Valley View Chapel April 8, 2012 Heroes and Villains, Part 5 Mary Magdalene John 20:1-2, Introduction

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1 1 Valley View Chapel April 8, 2012 Heroes and Villains, Part 5 Mary Magdalene John 20:1-2, Introduction Ever seen a movie with a lousy ending? What s my criterion for a lousy movie? The bad guys win. That s why I didn t like The Empire Strikes Back. It ended with Han Solo stuck in the carbon freezing chamber in Jabba the Hut s lair. Would Raiders of the Lost Ark have been a great movie if the Nazis had been able to keep the Ark of the Covenant? Would I have watched Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade at least a dozen times if the evil Walter Donovan had drunk from the real Holy Grail? Would Jaws be the number one movie on my list of all-time great movies if the shark killed Chief Brody instead of the other way around? To quote the Hollywood hasbeen Macaulay Culkin: I don t think so! What if the story of Jesus ended with his last words: It is finished! What if his life was finished forever? What if his mission was finished forever? What if Pontius Pilate and all the bad guys won? After all, many so-called Christ figures were crucified by the Romans in the first century and they ve never been heard from since. So what makes the story of Jesus different? His story has a happy ending. He rose from the dead! That s what makes Christianity unique among the world s spiritual systems. The God that Christians worship is alive! Background to Mary Magdalene And we owe the Easter story to a woman named Mary from the Galilean fishing village of Magdala near Capernaum. If she had kept the news of Jesus resurrection to herself, we wouldn t be having an Easter service today. But who was she? According to Dan Brown, the author of The Davinci Code, Mary Magdalene was the wife of Jesus and the mother of his child. And because she bore their child, particularly a daughter by the name of Sarah, she is, in fact, the Holy Grail. (By the way, Dan Brown wants us to believe that Mary herself is sitting at Jesus right hand in Leonardo s famous painting!) After the crucifixion, she fled with their child to the south of France where they established the Merovingian line of European royalty, which then became the basis of a secret society to preserve that bloodline and to protect the secret until it was time to make it known to the wider world.

2 2 And what was Dan Brown s source for all this inside information? A 1982 book The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail that is the laughingstock of every credible historian on the planet. To find out the true story of Mary Magdalene we have to turn to the one book that has been tested, tried and found accurate: the Bible. We are introduced to Mary Magdalene in Luke 8:1-3. Soon afterward Jesus began a tour of the nearby towns and villages, preaching and announcing the Good News about the Kingdom of God. He took his twelve disciples with him, along with some women he had healed and from whom he had cast out evil spirits. Among them were Mary Magdalene, from whom he had cast out seven demons; Joanna, the wife of Chuza, Herod's business manager; Susanna; and many others who were contributing their own resources to support Jesus and his disciples. (NLT) Mary was apparently a woman of some means and showed her gratitude for her healing by becoming a regular financial supporter of Jesus ministry. We don t meet her again until Good Friday. John 19:25 tells us that she was one of the women who stood near the cross with Jesus mother while he was dying. Matthew 27:61 states that Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of James the Less followed Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus to the burial site so that they could see where Jesus was laid to rest. All four gospels agree that Mary Magdalene was among the first to visit the Jesus grave in the wee hours of Easter morning. According to the Gospel of John, Mary Magdalene was the first person to see the risen Christ and the first person to tell the apostles that he had risen from the dead. A Question of Credibility It doesn t seem strange to us that a woman should be the first witness to Jesus resurrection but it would have made no sense to those who lived in first century Israel. Women at that time were so low in status that they were not regarded as credible witnesses. In fact, they weren't even allowed to give testimony in court. Eliezer ben Hurcanus, one of the most prominent rabbis of his time, wrote in the first century: "Rather should the words of the Torah be burned than entrusted to a woman. How extraordinary then that John testified that the first eyewitnesses to the empty tomb were women. In fact all four Gospels record that women were the first witnesses.

3 3 That women were the first eyewitnesses to Christ s resurrection prompted the second century Greek philosopher Celsus to dismiss its factuality out of hand. He labeled reports of Jesus resurrection as the hallucinations of hysterical women. Yet Tim Keller in his book The King s Cross says that the testimony of women does just the opposite. It serves to verify the historicity of the resurrection: If the Christians were making up these stories to get their movement off the ground, they would never have written women into the story as the first eyewitnesses to Jesus empty tomb. The only possible reason for the presence of women in these accounts is that they really were present and reported what they saw. Christian philosopher and theologian William Lane Craig supported Keller s argument: Any later legendary account would have certainly portrayed male disciples as discovering the tomb - Peter or John, for example. The fact that women are the first witnesses to the empty tomb is most plausibly explained by the reality that - like it or not - they were the discoverers of the empty tomb! This shows that the Gospel writers faithfully recorded what happened, even if it was embarrassing. So a first-century woman, Mary Magdalene, was the first person to see the resurrected Christ. Does that have any relevance at all for us who live two-thousand years later on the other side of the world? It most certainly does because it means that: The resurrection is good news for average people If Jesus resurrection was only relevant for important people, rich people, highly intelligent people, or super-religious people, then most of us wouldn t qualify. But the fact that Jesus showed himself first to Mary Magdalene means that the good news of Easter is for everybody! Mary had zero credentials to be favored by God. Women's status and freedoms were severely limited by Jewish law and custom in ancient Israel, as they were in essentially all other cultures at the time. Generally speaking: Most women were restricted to roles of little or no authority. They were largely confined to their father's or husband's home. They were considered to be inferior to men and under the authority of men -- either their father before marriage, or their husband afterwards. As if her gender wasn t a big enough hindrance to her credibility, Mary Magdalene had another strike against her. She carried with her a questionable past since she had once been possessed by seven demons. Though she was apparently a woman of some financial means, her mental health issues had no doubt left a scar on her reputation. The first person to hear about Jesus resurrection was a person disrespected by society and excluded from the religious life of Israel.

