She Who Hangs Out in Cemeteries

The following essay appears in Issue 27 of The Mockingbird print magazine.

The Graveyard Shift

One summer in college, I worked at a cemetery. My reasons for taking the job were born out of necessity and convenience. I was looking for something short-term before starting a study abroad program, and it was just down the street from my father’s church. The actual work was straightforward and repetitive: counting plots and headstones and digitizing records (no, I did not dig graves). That was the summer I became “she who hangs out a lot in cemeteries.”¹

Illustrations by Aubrey Swanson Dockery.

The living and the dead mingle in surprising ways when you work at a cemetery. Surrounded by acres of plots, we served as a temporary way station for cremated remains until interment. It was not unusual to stumble upon urns in awkward spaces, including on the shelf near my desk. Newspaper obituaries floated around the office (though not in abnormal ways). My tolerance for the space was no doubt linked to growing up in a pastors’ household. If Siri could have eavesdropped on our family’s conversations back then, she might have heard this exchange: “How was your funeral?” (i.e., the funeral you officiated). “It went great!”

And so I was ready when employee water-cooler talk slipped seamlessly into discussions of faith, theology, and God. Those questions always made a beeline for me as I learned that theology fills the spaces of the cemetery. Memento mori for miles.

In the Gospels, she-who-hangs-out-a-lot-in-cemeteries was Mary Magdalene. After participating in his ministry and witnessing Jesus die on the cross, she saw his body laid in the tomb and the tomb sealed (Mt 27:60; Mk 15:47). On resurrection morning, she hurried to the cemetery at first dawn just as soon as the Jewish sabbath released her.

The risk of continuing to associate with Jesus after capital punishment was real. Yet every Gospel names her presence there. For centuries the church has struggled to understand this turn of events. Why was Mary Magdalene, of all possible people, the first to encounter the resurrected Jesus?

John Salt, Arrested Vehicle Graveyard, 1970. Oil on canvas. 53 × 77 in. Courtesy of John Salt and Louis K. Meisel Gallery.

From Dusk to Dawn

The church has tried for centuries to make sense of Mary Magdalene’s presence and witness in Jesus’ ministry from Galilee to resurrection morning. In the second century, Irenaeus of Lyons started things off strong. In Against Heresies (2nd c.), he recognized that Mary, as recounted in John 20, is “the first to see and to worship” Christ. Very soon, however, the interpretive confusion began.

Harmonization of the Gospels collapsed three accounts of a woman anointing Jesus (Mt 26:6–13; Mk 14:1–9; Lk 7:36–50) into John’s fourth account where Mary of Bethany is named (Jn 12:1–11). Because the anointing woman of Luke 7 is described as a “sinner,” she came to be associated with prostitution; this association was subsequently absorbed and formalized in the Western reading of Mary Magdalene along with the erasure of Mary of Bethany. The identity as “penitent prostitute” persisted from the sixth century in almost unbreakable succession all the way to Hollywood. Then came the Da Vinci Code mania. By that time, the church had toyed with Mary Magdalene’s remembrance for so long that we were left speechless in the face of this wildly popular and speculative international bestseller and multi-movie blockbuster series.

In the wake of that cultural moment, a genre was born “revealing” Mary Magdalene in a conspiratorial light outside the biblical witness. It hasn’t helped that interpreters of Scripture have been prone to outsized or misplaced attention to Mary Magdalene’s hair and tears, as well as misguided readings of her touch, which have convoluted rather than clarified. The backstory of prostitution has consistently overshadowed a legacy that nonetheless also includes “apostle.”

During the Reformation, it was often concluded that Jesus’ revelation to Mary Magdalene (and other women, depending on the account) was due to the faith-lessness of the twelve disciples rather than the faith-fulness of her discipleship. Her honor was their shame.

But modern interpreters have found the women at the tomb to be helpful in validating the claim of Christ’s resurrection. As N. T. Wright has shown, Mary Magdalene and the women are apologetic assets in light of the recognition that the Gospel writers put Christianity at a disadvantage by recording the women’s witness at all.

We might also remember that Luke 8 introduces Mary Magdalene as the first among “some women”; the highlighting of her name indicates that she was not just any woman. Perhaps the reason Mary Magdalene is named in the cemetery of every Gospel account is because there is something particular about her witness that cannot be overlooked.

The Exorcist

The first verses of Luke 8 offer critical insight into Mary called the Magdalene. Her name alone indicates significance: being named at all, being associated with a place and/or nickname rather than a male relative, and being named first among the women healed of evil spirits and illness. In Luke 8, we learn that she was delivered from seven demons (the text says nothing about prostitution) and then joins Jesus alongside the Twelve from Galilee to Jerusalem. We learn that she supports Jesus’ ministry financially as patroness and that he is her teacher (later she calls him “teacher!”) and she his student, which is the meaning of “disciple.” After Jesus delivered her from the oppression of seven demons, we are told she gave of her resources, time, and presence. But none of that would have happened if Jesus were not an exorcist.

This is a hard topic to discuss so it may help to know that I am one who stands in the Presbyterian tradition, which is a branch of the church not known for its excessive appeal to spiritual warfare (Eph 6:12). Yes, we like to tell the stories of Jesus disrupting funerals (Lk 7:11–17), seeing the grief of a widow over her dead son and declaring, “Don’t cry” before bringing him back to life. Absolutely we celebrate when Jesus wept with Mary of Bethany and then commanded, “Lazarus! Come out!” The expulsion of demons, however? Well, that is a bit more fraught.

