The Good News:
John 12:1-8 NRSVUE
Six days before the Passover Jesus came to Bethany, the home of Lazarus, whom he had raised from the dead. There they gave a dinner for him. Martha served, and Lazarus was one of those reclining with him. Mary took a pound of costly perfume made of pure nard, anointed Jesus’s feet, and wiped them[a] with her hair. The house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume. But Judas Iscariot, one of his disciples (the one who was about to betray him), said, “Why was this perfume not sold for three hundred denarii and the money given to the poor?” (He said this not because he cared about the poor but because he was a thief; he kept the common purse and used to steal what was put into it.) Jesus said, “Leave her alone. She bought it so that she might keep it for the day of my burial. You always have the poor with you, but you do not always have me.”
The gift of Mary, the gift of her presence, to a friend facing testing and death.
The gift of Mary, the gift of her generosity, to disciples who still had much to learn.
The gift of Mary, the gift of her commitment to the teacher who was her inspiration.
The gift of Mary, the gift of her love to God’s Chosen One, in whom God’s love is revealed. Amen.
John 20:1-18 Common English Bible
Early in the morning of the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene came to the tomb and saw that the stone had been taken away from the tomb. 2 She ran to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one whom Jesus loved, and said, “They have taken the Lord from the tomb, and we don’t know where they’ve put him.” 3 Peter and the other disciple left to go to the tomb. 4 They were running together, but the other disciple ran faster than Peter and was the first to arrive at the tomb. 5 Bending down to take a look, he saw the linen cloths lying there, but he didn’t go in. 6 Following him, Simon Peter entered the tomb and saw the linen cloths lying there. 7 He also saw the face cloth that had been on Jesus’ head. It wasn’t with the other clothes but was folded up in its own place. 8 Then the other disciple, the one who arrived at the tomb first, also went inside. He saw and believed. 9 They didn’t yet understand the scripture that Jesus must rise from the dead. 10 Then the disciples returned to the place where they were staying.
11 Mary stood outside near the tomb, crying. As she cried, she bent down to look into the tomb. 12 She saw two angels dressed in white, seated where the body of Jesus had been, one at the head and one at the foot. 13 The angels asked her, “Woman, why are you crying?”
She replied, “They have taken away my Lord, and I don’t know where they’ve put him.” 14 As soon as she had said this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing there, but she didn’t know it was Jesus.
15 Jesus said to her, “Woman, why are you crying? Who are you looking for?”
Thinking he was the gardener, she replied, “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have put him and I will get him.”
16 Jesus said to her, “Mary.”
She turned and said to him in Aramaic, “Rabbouni” (which means Teacher).
17 Jesus said to her, “Don’t hold on to me, for I haven’t yet gone up to my Father. Go to my brothers and sisters and tell them, ‘I’m going up to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’”
18 Mary Magdalene left and announced to the disciples, “I’ve seen the Lord.” Then she told them what he said to her.
Reflection: “The Gift of Mary”
I acknowledge with gratitude that this reflection is largely based on this brilliant sermon by Diana Butler Bass, and on Elizabeth Schrader’s groundbreaking New Testament scholarship which Bass brings to life.
https://dianabutlerbass.substack.com/p/mary-the-tower
The first passage above is such a beautiful and dramatic passage, full of hospitality and abundance, confusion and conflict.
I want to take a close look at a major source of confusion in this passage and throughout the Gospel of John. There are “So Many Marys”, and the confusion centers around the name Mary, and which Mary anoints Jesus with costly perfume and wipes his feet with her hair.
This story is not the first appearance of Mary and Martha and Lazarus in the gospel of John. We first encounter them in John 11, the story of Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead. It begins,
Now a certain man was ill, Lazarus of Bethany, the village of Mary and her sister Martha. 2 Mary was the one who anointed the Lord with perfume and wiped his feet with her hair; her brother Lazarus was ill… though Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus, 6 after having heard that Lazarus[b] was ill, he stayed two days longer in the place where he was.
You know the story from there: when Jesus finally arrives, Lazarus has been dead for several days. Jesus calls to him to come out of the tomb, and Lazarus emerges, alive.
The big news is that some exciting new Bible scholarship has discovered that the oldest surviving manuscript of the Gospel of John did not include Martha in this story. And her inclusion by a later editor has led to centuries of translations that mis-identify Mary.
This might have only been interesting to Biblical scholars, but the popular Christian writer Diana Butler Bass shared the story in her closing sermon at the 2022 Wild Goose Festival, which is like a contemporary Woodstock for progressive Christians. Her sermon brought this Biblical scholarship alive, and it soon went viral.
The story begins with a master’s student in New Testament studies at General Theological Seminary named Elizabeth Schrader. She wanted to write her thesis on Mary Magdalene and John 11, and her professor asked her to look at the earliest possible texts and try to say something new.
Papyrus 66 is the oldest and most complete text of the gospel of John, dated at around the year 200. For centuries it had been protected in a library, and accessible to very few scholars. But just before Elizabeth Schrader began her research, it was digitized and made available much more widely. When Schrader looked at her electronic copy, the first sentence she saw read “Now a certain man was ill, Lazarus of Bethany, the village of Mary and his sister Mary.” Of course she was confused, since all our translations name Mary and his sister Martha.
Because she was working with an electronic copy, Schrader was able to zoom in on the text. And what she found was that the original Greek word for Mary had been changed to Martha. The Greek spelling for Mary was similar to Maria in English, and the letter “I” was changed to “TH”. They also changed “his” to “her” so that it now read “the village of Mary and her sister Martha”.
