LIVES OF THE SAINTS

I have seen the Lord!

John 20:18

St. Mary Magdalene

Mary came from Magdala, a fishing town on the western shore of the Sea of Galilee, and the Gospel of Luke gives us the one hard fact of her early life: that Christ cast seven demons out of her. Whatever that torment had been, it ended when she met Him, and from that healing her life ran in a single direction. She became one of the women who followed Jesus through Galilee and Judea and supported His ministry out of their own means, and unlike so many, she did not turn back when following Him grew dangerous.

That is the measure of her. When Christ was arrested and condemned and the men who had walked with Him scattered in fear, the women stayed, and the Gospels name Mary Magdalene first among them. She stood near enough the Cross to watch Him die. She saw where Joseph and Nicodemus laid the body. And before the sun was up on the first day of the week she went to the tomb with spices to finish the burial, the last service love can do for the dead, which is how she and the women with her came to be called the Myrrhbearers.

What she found there undid the world. The stone was rolled away and the tomb was empty, and in the garden, weeping, she mistook the risen Christ for the gardener until He spoke her name. Then He gave her the first errand of the new creation: go to My brothers and tell them. She ran to the apostles with the sentence the whole Church still lives on, I have seen the Lord. For this the Orthodox Church, which does not give its titles lightly, calls a woman Equal-to-the-Apostles. An apostle is one who is sent; she was sent first, the apostle to the apostles.

A beloved tradition follows her witness all the way to Rome, where, standing before the emperor Tiberius, she is said to have held out an egg and declared, Christ is risen, and the egg turned red in her hand; it is why we dye eggs at Pascha, and why her icon so often shows her holding a single crimson one. From Rome she is said to have gone to Ephesus, where she reposed in peace near the Apostle John. She is the saint of those whom Christ has brought up out of some darkness, whose gratitude does not flinch at a tomb, and whose first instinct, having seen the Lord, is to go and tell.