Some may be surprised to learn that it was understood in Jesus’ own time, and even among biblical scholars today, that Jesus was a successful exorcist. After the first century, early Christian writings continued to point to exorcisms performed in Jesus’ name. In the third century, during the era of Hippolytus (c.215), exorcism became closely tied with baptism.

During the Reformation, the intersection between baptism and exorcism was in some cases lost and in other cases dramatically minimized even as demonology was quite popular at the time. In the coming years, the Enlightenment’s Marcionite tendency towards Scripture (that is, cutting up the Bible) dealt a pronounced blow to understanding Christ as exorcist, and it became preferable to elevate his moral teaching. Other contributing factors would follow with modernity, including demythologizing trends and emerging distinctions between demon possession and mental health matters.

While this may explain why Western Christians rarely talk about Jesus as exorcist, to ignore his exorcisms detaches Christ’s claim to kingship from the work of his ministry. As Jesus declares, “If it is by the finger of God that I cast out the demons, then the kingdom of God has come to you” (Lk 11:20). The two things are inextricably linked according to scripture, even if that makes us uncomfortable.

Deliverance

When the Gospels invite us to remember that Mary Magdalene was demon oppressed, they also draw attention to the extent of the severity. Seven in number, to be exact (Lk 8:2). Lest we wonder how bad this is, Jesus himself explains: after a failed exorcism one after the other takes over, each more replete with evil than the last (Mt 12:45).

But as much as we would like to know, scripture does not share with us the details of her suffering or invite us to remember her that way. By not dwelling on her suffering, the Gospels draw us to see only her complete and victorious deliverance by Christ’s hand. It is the healed part of her journey that is emphasized. Even so, we might find the untold parts of her story through the words of Jesus in that same chapter (Mt 12:11). There Jesus recounts how a sheep had fallen into a pit on the sabbath. According to this scenario, it should have been a tragic day for that little life. Even the law-abider could not save the sheep under such circumstances. And yet the point of the story is to show how the mercy and compassion of God overcomes the letter of the law. By a saving hand, both the sheep and the spirit of the law are retrieved and made whole.

And so though we are not privy to it, Mary Magdalene had a divine appointment with Jesus. At a point in her life when she was lost to grave forces that not even the God-fearing could overcome, Christ laid hold of her and lifted her out of a pit of darkness. In an instant, she was freed not by her own power and might, not by her own effort and works, but by the power and the work of God to save.

In fact, when the reformers pointed to Mary Magdalene’s significance in scripture, they overwhelmingly saw her through the lens of the doctrine of justification and faith in Christ alone. Second-generation reformer John Calvin, who did not regard her as a prostitute, interpreted her story in light of 1 Peter 5:9: demonic activity strikes at every believer by way of ambush and invasion (basically, her demons are not her fault!). Only faith in Christ alone protects souls from Satan’s rule, and this is what Mary Magdalene’s true backstory came to signify for Calvin: the power of faith in Christ to overcome demonic forces. I would add that if the severity of her state under demonic oppression meant a loss of control or even awareness of her condition — as in the case of some in the Gospel stories — then all the more can we see the strength, power, and goodness of Jesus Christ reflected in her full deliverance and for this ultimate purpose: to be the first proclaimer of the good news of Christ’s resurrection.

Though Martin Luther was uncertain about Mary Magdalene’s backstory, we might nonetheless draw a connection to his teachings in the Smalcald Articles. There he emphasized true repentance by way of receiving Law and Gospel together. For him, the “thunderbolt of God” (no doubt his own experience of the thunderstorm is the subtext here) or “hammer” of God is powerful enough to break apart, in a sense, the rock-tomb of death that imprisons our lives and blocks our freedom for life.

Whether pit or tomb, we are invited to recognize that it was by Christ’s power alone that Mary Magdalene was freed of demonic oppression for ministry with him; and with that freedom, she walked with him all the way to the cross and to the tomb that could not contain him.

Morning of the Living Dead

And so it was that at the dawning of that morning, Mary Magdalene rushed to the cemetery knowing already the power of Jesus in her life to deliver from evil. She knew intimately what it was like to be brought out of a tomb that could not be breached. She knew the impossibility of overcoming the forces that lead to death. She had experienced it in her innermost being before she encountered the One whose teaching pierces hearts and divides soul, spirit, marrow, and joints (Heb 4:12).

To the cemetery, though overcome with grief, she carried the impact of her journey with Jesus, which was then fully ignited into recognition at the sound of her teacher’s voice calling, “Mary!” He could have revealed himself to Peter or John, but as she lingered there, she was given the honor of turning from an empty tomb to the risen Lord, whose funeral garb had been left behind. How fitting that she was there to greet him as one who knew to her core what it meant to endure living hell. How fitting that she would receive his message after he had just descended victoriously over death itself (Mt 28; Jn 20).

The risen Christ called Mary Magdalene by name, and she clung to him until he commissioned her to go and tell, not only what she had seen — “I have seen the Lord!” — but also the message that he gave her to share: “I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God” (Jn 20:17). We receive her testimony not because we do not expect a woman to offer it, but because Scripture reveals that Mary called Magdalene saw, heard, and touched Jesus (1 Jn 1:1) and then was sent by him to share the Good News. She is the apostle of the resurrection.

How marvelous to think that the certain one of “some women” who was once oppressed by demons was chosen by God to serve in this particular way. Perhaps, in the end, she was especially qualified. She who hangs out in cemeteries wants us to know: Christ is risen, and he is the gravedigger coming for our graves.

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