We’ll never know who made these changes, or why. It certainly made a confusing sentence into a more sensible one. This editor was also very thorough. Throughout John 11 and 12, he changed every subsequent mention of Mary into Martha.
Maybe this editor was just an over zealous member of the grammar police. I’m an English major, I get that.
But the result is that one or two Mary’s in the original translation became Mary and Martha in all later translations of this text. And so it’s logical to connect this Mary and Martha to the Mary and Martha in Luke 10, when Jesus visits busy Martha and contemplative Mary and tells an impatient Martha that Mary has chosen the better part. We put these two stories together and call this Mary “Mary of Bethany”.
But these are two different families and two different Mary’s. Lazarus and his sister Mary clearly live in Bethany, but the village where Mary and Martha live is not identified. In Luke 10:38, it says that “he entered a certain village where a woman named Martha welcomed him into her home.” In a patriarchal society, if it was Martha’s home that means that she did not have a brother, and Jesus was nowhere near Bethany at this point in his ministry.
So, we have Martha and her sister Mary in an unknown village, and Lazarus and his sister Mary in Bethany.
By now, I know you’re wondering why this matters.
It matters because the Mary in John 11 and 12 has a very important prophetic role, and we don’t really know who she is. In John 11, it is Mary, not Martha, who states her belief in Jesus, “Yes, Lord, I believe that you are the Messiah,[g] the Son of God, the one coming into the world.” This is known as a Christological confession, and there are only two in the New Testament. In Matthew, Mark and Luke, it is Peter who says, “You are the Messiah, the son of the living God.”
In the passage from John 12, it is Mary who anoints Jesus, which throughout Hebrew history has been the role of the most important prophets – to anoint the king. At the same time, she is anointing him for his death, a priestly role.
Suddenly, these passages open up to all sorts of exciting possibilities. One of the most exciting interpretations is that this is Mary Magdalene, who is so important in the gospel of John that she is the first to find the empty tomb on Easter morning, the first to recognize the risen Jesus in the garden. She is the first to take the news to the disciples, and for this she has been named “apostle to the apostles”.
It makes sense that this Mary, Mary Magdalene, is also the Mary in John 11 and 12.
The thing that makes this so exciting to Diana Butler Bass, to me and many others, is that this elevates Mary Magdalene to a status equal to Peter, and that idea is supported by the title that this Mary is given. She is not “Mary of Magdala”, a village known for its wild behavior. She is not Mary a repentant prostitute, she is never named that way in the Bible and the idea probably came from a sermon by Pope Gregory in 591. She was most likely a fairly wealthy woman with the means to travel with Jesus and the disciples and support them financially.
She is Mary Magdala. Magdala is a title, not a place. It means “tower” in Aramaic, the indigenous language of that region. Jesus names Peter the rock on which he will build his church. Mary is the tower. The Mary that pours out the expensive perfume on Jesus’ feet is the tower of faith.
When Mary anoints Jesus’ feet and wipes them with her hair, she brings many gifts. She gives from the abundance of her faith and her worldly resources and her love for Jesus. She anoints him King and she prepares him for his death. She is prophet and priest.
Diana Butler Bass describes the moment when she sat with Elizabeth Schrader and heard this story. She says,
“When Libbie told me of her research, and this story of the confession, we were sitting in a Starbucks in Alexandria, Virginia. I started to cry and I couldn’t stop. She had just told me a story that I always intuited existed. When she told me the pieces and how they fit together, and as soon as she said, “Mary the Tower,” I said, “I know. I know this to be true. This is the truest thing I have ever heard about the Gospel.”
Mary is indeed the tower of faith. That our faith is the faith of that woman who would become the first person to announce the resurrection. Mary the Witness, Mary the Tower, Mary the Great, and she has been obscured from us. She has been hidden from us and she been taken away from us for nearly 2,000 years.”
Mary the Tower, recovered for us through all the hard work of scholarship and great leaps of holy imagination, gives us the great gift of seeing the relationships of Jesus and his death and resurrection in a new light.
Diana Butler Bass asks,
What if Mary in John 11 hadn’t been split into two women? What if we’d known about Mary the Tower all along? What kind of Christianity would we have if the faith hadn’t only been based upon, “Peter, you are the Rock and upon this Rock I will build my church”? But what if we’d always known, “Mary, you are the Tower, and by this Tower we shall all stand?”
…imagine that possibility that is opening before us, never visible to our ancestors since that text was first altered hundreds and hundreds and hundreds, more than a millennia ago. What does that church look like? What does a Christianity of Mary the Tower look like? And what in the world might that towering faith have to say to this moment of crisis in which we live?
This Easter, for this moment let go of all the loss and pain of the past few days, weeks and months. Let’s stand with Mary the Tower in the garden, and let the wonderful reality of the gardener standing before us seep into our souls. Let’s carry the miracle of life born out of death into our lives and our world.
Let us pray:
Loving God, we thank you for all the gifts of all the Mary’s. Mary the mother of Jesus, Mary who chose to listen at Jesus’ feet, and Mary the Tower. May we learn from all these Mary’s to continue birthing you into the world, to listen to you with open hearts, and to honour Mary Magdala and all the other women who were Christ’s faithful apostles and first bearers of the news that he is the Messiah and he is alive. Amen.
