Mary Magdalene

IT IS SOMETIMES HELD that Mary Magdalene was the woman Luke tells about whom, to the righteous horror of Simon the Pharisee, Jesus let wash his feet and dry them with her hair despite her highly unsavory reputation, and about whom Jesus said, "I tell you, her sins, which are many, are forgiven because she loved much" (Luke 7:47). It's a powerful story, and it would be nice to think that Mary Magdalene is the one it's about, but unfortunately there's no really good reason for doing so.

When Jesus was on the road with his disciples, he had a group of women with him whom he'd cast evil spirits out of once and who had not only joined up with him, but all chipped in to help meet expenses. One of them was Mary Magdalene, and in her case it was apparently not just one evil spirit that had been cast out but seven. Just what her problem had been, nobody says, but, helped along by the story in Luke, tradition has it that she'd been a whore. Maybe so. In any case, she seems to have teamed up with Jesus early in the game and to have stuck with him to the end. And beyond.

It's at the end that she comes into focus most clearly. She was one of the women who was there in the background when he was being crucified—she had more guts than most of them had—and she was also one of the ones who was there when they put what was left of him in the tomb. But the time that you see her best is on that first Sunday morning after his death.

John is the one who gives the greatest detail, and according to him it was still dark when she went to the tomb to discover that the stone had been rolled away from the entrance and that, inside, it was empty as a drum. She ran back to wherever the disciples were hiding out to tell them, and Peter and one of the others returned with her to check out her story. They found out that it was true and that there was nothing there except some pieces of cloth the body had been wrapped in. They left then, but Mary stayed on outside the tomb someplace and started to cry. Two angels came and asked her what she was crying about, and she said, "Because they have taken away my lord, and I do not know where they have laid him" (John 20:13). She wasn't thinking in terms of anything miraculous, in other words; she was thinking simply that even in death they wouldn't let him be and somebody had stolen his body.

Then another person came up to her and asked the same questions. Why was she crying? What was she doing there? She decided it must be somebody in charge, like the gardener maybe, and she said if he was the one who had moved the body somewhere else, would he please tell her where it was so she could go there.

Instead of answering her, he spoke her name—Mary—and then she recognized who he was, and though from that instant forward the whole course of human history was changed in so many profound and complex ways that it's impossible to imagine how it would have been different otherwise, for Mary Magdalene the only thing that had changed was that, for reasons she was in no state to consider, her old friend and teacher and strong right arm was alive again. "Rabboni!" she shouted and was about to throw her arms around him for sheer joy and astonishment when he stopped her.

"Noli me tangere," he said. "Touch me not. Don't hold on to me" (John 20:17),thus making her not only the first person in the world to have her heart stop beating for a second to find him alive again when she'd thought he was dead as a doornail, but the first person also to have her heart break a little to realize that he couldn't be touched anymore, wasn't there anymore as a hand to hold on to when the going got tough, a shoulder to weep on, because the life in him was no longer a life she could know by touching it, with her here and him there, but a life she could know only by living it: with her here—old tart and retread, old broken-heart and last, best friend—and with him here too, alive inside her life, to raise her up also out of the wreckage of all that was wrecked in her and dead.

In the meanwhile, he had much to do and far to go, he said, and so did she, and the first thing she did was go back to the disciples to report. "I have seen the Lord," she said, and whatever dark doubts they might have had on the subject earlier, one look at her face was enough to melt them all away like morning mist.

-Originally published in Peculiar Treasures and later in Beyond Words

Mary

THE TIME THEIR TWELVE-YEAR-OLD got lost in Jerusalem and they finally found him in the Temple, Mary said, "Behold, thy father and I have sought thee sorrowing" (Luke 2:48), and as things turned out, it was a shadow of things to come.

It's not hard to imagine her sorrowing again when Jesus left a good, steady job in Nazareth to risk his neck wandering around all over creation to proclaim whatever it was he thought he was proclaiming. Part of her sorrow was presumably that she loved him too much for himself instead of for the wild and holy business he thought he'd been called to. Another part must have been that like just about everybody else who was closest to him in Nazareth, she never really understood what he thought he was doing and may well have been one of the ones who, when he went back home once, decided he must be off his rocker. "He is beside himself," they said (Mark 3:21) and tried to lock him up for his own good.

Maybe some of the things he said to her didn't sound as bad in Aramaic as they do in English, but even so, she can't have been too happy about the time she told him the wine was running out at the wedding in Cana, and he said, "Woman, what have you to do with me?" (John 2:4), or the time they came and told him his mother was waiting outside for him, and he said, "Who is my mother?" (Matthew 12:48), adding that whoever did the will of his father who was in heaven, that was who his mother was.

