What Can We Learn From Mary Magdalene? — Spurgeon on the First Witness
⏱ 15 min read
You may have inherited a Mary Magdalene who is not in the Bible. The medieval church conflated her with the unnamed sinful woman of Luke 7 and with Mary of Bethany, and the conflation produced a sensational composite — penitent prostitute, weeping in long hair, more dramatic than scriptural. The actual Mary in the four Gospels is a different woman, smaller in the way a real person is smaller than the legend grown around her, and her story is the more piercing for it.
The Mary of the Gospels is named for her hometown, Magdala, a fishing village on the western shore of the Sea of Galilee. The single biographical detail Luke gives us is that seven demons had gone out of her — a phrase the Gospels record without elaboration, in the same matter-of-fact register they use for any of Jesus’ deliverances. She travelled with Him from then on, financially supported the ministry from her own means, stood at the cross when most of the disciples had fled, watched the burial, came to the tomb at first light on the third day, and was the first human being to see the risen Lord. The Gospel of John records the encounter at length: the empty tomb, the question whom seekest thou, the misidentification (supposing him to be the gardener), and the single word — her own name, spoken by Him — that broke the morning open. The Everspring Christian Healing Journal is built for the slow walking of stories like hers — the kind of story the shamed soul cannot read quickly because the read itself is part of the healing. For now — read slowly. (If you are at the beginning of your own slow return, an easy Bible for the beginner woman walks the first thirty days; what are sins of omission is the gentler companion for the woman whose shame is about the years she lost; and what to pray when you don’t know what to pray walks the prayer side of this same slow rising.)
Charles Spurgeon wrote about Mary Magdalene in Morning and Evening and across his Easter sermons with an unusual gentleness. He understood — pastorally, in a way the medieval composite did not — that the woman from whom seven demons had departed was not a woman to be sensationalised. She was a woman who had been given herself back, on a scale most of his hearers could not imagine, and who had then spent the rest of the Gospels in quiet, financially-generous, present-at-every-hardest-moment proximity to the One who had given her back to her. The first witness was not chosen at the tomb. She had been chosen long before the tomb, at the unrecorded moment of her deliverance, and the garden at first light was simply the place the choosing finally became visible.
The first episode: the seven demons, and what the deliverance meant
Luke 8:2 is the entire scriptural record of the before of Mary’s life. Mary called Magdalene, out of whom went seven demons. The Gospels do not elaborate on what the seven demons looked like in her — whether the affliction was visible, whether it had cost her her family, whether the village in Magdala had stopped seeing her as a person before Jesus arrived. The text is restrained. The deliverance is named, and the woman walks onto the next page of her own life as a person travelling with the disciples and supporting the ministry from her own means.
What Spurgeon kept returning to was the completeness of the deliverance. Not the dramatic exorcism scene; the Gospels do not provide one. The completeness — the fact that the woman the Gospels meet after Luke 8:2 is a woman whose seven-fold affliction is gone, fully gone, in a way that allows her to function as a financially independent disciple, present at every major event of the Passion, calm enough at the tomb to ask a polite question of the man she takes to be a gardener. The completeness of the deliverance is the part the medieval composite buried under the drama. Spurgeon dug it back up.
In Till He Come, writing about the moment a soul under the weight of a long affliction finds itself unexpectedly free, Spurgeon recorded a small late-evening experience that names what Mary’s after must have felt like:
“I was sitting, the other night, meditating on God’s mercy and love, when suddenly I found in my own heart a most delightful sense of perfect peace.”
— Charles Spurgeon, Till He Come
Read it twice. The line is small and it is doing a large amount of work. Suddenly I found in my own heart a most delightful sense of perfect peace. The peace was not produced. The peace was found, suddenly, in his own heart, while he was doing the slow ordinary thing of sitting and meditating. This is the texture of the kind of deliverance Mary had been given. The seven demons did not leave through her effort. They left because the One in front of her sent them out. The peace afterwards was found in her own heart, suddenly, not as the result of a successful self-improvement project but as a gift from the One who had simply spoken to whatever was in her and ended it.
The first lesson, then, on what can we learn from Mary Magdalene: the deliverance you have been trying to achieve in your own life — the one that has been resistant to therapy and resolutions and the better Bible-reading plan and the new church — is not yours to engineer. The seven that have been afflicting you do not leave because you have read the right book. They leave because the One who has authority over them speaks. Your part is the showing-up to the place He is. The deliverance is His. Spurgeon’s suddenly I found is the form the deliverance takes when it comes — not as the climax of your effort, but as a gift discovered in a late ordinary evening.
