July 22, 2005
Magdalene
Mary Magdalene’s feast this year is stuck on a Friday over here in the hot and humid tag-end days of July. It’s almost as if the Kalendar Kids somewhere down in the distant past didn’t quite know what to do with her, but only knew they couldn’t do without her.
Neither can we. The apostle to the apostles-to-become got short shrift then and has been left out of their succession ever since. Such gospel irony always exposes this kind of pretense and shows us the understated persons who appear to be less than they are.
The hero on the other hand is the larger-than-life figure who appears to be more than the human condition will bear. The apostles did great things and laid a wall-to-wall carpet on the floor of our church’s history. But their treatment of the Magdalene was not one of them.
All of Jesus’ preaching about the kingdom is like this, the paradox that the extraordinary is like the ordinary, that it is a tale told through stories of the earth and earthy people, not through grandiosity and puffery.
We’d look a long way on the Way, you and I, before finding a better emblem of a life more like our own than the Magdalene. A life whose remembering is not mounted up and out of reach on the liturgical year’s promontories, but a life whose day is parked off in the shank of summer, a life that understood the sin, the forgiveness, the reconciliation, and the utter surprise by joy to which we all might well aspire.