For all the sentimentalizing that their relationship has come in for since, there's no place in the Gospels where he speaks some special, loving word or does some special, loving thing for the woman who gave him birth. You get the idea that he felt he couldn't belong truly to anybody unless he somehow belonged equally to everybody. They were all his mothers and brothers and sisters, and there's no place in the record where he offers her anything more than he offered everybody else.

No place, that is, except at the very end when, cross-eyed with pain, he looked down from where they'd nailed him and said something just for her. Even here he didn't call her his mother, just "woman" again, and he didn't say good-bye to her or anything like that. But it's as if here at last he finally spoke to the awful need he must have always sensed in her. "Behold your son," he said, indicating the disciple who was standing beside her, and then to the disciple, "Behold your mother" (John 19:26-27).

It was his going-away present to her really, somebody to be the son to her that he had had no way of being himself, what with a world to save, a death to die. He would be present in that disciple, he seemed to be saying, for her to live for, and to live for her. Beyond that, he would be present in generation after generation for her to mother, the Mater Dolorosa who seeks him always, and sorrowing, everywhere she goes.

-Originally published in Peculiar Treasures and later in Beyond Words

Marriage

THEY SAY THEY WILL LOVE, comfort, honor each other to the end of their days. They say they will cherish each other and be faithful to each other always. They say they will do these things not just when they feel like it, but even—for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health—when they don't feel like it at all. In other words, the vows they make at a marriage could hardly be more extravagant. They give away their freedom. They take on themselves each other's burdens. They bind their lives together in ways that are even more painful to unbind emotionally, humanly, than they are to unbind legally. The question is, what do they get in return?

They get each other in return. Assuming they have any success at all in keeping their rash, quixotic promises, they never have to face the world quite alone again. There will always be the other to talk to, to listen to. If they're lucky, even after the first passion passes, they still have a kindness and a patience to depend on, a chance to be patient and kind. There is still someone to get through the night with, to wake into the new day beside. If they have children, they can give them, as well as each other, roots and wings. If they don't have children, they each become the other's child.

They both still have their lives apart as well as a life together. They both still have their separate ways to find. But a marriage made in heaven is one where they become more richly themselves together than the chances are either of them could ever have managed to become alone. When Jesus changed the water into wine at the wedding in Cana, perhaps it was a way of saying more or less the same thing.

-Originally published in Whistling in the Dark and later in Beyond Words

Mark

NOBODY KNOWS FOR SURE who wrote the Gospel that bears Mark's name because the book itself doesn't say. Some people claim it was the John Mark who turns up in the book of Acts as a traveling companion of Paul's and the son of a woman named Mary, who owned a place where the group used to meet and pray back in the days when the church was young (Acts 12:12). And maybe this John Mark was the same person who appears in the scene of Jesus' arrest at Gethsemane as a boy who managed to escape from the soldiers' clutches but not without leaving his shirt behind, so that he ran off into the dark scared out of his wits and naked as the day he was born (Mark 14:51-52). Mark is the only one who reports the incident, and maybe he put it in as a kind of signature. An early historian says he was a friend of Peter's and got some of his information from him. Who knows? In the long run, the only things you can find out about him for certain are from the book he wrote. Whoever he was, Mark is as good a name to call him by as any other.

He was a man in a hurry, out of breath, with no time to lose because that's how the people were he was writing for too. The authorities were out for their blood, and they were on the run. At any moment of day or night a knock might come at the door, and from there to getting thrown to the lions or set fire to as living torches at one of Nero's evening entertainments took no time at all. So he leaves a lot out; it's amazing how much. There's no family tree for Jesus as there is in Matthew and Luke. There's nothing about how he was born, no angel explaining it ahead of time, no Wise Men, no Herod, no star. There's nothing about his childhood. There's precious little about his run-ins with the Pharisees, no Sermon on the Mount, only four parables. His teaching in general is brushed past hurriedly—except for one long speech, just a word here, a word there. "Immediately" is one of Mark's favorite words, and he uses it three times more than either Matthew or Luke, fifteen times more than John. "Immediately he called them" (1:20), "immediately on the sabbath he entered the synagogue" (1:21). Immediately the girl got up and walked (5:30), or the father cried (9:24), or the cock crowed (14:72). Jesus himself races by, scattering miracles like rice at a wedding. Mark is alive with miracles, especially healing ones, and Jesus rushes from one to another. He had no time to lose either.

Mark writes for people who already believe instead of the ones who need things explained, and therefore it's who Jesus was, rather than what he said, that Mark's book is bursting with—who he was and what he did with what little time he had. He was the "Son of God," that's who he was. Mark says it right out in the first sentence so nobody will miss it (1:1). And he came "not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many" (10:45). That's what he did, and he died doing it. The whole book is obsessed with the fact of his death. And with good reason.