For the woman whose shame is the long shape of the last decade, this is the consolation that begins the slow return. You have been carrying what was not built to be carried by you. The carrying is not the point. The release is. And the release, when it comes, will come in a register closer to suddenly I found than to finally I produced.
The second episode: the financial generosity, and the quiet years
Most of Mary Magdalene’s life with Jesus is unrecorded. Luke 8:1-3 gives the summary — she and many others travelled with Him and the twelve, and ministered unto him of their substance. The phrase is quiet. Of their substance. She had her own money, in a society where a woman’s having her own money was not the default, and she was spending it on the ministry that had given her back to herself. The financial generosity is named in a single subordinate clause and then the Gospels move on.
But the single subordinate clause is, in its way, the whole shape of her after. The woman who had been delivered did not return to her village to resume her former life. She did not write a memoir. She did not become a teacher of others. She travelled with Him and paid for things. The presence and the patronage were her quiet vocation. The healed woman became, by all available evidence, the steady financial backbone of an itinerant ministry that did not have a regular income, and she did it for the whole of the years between her deliverance and the cross.
Spurgeon, in Morning and Evening, wrote about the kind of immediate readiness for fellowship that a delivered soul carries:
“Speak, Lord, for thy servant heareth! O that he would walk with me; I am ready to give up my whole heart and mind to him, and every other thought is hushed. I am only asking what he delights to give. I am sure that he will condescend to have fellowship with me, for he has given me his Holy Spirit to abide with me forever.”
— Charles Spurgeon, Morning and Evening
Sit with the second sentence. I am ready to give up my whole heart and mind to him. This is the posture Mary Magdalene held across the unrecorded quiet years. The readiness to give the whole self — heart, mind, money, calendar, geography — was the natural overflow of the deliverance. Not as a debt to be repaid, but as the simple recognition that the One who had taken the seven from her had also given her, in their place, the whole of her own life back to spend however He led her to spend it. The spending was her thank-you, and the thank-you was, by every account, total.
For the modern Christian woman whose deliverance has happened in some quieter form — not seven demons exorcised in a single afternoon, but the years of slow recovery from whatever was in you — the second lesson on what can we learn from Mary Magdalene is about the shape of the after. The shape is not necessarily public. The shape is not necessarily ministerial in the platform sense. The shape may be the steady financial generosity nobody photographs, the quiet presence at every hard moment of the people God has put in your path, the willingness to be present and to pay for things over a decade in which nobody writes your name down. Mary’s after was the unrecorded years of presence and patronage. Yours may be too. The Gospels do not record the unrecorded years because they were not the point. The point was the presence inside them.
A pause for the body
The teaching has been long enough that the body has begun to brace again. Pause, here, in the middle of the essay.
Sit somewhere quiet. Place both feet flat against the floor. Let the shoulders drop by a small amount — not by trying to relax, but by stopping the small ongoing effort to hold them up. Let the jaw unclench. Let the chest, which has been tight, soften by a small amount. Take one slow inhale. On the exhale, let the breath go all the way out — slower than the inhale, until the lungs are empty enough that the next inhale arrives on its own. Repeat once more. Then continue reading.
The shame-body is the tight-body. The chest pulled in. The shoulders rounded forward, as if to cover. The jaw clenched. The breathing shallow. The somatic of shame is the somatic of making oneself smaller and harder so that less of one can be seen. The slow exhale and the small lowering of the shoulders is the body’s first small refusal of the shame posture. The body learning that it is allowed to take up the space it actually takes up. The body learning that the seven that were in it are no longer the things it has to make itself small around.
The Everspring Christian Healing Journal carries this kind of slow somatic return into a 140-day form. One short passage. Room for one honest sentence. Space to write the small noticing of the chest softening, the jaw unclenching, the shame-body learning the new shape. The journal is not the healing. He is. The journal is the daily room in which the healing can be tended.
The third episode: the garden, and the name
The third day. First light. Mary, who has been at the cross and watched the burial, returns to the tomb in the half-dark to finish the anointing that the Sabbath had interrupted. The stone is rolled away. She runs to tell Peter and John. They run to the tomb, find it empty, look in, and leave. Mary stays. The text gives the quiet detail without comment: but Mary stood without at the sepulchre weeping.
Then the encounter. Two angels in the tomb ask her why she weeps. She answers. She turns around. She sees Jesus standing there and does not recognise Him. She takes Him for the gardener. He asks her — the same question the angels asked — Why weepest thou? whom seekest thou? She, still misidentifying Him, asks if He has taken the body away and offers to retrieve it herself. And then the single word that ends the misrecognition: Jesus saith unto her, Mary.
