To mark the feast of St. Mary Magdalene, here is the Introduction to Fran Lock’s latest book, with all images by Ignacia Ruiz
Introduction: Our Resurrection
Who was Mary Magdalene? The answer to that question seems largely to depend on who you ask: a repentant prostitute who ended her days as a desert contemplative? The secret wife of Jesus? An evangelist and prophet? A sinner or a saint? A socially destabilising counter-heroine? The difficulty is that Mary Magdalene is an elusive figure within scripture, and this ambiguity has allowed her to serve as a receptacle or scrim for whatever projections have been expedient to those with ecclesiastical power. It has also provided those same forces with an opportunity to distort or suppress the more disturbing—revolutionary—elements of her life and message.
So, where to begin? As an amateur medievalist my temptation was to dive into the wealth of Magdalene ephemera from the long Middle Ages. Mary Magdalene was an extremely popular medieval saint; her status as the first witness to the resurrection meant that she was already prominent within the church’s Easter liturgy, a figure around which a variety of different ideas and attributes could usefully constellate.
The medieval Magdalene was a composite figure in whom the lives of three women had been braided together. This entanglement began in 591, when Pope Gregory the Great conflated Mary of Magdala (the woman Jesus healed of seven “devils”) with Mary of Bethany (the sister of Martha and Lazarus), and with a third nameless penitent who had anointed Jesus’ feet with oil and tears. These three strands formed the basis of a legendary tradition – cemented during the Middle Ages – in which Mary Magdalene embodied a number of complex roles: as a sinner, as a young woman of genteel birth, a model penitent, a follower of Christ, an evangelist and exegete. The dramatic nature of this tripartite story, particularly her conversion from sinfulness to sanctity, made her a fruitful subject for all manner of devotional texts, and a popular role model for an increasingly literate laity.
While I find these texts fascinating, I often come away from them feeling frustrated. To a certain extent this medieval Magdalene challenged the social norms and hierarchies of her time, behaving in ways and with a degree of agency that was unusual for women (even saintly ones) in the literature of the period. However, these representations tended to resolve the social and political tensions she brought into focus within a narrative arc of conversion, penitence, moderation and obedience. Mary Magdalene rues and renounces her former existence, and the end of her story is ascetically spiritual, not socially radical.
Equality and justice
I wanted to use the poems to think through some of these representations, and the political manoeuvres that underpinned them. In particular, I wanted to think about how labelling Mary Magdalene as a “prostitute” (despite the fact she was never referred to as such in scripture), becomes a useful tool for delegitimating her message, undermining her importance within Jesus’ ministry, and thus curtailing the role of women within and outside of the church. As a prostitute, Mary is beyond the pale, an outcast, and as such she cannot be a threat to power. She is also structurally useful: as an exemplary penitent she bears the figural burden of sin for her entire community, for her sex, for the state, for the world, whichever of these is required.
Just as Christ’s body is quite literally sacrificed for the sins of the world, I often think that Mary Magdalene is conceptually sacrificed—that she becomes a place for the early Church Fathers to put all of the distressing and distasteful ideas (the equality of women, the refusal of shame) they would rather not look at or think about. I also found myself thinking about how in placing Christ outside the compass of human love and bodily desire, his life and teachings are rendered ever more remote from other very human concerns, such as social and gender equality, and redistributive justice.
The poems in this collection speak through and back to elements of Mary Magdalene’s medieval hagiography, unpicking and entangling the various threads of her legend to create a hybrid lyric voice that may belong to one woman or to several. In doing so, I am hoping to tap into some of the radical undercurrents of her character and story: her sensuality, her grief, her sense of social justice, and—most importantly—her status as chronicler of the incendiary proto-socialism of Jesus and his disciples.
Beatitudes
The bold monochrome linocuts made by Ignacia Ruiz tap into this incendiary energy. They concentrate the (com)passionate intensity of these stories in dynamic and tactile graphic designs. I think of them as connecting back to ancient traditions of mark-making, while simultaneously creating a stark symbolic language that feels strikingly contemporary. To me they feel like a way of getting in touch with the deep past.
Twisting revolutionary messages
To truly find a way into writing about and with Mary Magdalene, I needed to go back to the beginning, to the most important episodes of her life as recorded in scripture. What has continued to stand out to me is that when Jesus’ male disciples abandoned him at his moment of greatest crisis and most pressing danger, Mary Magdalene stayed with him. She stayed with him even to the Crucifixion. She was present at the tomb. She was the first person to whom Christ appeared after his resurrection. To me, this is huge. It argues powerfully for the role of women within Jesus’ ministry, and for Christ’s implicit challenge to patriarchal dominance. It also argues, I think for the importance of the Gospel of Mary in understanding Christ’s revolutionary life and teaching.
The fate of this gospel as a fringe text says a lot about the way such religious texts are edited and selected: which texts are canonised, and which are excluded, and for what reasons. The Gospel of Mary is a telling of Jesus’ ministry in which Mary Magdalene features as one of the most prominent voices. This is not a gospel written by Mary, but one which recognises her as a powerful spiritual authority. The text’s exclusion from the canonical gospels is an object lesson in the ways in which power seeks to sanctify and establish itself as and through tradition. The exclusion of Mary from the story of the Jesus movement is emblematic of and a precursor to the often violent exclusion and suppression of women throughout the history of the church, up to the present day. The fate of Mary Magdalene is the fate of all women. It shows us how revolutionary messages can be twisted or betrayed towards the ends of domination.
Yet Mary Magdalene survives. She is an enigmatic presence throughout the New Testament, appearing at pivotal moments like a beacon of light and a conduit for lightning. As the apostle Levi says: ‘If the Saviour made her worthy, who are you then for your part to reject her?’