If Jesus died as dead as anybody, what hope did the rest of them have who woke every morning to the taste of their own death in their mouths? Why did he die? He died because the Jews had it in for him, Mark says, because he is hard on the Jews, himself very likely a Gentile and writing for Gentiles. He died because that's the way he wanted it—that "ransom for many" again, a wonderful thing to be bought at a terrible price. He died because that's the way God wanted it. Marvelous things would come of his death, and the one long speech Mark gives has to do with those marvelous things. "The stars will be falling from heaven," Jesus says, "and the powers in the heavens will be shaken, and then they will see the Son of man coming in clouds with great power and glory" (13:25-26). Of course there was hope—hope that would set the stars reeling.

But even in the midst of his great haste, Mark stops and looks at Jesus, sees him better than any of the others do. When Jesus naps in a boat, it's in the stern he does it, with a pillow under his head (4:38). The others don't say that. And the grass was green when he fed the five thousand on hardly enough to feed five (6:39), not dry grass, crackling and brown. He got up "a great while before day" to go pray by himself (1:35), not at nine, not after a hot breakfast, and he was sitting down "opposite the treasury" when he saw the old lady drop her two cents in the collection box (12:41). Only Mark reports how the desperate father said, "I believe. Help thou my unbelief" (9:24), and how Jesus found it belief enough to heal his sick boy by. You can say they make no difference, such details as these, which the others skip, or you can say they make all the difference.

Then the end comes, and even Mark has to slow down there. Half his book has to do with the last days in Jerusalem and the way Jesus handled them and the way he was handled himself. And when he died, Mark is the one who reports what his last words were, even the language he spoke them in—"Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani"—which he translates, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" (15:34). Only Matthew had the stomach to pick them up from Mark and report them too. Luke and John apparently couldn't bring themselves to.

Mark ends his book, as he begins it, almost in the middle of a sentence. There was no time to gather up all the loose ends. The world itself was the loose ends, and all history would hardly be enough to gather them up in. The women went to the tomb and found it empty. A young man in white was sitting there—"on the right," Mark says, not on the left. "He has risen," the young man said. "Go tell his disciples. And Peter," Mark adds, unlike Matthew and Luke again. Was it because he'd known Peter and the old man had wanted his name there? So the women ran out as if the place was on fire, which in a way of course it was, "for trembling and astonishment had come upon them, and they said nothing to anyone for they were afraid" (16:1-8). Later editors added a few extra verses to round things off, but that's where Mark ended it. In mid-air.

Mark's last word in his Gospel is afraid, and it makes you wonder if maybe the theory is true after all that he was the boy who streaked out of Gethsemane in such a panic. He knew how the women felt as they picked up their skirts and made a dash for it anyway. Wonderful and terrible things were happening, and more were still to come. He knew what fear was all about—the scalp cold, the mouth dry, the midnight knock at the door—but he also knew that fear was not the last thing. It was the next to the last thing. The last thing was hope. "You will see him, as he told you," the young man in white said (16:7). If that was true, there was nothing else that mattered. So Mark stopped there.

-Originally published in Peculiar Treasures and later in Beyond Words

Male

MALES ARE STRONG, daring, aggressive. Females are gentle, prudent, sensitive. That's the way it was always supposed to be. If a particular male didn't fit the picture by nature, he generally tended to let on that he did. He wasn't free to be himself that way, but at least it was better than drawing unfavorable attention and possible ridicule. Artists of various kinds—together with priests, ministers, and actors—were sometimes exceptions, but everybody knew they were a peculiar crowd anyhow.

When the old stereotypes began to break down in the middle of the twentieth century—a revolution crystallized in the musical Hair—it was of course a liberating experience for males just as for everybody else. Starting with the younger ones, they could put an earring in one ear and wear a ponytail without having their masculinity called into question. If they opposed war, violence, and nuclear power, they might get into trouble with the cops, but most people no longer considered them traitors to their gender. It was even acceptable for them to stay home and take care of the children while their wives went out to earn the family living.

Needless to say, males continue to be as much of a problem to themselves now that the sky's the limit as they ever were. Maybe more so. With females more or less liberated right alongside them, they're not quite as much in charge as they used to be, and that leaves them feeling a little vulnerable and disoriented. Free to be almost anything these days, now they've got a harder time figuring out what to be. With everything pretty much up for grabs, they're not sure what's most worth grabbing.

Father and husband, brother and son, lover and friend—all the old roles are still there for them to fill, but with the old scripts discarded, they're left to wing it as best they can.

-Originally published in Whistling in the Dark and later in Beyond Words