Heard an amazing sermon by
Diana Butler Bass, delivered at the end of a gathering called Wild Goose, and burst into tears. It's called "
All the Marys," and shares some tradition-redefining new research on the gospel passages where multiple Marys, and two Marthas, appear.
The research was done by an American MA student named Elizabeth Schrader, inspired by a dream and taking advantage of the latest digitization of ancient manuscripts, who found the earliest extant text of John (Papyrus 66) shows an editor's fudging. A simple emendation can turn a Marya into a Marta, and this seems to have happened here, turning one character into two, perhaps in order to align this household in Bethany with the one mentioning sisters Mary and Martha in Luke 10. One doesn't know what inspired the editorial intervention, but what if Lazarus had only one sister - Mary - and it was she, not an otherwise unremarked and quickly forgotten other Martha, who responded to the raising of her brother from the dead with one of only two christological confessions in scripture (the other being Peter's)? It would make such sense if it was Mary (as Tertullian thought), and she was the very Mary to whom the risen Christ would appear in the garden. But wasn't that Mary Magdalene, you know, the one from Magdala? But there was no town named Magdala at the time, and the word magdala just means "tower" in Aramaic anyway. Might it not be that Jesus, who gave nicknames to his disciples, also gave one to her - "Mary the Tower"?
And so now you get the full picture. In the Synoptics, Jesus and Peter have a discussion. In that discussion, Peter utters the Christological confession. As a result of the Christological confession, Jesus says, "You are Peter the Rock." In the gospel of John, Mary and Jesus have a conversation, and Mary utters the Christological confession. And she comes to be known as Mary the Tower. Between these two confessions, are we looking at an argument in the early church? Peter the Rock or Mary the Tower?
But the John account was changed. The John story has been hidden from our view. All those years ago, Mary uttered those words, "Yes, Lord, I believe you are the Messiah, the son of God, the one who is coming into the world."
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. ...
What if the other story of Mary hadn't been hidden? 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?”
It's almost unbearably exciting. Feminist theology vindicated!