There’s a quote from the late Sean Bonney that always pops into my head when talking to people about religion: there are, he said, ‘traditions of thought that are interested in serving power. And […] traditions of thought that are interested in freeing people from that power. Sometimes these traditions overlap. And sometimes they can be useful in both directions.’ Look no further than the horrors perpetrated against the people—women in particular—in Ireland for an eyeful of the former. Or indeed to an increasingly vocal religious right in the United States. For the latter we have to look elsewhere, and a good place to start is with scripture: with Luke, with the Psalms, and with the life of Christ. How can anyone read the Cleansing of the Temple, and not know it in their bones as a powerful revolutionary salvo?
The insurrection of Jesus
I am not infrequently asked what it is I believe, and I don’t have a simple answer to that one. I suppose I believe in stories, in words. I believe in the insurrectionary message carried by Jesus’ words, and that whatever it is we call “God” rides on the side of the poor and the oppressed. I might say I believe that “God” isn’t an entity at all, but an action, something we manifest within ourselves every time we stand up for the marginalised or the abused; when we exhibit courage and kindness in the face of a social order that wishes to crush our most vulnerable.
As Terry Eagleton puts it in Radical Sacrifice (Yale University Press, 2018), the crucifixion of Jesus is freighted with liberatory significance. It was his political agenda that led him to the cross, his: ‘solidarity with those who dwell in the borderlands of orthodox society, men and women whose existence signifies a kind of non-being, prefigures the non-being to which he himself is brought on the outer edge of the metropolis. In the person of Jesus, those whom Paul calls the filth of the earth are in principle raised up to glory’.
Solidarity
Thinking about Jesus’ ministry and about his death, I am often reminded of Huey Newton, the founder of the Black Panther Party, writing in Revolutionary Suicide (1973) that ‘Revolutionary suicide does not mean that I and my comrades have a death wish; it means just the opposite. We have such a strong desire to live with hope and human dignity that existence without them is impossible. When reactionary forces crush us, we must move against these forces, even at the risk of death.’ To me, such a sacrifice is both a radical political event, and an almost overwhelming act of love.
This is not “love” as a private, individual end, but love as an open, social and collective means. That is, not as a vague feeling, but a radical social practice, and an innovating energy; like other forms of energy love can never be destroyed, only converted into new and various shapes. This is what my Mary Magdalene means when she talks about Christ’s endurance and resurrection, even from the depths of her loss: that an experience of the most profound grief might be transformed into more compassionate forms of practical solidarity. Love is the irritating imperative to do something. It is the miracle by which everyone lives.
Binding the Strong Man
When Christ turned over the tables and ran the moneylenders out of the temple, that was the beginning of his sacrifice. He was dead a few days later. Those two things are not unconnected: he challenged money, he challenged power, and he had such popular support when he did it that the Temple guards refused to move against him. Of course, the state, in the hands of the political, religious and business elites, killed him; they brought the final binding authority of the law down on his head. It’s what the rich do when they feel threatened, when they’ve lost the moral argument. And he knew that they would do it. But he also knew that he was just one man, that people needed this radical example to unite around, and that when they killed him, that radicalism would live on.
This is the message my Mary Magdalene wants to share with the world. This is what is meant by love being stronger than death. You can put a person to death, but not an idea. That doesn’t make the idea more important or precious than the person. It means that the way in which we honour them, the way we keep their fire burning, and love them past death is to work tirelessly toward a better, more loving world—the coming change.
Our Resurrection
by Fran Lock, with image above by Ignacia Ruiz
to arrest or interrupt. to stay
and to awaken. to awaken
the dangerous memory of christ.
the sky rebuked by whirling
birds. the sky sloughs off
the sky. all is revealed. inside
the mouth they sew a coal
of caution. this silence,
a wilderness of weak heat
when all we want is love;
the lightning leaping from
his likeness, the reversal
or suspension of time. he
stands beside in us. to stand
beside, a messianic act. we
are the resurrection. the hinge
on which the word hangs,
the axis upon which history
turns.
Fran Lock’s most recent book of poetry arrived completely out of the blue into my inbox. I took a look – and didn’t put it down until the final word. I suggest you do the same. Discover again – or for the first time – how stories and persona we think we know so well are utterly confounding, as Lock catches stories of Mary Magdalene and Jesus off balance, grounding them again in breathless love stronger than death.
- Karen L. King, Research Professor of Divinity, Harvard University
Perhaps like Mary Magdalene herself, Fran Lock has had a fraught relationship to religion. But that has opened up her imagination. This meditation, strikingly illustrated by Ignacia Ruiz, helps to birth a spirituality that gives life. At a time when many people ask afresh – is there anything for me in Christianity? – here is a liberation theology, that liberates itself from the chains of oppressive patriarchal structures. It is an imaginative theology, revealed by the author’s and the artist’s innermost eye of the human heart.
- Alastair McIntosh, author of Soil and Soul and Poacher’s Pilgrimage
Fran Lock weaves words that bring to life a figure either lost or maligned in the history of church and culture – Mary Magdalene. Her poetry is sensuous and challenging, it flows over us stirring our imaginations. We are sad, angry and aflame with love that demands a retelling and a remembering.
Lock gives us this, she strips away the false telling and opens a world of life-changing possibilities by unfolding a vision of the revolutionary ‘apostle to the apostles’ and the man she loved.
- Lisa Isherwood, Professor of Feminist Liberation Theologies, University of Wales
Love Is Stronger Than Death: Mary Magdalene and the Insurrection of Jesus, by Fran Lock, is available here.
