+Z’ev

Today’s assigned readings:

AM: Zephaniah 3:14-20, Mark 15:37-16:7
PM: Exodus 15:19-21, 2 Corinthians 1:3-7

Sing aloud, O daughter Zion; shout, O Israel! Rejoice and exult with all your heart, O daughter Jerusalem! The Lord has taken away the judgments against you, he has turned away your enemies.
Zephaniah 3:14-15

First, some liturgical geekery: In the “high church” understanding, today’s feast is transferred from yesterday because Sundays, as feasts of the Resurrection, get priority seating in the Anglican tradition. A couple of possible exceptions: if you’re a church named for a given saint or has a special devotion, then the feast doesn’t get transferred.

But I know a number of places that define “special devotion” in such a way to transfer this feast (or others) “backwards” to the closest Sunday - so that a given feast always gets the sort of importance that Sunday always brings. To my mind this makes more sense than letting Sunday “bump” a feast because most communities don’t have the time to pull off a huge party in the middle of the week. Some view this as decline in devotion. Bah.

Now… onwards.

Most Mary Magdalen sermons today start out with a list of “what she is not.” She’s not a prostitute, she’s not the woman caught in adultery, she’s not Jesus’ wife. She’s not… she’s not… she’s not… I’m down with all of that. The problem is that what she is is very scary.

I learned what she is from St Gregory of Nyssa parish where, every year when this feast is celebrated, this poem by Janet Morley is read as a lesson. One year it was a dramatic dance… a weeping and mourning image draped in too many veils swirling in the midst of the congregation, revealing her face and its joy in the midst of the final line: “I have a gospel to proclaim.” At that point it was revealed to me (I was new in the parish at the time, I assume this was well known by the others) that the dancer was male…

Mary is important because if it were not for her we’d now know about the Resurrection. I mean this.

I answered a series of questions claimed to tell “where people who say that they are Christian believers fall on a left-to-right theological spectrum”. The first question is Are the biblical accounts of the resurrection of Jesus accurate? Did this event really happen? My reply, in part, is: “There are no accounts of Jesus’ resurrection in the Bible. There are only accounts of people finding an empty tomb.”

We often miss that point - there no stories of the Resurrection. There’s only an earthquake and then some visions. Mary has, really, the only vision of Jesus on that Easter Morning and he gives her a command (in other stories, this command comes from Angels). The command is “Go and tell the others.” Mary is called, by some “the Apostle to the Apostles” but, in reality, she is the first Apostle - the first one sent (meaning of “apostle) with news of the Resurrection.

In a male-dominated culture where “goddesses” had lost a lot of their power, becomign mostly about sex and fertility, this woman who, seemingly, owns her own business and caries her own name (no husband is ever mentioned) is oddly powerful. And she becomes the first one sent with news: certainly she has a Gospel to proclaim! It’s ironic, then, and sad that the mostly-male church relegates her to a second class seat, bumping her feast off a Sunday when there would be no Sunday at all save for her.

Knowing what we know about how we hear of the Resurrection, we rush to the local congregation in joy to celebrate and discover the dancer is really a man.

We have 2000 years of justification for that male dominance and the appeal is usually to tradition: this means “we’ve done it this way for 2000 years because we’ve done it this way for 2000 years.”

Even the Infallible Pope of Rome says he can’t change this (despite the fact that he’s changed a number of things, recently - whatever their justification).

I’m thankful that some ecclesial communities have broken away on this. If we have a gospel to proclaim at all, it must be one that transcends culture. Completely. It must also be one that transforms it.. revolutionises it. Mary is the first person to bear the promises of Zephaniah:

I will deal with all your oppressors at that time. And I will save the lame and gather the outcast, and I will change their shame into praise and renown in all the earth.

Sadly, for most of 2000 years, we’ve sat down and turned into oppressors ourselves. We’ve created our own brands of outcasts, our own brands of shame to inflict on folks. Mary calls us out of that, beyond what the culture expects of us.

If the wedding feast of Cana is, despite the sense of grasping at straws, Jesus’ blessing on “the sacrament of marriage”; then here is Jesus blessing on strong women who are not “subservient” to men.

Let us celebrate the sacrament of Mary Magdalen! In Russian - and in the Orthodox Tradition - for any feast where you want to celebrate joy, “S’praznikum!” is the festal shout: A Happy Feast!

Christians have another one to announce the revolution:

Christ is risen!