermon: after all, as a woman, what else would Mary’s sins be if not sexual? The late Brian Sewell, opinionated art critic supreme, thought Sutherland had painted Mary Magdalen to look like the prostitute Gregory had proclaimed her to be; I see little justification for that myself, unless you assume that any woman in a religious painting not dressed like a nun, is somehow morally suspect. Sir Kenneth Clark had been due to speak at the unveiling, but was too ill to come. Nonetheless his prepared remarks were read out, including the observation that ‘the narrative of St John, although it fires the imagination by the one word “gardener”, does not provide much material… and how mysterious those words are, “Touch me no longer, for I am not yet ascended to My Father”.’ The art critic Eric Newton referred to the high emotional temperature of the painting as [slide] ‘The Christ bends forward in affectionate greeting, the Magdalene kneels, astonished but reverent: the painting is fully charged with its strange message.’ Now I agree with Kenneth Clark that the ‘gardener’ reference is intriguing; in this lecture I have already referred to a number of scriptural gardens, including Eden and Gethsemane. But what of the no less than four references in eight verses of John’s Gospel, to Mary Magdalen weeping? Is it coincidence that neither male commentator, Clark and Newton, make any mention of all those tears? Mary Magdalen’s tears outside the tomb, are neither self-pitying, nor superficial; they arise, rather, out of deep love. She weeps as Jesus did over Lazarus, and in both places tears of love coincide with new life and resurrection. As she weeps, Jesus sees and names Mary: the first time he calls any woman by name in the whole of 5

Patron of Art page 211

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John’s Gospel. She is not allowed to rest in her joy, however, but is given a message for the disciples, that Jesus is ascending to God, and so making his gift of life, full life, available to everyone. There is also something important in Sutherland’s painting about the relation between human and divine love, erotic and spiritual love. The church has spent so many words and so much energy in trying to distinguish between them, and yet this painting will have none of it. Mary, in her sensuous longing for Jesus’ touch, raises her eyes and hand heavenwards, and Jesus tenderly leans over Mary and extends his hand towards earth and the world he continues to love. As Robin Griffiths Jones puts it, ‘This is Easter, when heaven is wedded to earth and all creation is made new.’6 Thank you very much for your attention, and I look forward to your company next week when I will draw this series to a close via considering another fascinating and much speculated upon figure: Pontius Pilate. Thank you. [slide]

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Robin Griffith-Jones (2008) Mary Magdalene – the woman whom Jesus loved Norwich: Canterbury Press, p231.

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