4 4 Rewind thirty-three years earlier to the little town of Bethlehem where a baby lay in a manger because there was no room in the inn. Who were the first to hear the good news, the angelic announcement that: Today in the town of David a Savior has been born to you; he is Christ the Lord. Luke 2:11 (NIV) The first to hear of the birth of Christ were humble, despised and disrespected shepherds. Like women, shepherds were forbidden from testifying in court. Because of their regular contact with dead animals, they were forbidden to worship in the Temple. Yet they were highly favored by God. Not the priests, the rabbis, the scribes, the intellectuals. Shepherds were the first to hear, the first to see and the first to tell the world that God had come into the world in human flesh! The shepherds told everybody in sight what they had witnessed: The shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all the things they had heard and seen, which were just as they had been told. Luke 2:20 (NIV) God chose the unlikeliest people to be the first to tell the good news of Jesus birth and resurrection! Mary the Witness John 20:18 tells us: Mary Magdalene went to the disciples with the news: I have seen the Lord! And she told them that he had said these things to her. Like the shepherds, Mary was not a preacher. She was not a Bible student. She had no formal theological education. In fact, she had never been to Sunday school. She simply communicated what she had personally experienced. And there was something compelling about it, something persuasive, something that was hard to resist. There is something about a sincere, heartfelt personal testimony that is awfully hard to argue with. C.H. Dodd was a distinguished professor of New Testament at Jesus College, Cambridge and widely regarded as one of the most influential theologians of the twentieth century. Of Mary s simple words I have seen the Lord, he wrote: Her witness has something indefinably first-hand about it.there is nothing quite like it in the gospels. Is there anything quite like it in all ancient literature? If Mary had waited until she could answer all the disciples questions, if she had waited until she could explain the resurrection of Jesus logically, she would have never said a word. She told just what she knew from personal experience. I don t know much about the legal system. My only firsthand experience with it is a few speeding and parking tickets. But I know that there are two kinds of testimony that are admissible as evidence. There is expert testimony where a psychiatrist, physician or forensics specialist tries to shed light on what happened. And there is eyewitness testimony where a person who was actually there gives her or his version about what

5 5 happened. My guess is that all things being equal in the eyes of a jury, the credible and consistent eyewitness testimony of an uneducated person on the bottom rung of the socioeconomic ladder carries a lot more weight than that of an expert witness with a couple of PhD s. Those of us who have made a decision to believe in the resurrection of Jesus have done it for largely the same reason as Professor Dodd of Cambridge: Her witness has something indefinably first-hand about it.there is nothing quite like it in the gospels. If your life has been touched by the risen Christ, if he has spoken your name as he did Mary s name, then don t wait. Tell somebody today: I have seen the Lord! If you have personally encountered Christ, a few people just might believe you and want to meet him too! The abbot of a monastery called a novice into his office and instructed him to give the homily at the next morning s chapel. The novice was struck with fear. The next morning chapel came. He stood in the pulpit. The brothers were all there. His hands were trembling. His knees were knocking. His voice was quivering. There was a long pause before he first spoke, and then he asked a question. Do you know why I am here? They had no idea so all of their heads went back and forth in unison as if choreographed. He said, Neither do I. Let s have the benediction. The next day was almost an exact repeat of the day before. All the brothers sat there before him. His hands shook. His knees knocked. His voice trembled. There was a long pause. Do you know what I m going to say? he asked. After the previous day s experience, they had a pretty good idea. So all their heads nodded yes. Then there s no need for me to tell you. Let s stand for the benediction. The abbot was angry beyond description. He brought the young man into his office and said, If you do that again, you re going to be in solitary confinement, eat bread and drink water for thirty days, and receive any other punishment I can think of. Tomorrow morning, hive the homily. And do it right. The third day chapel attendance hit an all-time high. Everyone was there to see what he would say, and it was almost an exact repeat. He stood trembling, voice quivering, and after a long silence asked, Do you know what I m going to say? After three days of this, half of them had a pretty good idea and they nodded their heads yes. The other half noticed the switch from day to day, and they weren t sure what to expect, and so they shook their heads no.

6 6 The novice observed this and said, Let those who know tell those who don t. Let s stand for the benediction. Let those of us who know tell those who don t: Christ is risen! I have seen the Lord! Conclusion Socrates was perhaps the greatest of all the Greek philosophers. In 399 B.C., he was convicted of corrupting the youth of Athens and sentenced to death. His real crime was that he opposed the politics of the leaders of Athens. He was told to drink a cup of liquid laced with poisoned hemlock. Though Socrates could have raised enough money among his friends to buy himself out of the death sentence, he submitted to the law of the land and drank the poison. Almost 2,450 years later, a Lutheran pastor named Dietrich Bonhoeffer awaited death in a Nazi concentration camp for his role in trying to overthrow Hitler. His last volume was simply titled Letters and Papers from Prison. What he wrote was compelling: Socrates mastered the art of dying; Christ overcame death. There is a real difference between the two things; the one is within the scope of human possibilities, the other means resurrection. It is not from the art of dying, but from the resurrection of Christ that a new and purifying wind can blow through our present world. If a few people really believed that and acted on it in their daily lives, a great deal would be changed. To live in the light of the Resurrection that is what Easter means. So what does it mean to live in light of the resurrection? It means three things: It means to believe that he died on the cross for my sins and rose from the dead. It means to receive his gift of forgiveness and eternal life. It means to tell someone else the good news that Jesus lives and that death has been defeated. To live in light of the resurrection that is what Easter means.

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