Commontide
Liturgical Color: White/Gold
The 5th Sunday after Trinity
O God, you declare your almighty power chiefly in showing mercy and pity: Grant us the fullness of your grace, that we, running to obtain your promises, may become partakers of your heavenly treasure; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
Most liturgical texts are from the Book of Common Prayer (2019) of the Anglican Church in North America.
The New Coverdale Psalter, © 2019 by the Anglican Church in North America. Used by permission.
Witness to the Resurrection
Red Letter Day
Mary Magdalene was the follower out of whom Jesus cast seven demons, who stood by the cross when others fled and became the first witness of the Resurrection. To her, weeping in the garden, the risen Christ first appeared, and her he sent to carry the news to the apostles, so that the church has called her the Apostle to the Apostles. The later Western image of her as a repentant prostitute is a confusion with other women in the Gospels; the New Testament knows her as the first herald of Easter.
Mary Magdalene is identified in Luke 8:2 as a woman 'from whom seven demons had gone out.' This single detail — the seven demons — is the only personal information the Gospels provide about her background. The plural 'demons' suggests profound spiritual affliction, but nothing in the Gospel accounts associates her with sexual sin. Luke introduces her immediately after narrating the story of an unnamed 'sinful woman' who anoints Jesus' feet in the house of a Pharisee (Luke 7:36–50), but the evangelists make clear they are distinct figures: Luke explicitly introduces Mary Magdalene as a new person in the very next verse.
What the canonical accounts emphasize is Mary's devotion. Luke 8:2–3 notes that she, along with other women who had been healed by Jesus, 'provided for' him and his disciples 'out of their resources,' indicating both her financial means and her commitment to his cause.
Mary appears by name in all four Gospel accounts of the Crucifixion and Resurrection. She is present at Jesus's death (Matthew 27:56, Mark 15:40, Luke 23:49, John 19:25), at his burial (Matthew 27:61, Mark 15:47, Luke 23:55), and is listed first among the women who go to the tomb on Easter morning in all four Gospels. This consistency across all four Gospels makes her one of the most reliably attested figures in the Passion narrative.
The Fourth Gospel gives the most intimate account of her encounter with the risen Christ (John 20:1–18). She comes to the tomb while it is still dark, finds the stone rolled away, and discovers Jesus is gone. She weeps at the tomb. Two angels ask her why she is weeping; she turns and sees a figure she takes for the gardener. Then Jesus speaks her name — 'Mary' — and she recognizes him with the cry 'Rabbouni!' ('Teacher!'). Jesus tells her, 'Do not cling to me, for I have not yet ascended to the Father; but go to my brothers and say to them, I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.' She goes and announces to the disciples: 'I have seen the Lord.' This moment — the recognition, the commissioning, the proclamation — constitutes her as the first witness and first proclaimer of the Resurrection.
Traditionally, the Western Church — following Gregory the Great's homily of 591 — conflated Mary Magdalene with three distinct biblical figures: the sinful woman of Luke 7:36–50 who anoints Jesus' feet with expensive ointment, the Mary of Bethany (Luke 10:39 and John 11–12) who sat at Jesus' feet and anointed him with nard, and Mary Magdalene herself. This conflation, unsupported by the Gospel texts themselves, created a composite figure described as a penitent sinner who became a contemplative saint — a powerful devotional archetype that dominated Western spirituality for nearly fourteen centuries.
The Eastern Church never accepted this conflation. The Orthodox tradition maintains that Mary Magdalene was distinct from both the sinful woman and Mary of Bethany, and that she was honored as the 'First Witness' (Myrrhophore, 'Myrrh-bearer') to the Resurrection.
The Western tradition further developed the claim that after the persecution in Jerusalem, Mary Magdalene traveled to Provence in southern France, lived as a hermit in a cave at Sainte-Baume, and spent the last thirty years of her life in penitential contemplation. This tradition, first attested in the 11th-century vita by Odo of Cluny but elaborated through the medieval period, has no historical foundation. It appears to have arisen from a confusion between Mary Magdalene and another saint, or as a purely literary development.
In 1969, the Roman Catholic Church, following modern biblical scholarship, officially corrected the conflation and restored Mary Magdalene to her canonical identity as distinct from the sinful woman and Mary of Bethany.