July 20, 2025: All Things Have Become New

Lisa Wiens Heinsohn

 

All Things Have Become New

Homily by Lisa Wiens Heinsohn given for the people of St. John’s Episcopal Church

The Feast of Mary Magdalene, July 20, 2025

John 20:11-18; 2. Corinthians 5:14-18

 

Today is the feast day of Mary Magdalene, one of the great saints of Christian tradition. She is one of a handful of saints that we particularly honor at St. John’s, alongside our patron saint John the Baptist, St. Francis who loved and deeply honored our Earth and all her creatures; the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, pastor and martyr; and Enmegahbowh, the great Ojibwe priest from Minnesota who saw no conflict between his traditional beliefs and Jesus’ Way of Love. Of all the hundreds of saints we could elevate, why do we choose Mary Magdalene?

 

All four gospels agree that Mary Magdalene was the first to encounter the risen Christ. Unlike the twelve disciples who fled when Jesus was crucified, three of the four gospels specifically name Mary Magdalene as being present at Jesus’ crucifixion. Otherwise the gospels say little about her. We know from Luke’s gospel that Jesus had cast seven demons from her. Tradition says that she was a prostitute, but the Bible never says that about her. What we know is that the risen Christ encounters her in the garden, which is meant to evoke the garden of Eden, the primal power of creation itself, in the beautiful and poignant scene we just heard; and he sends her to the other disciples to tell them what we say at Easter, Christ is risen, alleluia. So she is rightfully called the Apostle to the Apostles, although why she never gets called the Apostle Mary Magdalene is a question that ought to be considered.

 

I have mentioned to you before that I’m leading a group studying Richard Rohr’s book The Universal Christ: How A Forgotten Reality Can Change Everything we See, Hope for, and Believe. In that book Rohr makes the beautiful point that we have two great witnesses to the resurrection of Jesus: Mary Magdalene and Paul. Mary Magdalene witnesses to the resurrection of Jesus because of her very close relationship with him in his physical form; Paul never meets the physical Jesus but after he has been persecuting, arresting and killing disciples of Jesus, he does have a vision of the Jesus he has been oppressing and is struck blind by it. If the two greatest witnesses to Jesus were someone who had been demon possessed and a great persecutor and murderer, then there is hope for anyone. Anyone who is in Christ is a new creation.

 

The Apostle Paul wrote most of the New Testament, and surely gets a great deal more attention in Christian tradition than Mary Magdalene does. But recent scholarship has been insisting that she had a crucial role as a disciple of Jesus that has gradually been lost to the tradition but that matters very much to us today because it expands how we understand who and what Christ is, and who and what we are. Cynthia Bourgeault is an Episcopal priest whose wrote a book called The Wisdom Jesus, that I highly recommend.

 In this book she shares how in the language of Aramaic that Jesus and his disciples spoke, there was no word for salvation; what Jesus offered was to help people “become alive”. Two titles were used to describe Jesus in Aramaic: mahyana, “Life-Giver”; and ihidaya, “the Single One” or the “Unified One”.[1] In other words, the one who had transcended dualistic thinking; in today’s world perhaps we would say the Enlightened One. According to Cynthia Bourgeault, Jesus’ disciples saw him as a “master of consciousness offering a path through which they, too, could become ihidaya, enlightened ones… Christianity focuses on this path,”[2] or how one does this. Mary Magdalene, according to some of the earliest Christian texts that were discovered within the last century, truly understood this and embraced it and practiced it. The primary work of a follower of Jesus’ Way of Love is not to believe doctrines about Jesus but to put on the mind of Christ, and Mary Magdalene did that, according to the Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of Mary Magdalene and some of the earliest Christian writings that were discovered near the Egyptian town of Nag Hammadi in 1945.

 

Why does this matter? It matters because we are all meant to become like Christ. We can follow him as a wisdom teacher and learn to embody love as he did. If anyone is “in Christ,” as the reading from Second Corinthians for today says, “there is a new creation – everything old has passed away – see, all things have become new.” Mary Magdalene points us in this direction. Although Christianity has been problematic at times and is not universally embraced or loved, almost no one has any problem with the original Jesus. How could they? And if you and I were to really dare to embrace the idea that we can have what he had, we can see and experience the world as he did; if we were to truly believe that we could love as he loved—what in our world might become possible that today does not seem possible?

 

It is all too easy to look at the story of Jesus and say, he did miraculous healings – I can’t do that. He was crucified and rose from the dead – scientific thinkers may struggle with that. So at best he taught an ethical life in solidarity with the poor? That’s good and important. But we are meant to have far more than that. We are meant to be and embody a new creation. This is about transcending the life of the egoic mind and entering the wisdom of the heart. It is about encountering the risen Christ as Mary Magdalene did in the garden. It is about experiencing that wherever we are full of grief and despair, we encounter the one who calls us by name, embraces us and gives hope where there was no hope. If Mary Magdalene could do it, anyone could do it. It all starts with what we believe is possible.

 

If Mary Magdalene invites us into a contemplative experience of the risen Christ, I’d like to honor her feast day by doing a little contemplative practice ourselves right here in the service, right now.  So I’m going to speak several questions, with silent space between them, and invite you to be as honest and open-hearted in your contemplation as possible.

Please get in touch with what you feel the most angst about, in your own life and in the life of the world.

 

Now imagine that it really is possible for you to “put on the mind of Christ”; to enter the vast love and compassion of the heart where there is both acceptance and transformation.

 

Now ask God, as you understand God, to help you see the situation as Christ sees it, with utter honesty and love.

 

Finally: what one small thing might the Spirit of God be inviting you to do to practice this understanding in your life?

 

There is a way forward. There is a path we can follow. There is a wisdom understanding of Jesus that is absolutely relevant and helpful and desperately needed in today’s crazy world. If we are in Christ—if we put on the mind of Christ—all things can become new. May it be so. Amen.

[1] Cynthia Bourgeault, The Wisdom Jesus (Shambala Press, 2008) at 20-21.

[2] Ibid.

10am Service