By Reverend Laurie DeMott

Jerome's dubious conjectures aside, we actually know very little about Mary Magdalene except that she had some sort of serious disease and that she was from the city of Magdala, a fishing city on the shore of the sea of Galilee. It was probably there that she met Jesus, was healed by him, and became the most prominent of the group of women who followed Jesus. The gospel of Luke uses the word "disciple" to characterize her and indicates that she went on to play a leadership role in the early church. In fact, some feminist scholars wonder if the church's insistence on seeing Mary Magdalene as a former prostitute even when the evidence is against it is a way of tarnishing the reputation of a woman who became as prominent in the church as the male apostles.

Today I want to return to this passage which introduces us to Mary Magdalene and focus on the real issue that caused her to seek Jesus. I want to ask, "What does the woman, who was possessed by seven demons and healed by Jesus, have to teach us today?"

[Read Luke 8:1-3]

I pulled up a chair next to the hospital bed and gently awakened the woman lying there. I don't always wake up church members when they are recuperating in the hospital knowing how hard it is to get any sleep there, but it had been a long stay for this woman and she would be disappointed if I left without saying hello, so I quietly called her name.

"How are you feeling?" I asked as she came awake.

She smiled and replied, "Not too bad for someone with tubes sticking out of them every which way." We talked for several minutes about her condition, the latest prognosis, the doctors and nurses, the hospital food, and the physical symptoms of her illness. The woman had been in and out of the hospital many times over the past few months as she battled this disease and there always seemed to be a new permutation to discuss. But at last she sighed and said, "Oh, I get so tired of all of this. Tell me something about the world outside this door. Tell me about your son, or the church, or what's going on in Alfred; tell me anything to remind me that there is something besides my illness left to care about."

I still remember this woman's words, but her face has merged with the faces of the many church members I have visited as they endured long illnesses -- maybe it was Edna Carter who said this to me, or Sue Bergren or Mary Crandall. And though I am certain it was a woman, such words could just as easily have been expressed by the men I have talked with as well -- Fred Gertz, Connor Stephens, Barrett Potter, Steve Mayes. When people face a long illness, even chronic illnesses that don't necessarily end in death, they often express a fear that the psychic toll of the illness will be as debilitating as the physical one. Their lives become defined by their disease, not only in terms of the time and energy that they must devote to combating it but by the loss of their identity to it. The person they once were -- the healthy person with normal thoughts and small worries, with hobbies and loves and interests -- becomes consumed by the limitations of their illness until they feel that though still alive, something fundamental about who they are is in danger of disappearing.

Mary Magdalene, the gospel tells us, was possessed by seven demons. The language of demon possession was used in the first century to describe medical conditions that were very severe but had no visible cause. People could understand why a spear wound would kill you -- they could see the hole and the blood puring out -- but how could they explain why a person was slowly decaying from the inside, or why someone might suddenly collapse in a nervous breakdown? Their only explanation was to attribute it to demons. And in Mary's case, they attributed it to seven demons, to be exact. In the Bible, the number seven is used to symbolize totality; so for the gospel to say that Mary was possessed by seven demons was to say that the illness had completely taken over her life. She has been possessed by her disease, and "dispossessed" of any identity beyond her disease.

We don't use the language of demon possession anymore but Mary's experience of losing her identity completely to her illness is one we know intimately. Think of a time when you have dealt with the long-term illness of a loved one. How much of the pain of that illness comes from watching the toll it takes on the identity of the person you love? A disease can cause their body to change and become unrecognizable. It can affect their personality. They may lose their ability to function in your life in the way you had become accustomed to: people who were always strong for you now are weak and dependent or those who were always positive and active fall into a despairing inertia. Illness can possess people so thoroughly that it dispossesses the one we love and leaves a stranger behind in its wake. My father had several strokes before he died and the only thing that the strokes didn't take away was his stubbornness, leaving him a miserable frustrated man unable to walk, think straight, or remember any vocabulary except words he had learned in the Navy and never before uttered in our presence. In the months immediately after his death, my family's grief was tempered by relief and then guilt over our relief, but as time wore on, our grief actually purified and intensified because the stranger left by the stroke receded from memory, and the father we had loved returned to our hearts.

The loss of identity is a fear of all of those facing long term illness and it is also a large part of the struggle people with mental illnesses or addictions face as well. A woman with a severe anxiety disorder comes to wonder who she is outside of the anxiety that she cannot control and yet eats away at every relationship she tries to have. A man back from Iraq suffering from post traumatic syndrome explodes in anger at those he loves and feels his identity has been swallowed up by physical responses buried deep within him by his trauma.

The loss of identity is the spiritual toll of an illness and it can be as threatening to our sense of well-being as the physical toll of that illness.

Mary Magdalene had lost herself to the demons that inhabitated her life and she did not know how to reclaim her soul. And then she encountered Christ. Jesus was able to do what none of her friends or family had been able to do: he looked beyond her illness and saw deep within to the soul that remained.

Jesus didn't take on a different tone of voice with her -- that sympathetic and slightly uncomfortable voice that too many of us adopt and every cancer patient hates to hear, the "How are you doing?" said with a sigh and a shake of the head. That is a voice that speaks to the disease and not the person.

Jesus refused to judge her for "moral weakness" and condemn her for a disease she never asked for. He didn't say, "Well, it serves you right for smoking," or "if she'd only taken better care of herself she wouldn't be in this position."

Jesus didn't look at Mary and see her disease. He looked right through the disease into her eyes to call forth the woman who remained underneath it all and to welcome that person into his fellowship.

So many of us and so many of those around us are as in need of spiritual healing as of physical healing. Spiritual healing is not a substitute for physical healing -- we should still seek out doctor's treatments or the help of a professional therapist for our illness -- but neither should we forget that physical healing cannot always be complete without spiritual healing, especially if the disease is long or chronic. Mary Magdalene stood in the presence of Christ and for the first time in as long as she could remember, she felt herself again. She knew that here was someone who would love her for who she was and who she could be beyond her illness. Christ could give her the strength to endure, strength that she had been unable to find on her own. Christ would remind her of her value as a person, something her condition and the judgment of others had caused her to doubt. Christ would measure her not by her disease, not by her mistakes and failures, not by the illness that stole away her control, but only by her insistence on staying by his side through it all.

With Jesus' help, we can all confront the demons that threaten to steal away our identity and damage our relationships, whether they be the illnesses that invade our bodies or the doubts and fears that invade our minds. Like Mary Magdalene, we can turn to the one person whose eyes will penetrate the anger, the weariness, the despair, and the pain that envelopes us to fill us with the certainty of his belief in us. In Christ, Mary Magdalene found the power to endure. In Christ, she found the strength to stand. In Christ, she found the love to return her to who she really was and who God meant her to be. In Christ, she found the healing her soul desired... and so can we.