The single word is the whole hinge of the morning. Not a teaching. Not a doctrine. Not an instruction. The name of the woman, spoken by the One she had thought was the gardener. Mary. And she answers, in Aramaic, Rabboni — my Master — and the encounter is complete. The first witness to the resurrection is the woman who recognised Him at the sound of her own name being said the way He said it.
Spurgeon, in Morning and Evening, wrote about the kind of grace that arrives as a person and is, simultaneously, a giving of one’s own life back to oneself:
“He is so prolific of grace, that like the sun which shines as it rolls onward in its orbit, his path is radiant with lovingkindness. He is a swift arrow of love, which not only reaches its ordained target, but perfumes the air through which it flies. Virtue is evermore going out of Jesus, as sweet odours exhale from flowers; and it always will be emanating from him, as water from a sparkling fountain. What delightful encouragement this truth affords us! If our Lord is so ready to heal the sick and bless the needy, then, my soul, be not thou slow to put thyself in his way, that he may smile on thee.”
— Charles Spurgeon, Morning and Evening
Read it twice. A swift arrow of love, which not only reaches its ordained target, but perfumes the air through which it flies. The arrow had been in flight toward Mary Magdalene since long before the garden. The seven had been the first landing. The years of travelling and ministering of her substance had been the air through which the arrow had continued to perfume itself. The garden was the second landing — the calling of her name at first light, by the One she had thought was dead. The arrow had never stopped. The fragrance had never left the air around her life. The garden was the second time she heard the sound of it.
The line worth keeping near the page is the closing imperative. Be not thou slow to put thyself in his way, that he may smile on thee. Mary’s whole story is the woman who was not slow to put herself in His way. She was at the cross. She was at the burial. She was at the tomb at first light. She stayed when the others left. She did not engineer the resurrection encounter — she could not have — but she had positioned herself, by ordinary persistent presence, in the place where it could find her. The first witness was not chosen for theological qualifications. She was chosen because she was there, at the first available hour, in the right garden, having loved Him enough to come back when there was no further service she could perform.
For you, this is the third lesson. The calling of your name — the moment of recognition that turns the gardener back into the Lord — does not come on a schedule you can engineer. It comes when it comes. Your part is the slow, ordinary, financially-generous, present-at-the-hard-things life of not being slow to put yourself in His way. The Mary Magdalene who heard her name in the garden was the woman who had stood at the cross when most of the others had gone home. The position at the tomb at first light was earned by the position at the cross at dusk. The recognition was the gift. The positioning was the slow life.
What the first witness teaches across a year
The famous line of Mary’s morning — they have taken away my Lord, and I know not where they have laid him — is the sentence of the still-grieving woman who has not yet heard her name. The line is honest. She is not pretending the resurrection has already happened to her interior life. She is, at the moment of speaking, a woman with a dead Lord and a missing body, asking the gardener if he can help her locate the corpse. The grief is exact. The recognition has not yet come.
This is the line for the long stretch of your own slow return. You may be in the they have taken away my Lord hour. The deliverance happened — the seven left at some quieter moment in the years behind you — and yet the second recognition, the calling of your own name by the One you had thought was lost, has not yet arrived on a particular morning you can name. You are at the tomb. You are weeping. You have not yet heard the single word that will turn the gardener back into the Lord.
What we can actually learn from Mary Magdalene, for the lives most of us are living, is that the staying is the practice. The disciples ran away. Mary stayed at the cross, stayed at the burial, returned to the tomb. The first witness was the woman who, in the absence of any visible reason to remain, remained. The calling of her name in the garden was not a reward for her remaining. It was the natural overflow of a relationship that had been so completely a giving-back-of-her-life that there was nowhere else for her to be at first light except in the garden where He had last been seen.
That is the slow secret of what can we learn from Mary Magdalene. The first witness is the woman who has been spending herself on Him for so long that the morning of the recognition finds her exactly where the recognition needs her to be. The garden does not require strategic positioning. It requires the kind of life that ends up in the right garden automatically, because everything in the life has been pointed toward Him for years. (For the sibling slow reads in this series, what can we learn from Mary mother of Jesus walks Tileston on the Magnificat, and what can we learn from Hannah’s prayer walks Spurgeon on the praying woman, both at the same contemplative pace.)
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A daily home for the practice
The slow practice we just walked has its 140-day form in Christian Healing Journal. Each evening, a short passage and room for the honest sentence — the small daily anchor for the woman whose seven have already left and who is, slowly, learning to be the woman the gardener calls by her own name.
The Everspring Christian Healing Journal carries Spurgeon’s slow vocabulary — the suddenly-found peace, the arrow that perfumes the air, the small daily putting-of-oneself-in-His-way — into a daily companion built for the woman whose own return is still in the half-dark, and who is ready, slowly, to stay until the name is spoken.
