On July 22, the Orthodox Church commemorates Saint Mary Magdalene. She was the woman from the city of Magdala whom the Lord healed of seven demons and who then followed Him to the end: she stood beside the Cross in the hour when the disciples had scattered, kept watch at His burial, and, on the morning of the first day of the week, saw Him risen. The Church calls her a Myrrh-bearer because she came to the tomb very early in the morning with spices, to anoint the Lord’s body according to the custom of the Jews. And she honors her as Equal to the Apostles because, from the empty tomb, she was sent by the risen Lord Himself to bring the disciples the tidings upon which the whole Christian faith stands: Christ is risen.
The Woman from Magdala
Magdala was a fishing town on the western shore of the Sea of Galilee. From it the saint takes the name by which the whole Christian world knows her. Of her life before she met Christ, the Gospel tells us only one thing, and that one thing is a suffering: she was tormented by unclean spirits. Saint Luke the Evangelist mentions her among the women who accompanied the Lord: “Mary, called Magdalene, from whom seven demons had gone out” (Luke 8:2).
Scripture attributes no particular sin to Mary Magdalene and nowhere calls her a harlot. Nor is torment by unclean spirits in itself proof of some hidden guilt: the demon-possessed person is an enslaved and suffering human being, and the seven demons do not constitute a moral biography. This is how the Fathers of the East regarded her affliction: as a bondage from which Christ set her free. Saint Modestus, the seventh-century patriarch of Jerusalem, testifies in his homily on the Myrrh-bearing Women that she spent her life in purity.
What the Gospel leaves in silence, the later tradition of the Church preserves in a narrative worthy of attention. Nicephorus Callistus Xanthopoulos, a fourteenth-century church historian, relates in a discourse attributed to him that Mary was born to wealthy and God-fearing parents known for their almsgiving, and that from her youth she grew to love the reading of Scripture, learning from it the prophecies concerning the Messiah. Orphaned early, she guarded her virginity in fasting and prayer. Seeing such a life, the enemy of mankind, who knew Isaiah’s prophecy, “Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son” (Isaiah 7:14), supposed that she might be that virgin and rose up to war against her. God permitted her to be tormented by the seven demons so that her patience and purity might be brought to light. This account remains a late tradition, not the witness of the Gospel; yet it speaks in the spirit of the Fathers, who taught that the mystery of the Incarnation was hidden from the rulers of this age (cf. 1 Corinthians 2:7-8), and it states plainly how the East understood the seven demons: not as a sign of fornication, but as the enemy’s warfare against a pure life.
Her healing was the beginning of a new life. Saint Luke writes that the women healed by the Lord ministered to Him “from their substance” (Luke 8:3). Her gratitude did not stop with words of thanks spoken once; it became a daily ministry. She left her home and her city and followed the Teacher from place to place, sharing with the other women the care of what was needed. Her discipleship began in gratitude and grew into love.
Beside the Cross and at the Tomb
This love showed itself in full only in the hour when everything seemed lost. When the Lord was seized, the disciples scattered, and Peter, who had promised that he would die with Him, denied Him three times in the high priest’s courtyard. Beneath the Cross, of the disciples, the Gospel shows only John, the beloved disciple; beside him stood the women. Saint John the Evangelist writes: “Now there stood by the cross of Jesus His mother, and His mother’s sister, Mary of Cleopas, and Mary Magdalene” (John 19:25).
She remained there to the end, a witness of the Lord’s crucifixion and death, and afterward followed His body to the tomb hewn in the rock: “And Mary Magdalene was there, and the other Mary, sitting opposite the tomb” (Matthew 27:61). No one still awaited the Resurrection. She remained not because she expected something, but because she could not leave.
“Mary!”: The Morning of the Resurrection
After keeping the Sabbath rest commanded by the Law, she returned to the tomb with the spices prepared. Saint John writes: “Now on the first day of the week Mary Magdalene came to the tomb early, while it was still dark, and saw that the stone had been taken away from the tomb” (John 20:1). She ran to Peter and John; the two came, saw the empty tomb and the linen cloths lying apart, and then returned to their own homes.
Mary remained. “But Mary stood outside by the tomb weeping” (John 20:11). As she wept, she stooped down into the tomb and saw two angels in white, who asked her, “Woman, why are you weeping?” She answered that they had taken away her Lord and that she did not know where they had laid Him. Then she turned and saw Jesus standing there, but did not know Him; she supposed He was the gardener. She asked Him, if He had taken the body away, to tell her where He had laid it, and she herself would take it.
Then “Jesus said to her, ‘Mary!’ She turned and said to Him in Hebrew, ‘Rabboni!’ (which is to say, Teacher)” (John 20:16). A single word, her name, and her eyes were opened. The Good Shepherd calls His sheep by name (cf. John 10:3), and the sheep who remained beside the fold even when the fold appeared desolate knew His voice at once.
The Lord then gave her the first commission after the Resurrection: “Go to My brethren and say to them, ‘I am ascending to My Father and your Father, and to My God and your God’” (John 20:17). And Mary Magdalene came to the disciples announcing that she had seen the Lord (cf. John 20:18). Saint Mark the Evangelist confirms that, after His Resurrection, the Lord “appeared first to Mary Magdalene, out of whom He had cast seven demons” (Mark 16:9).
Here we should also remember the deeper interpretation offered by Saint Gregory Palamas in his homily for the Sunday of the Myrrh-bearing Women. Bringing together the testimony of all four Evangelists, he interprets “the other Mary” who came to the tomb (cf. Matthew 28:1) as the Mother of God herself, and holds that she received the first tidings and vision of her risen Son. The Evangelists, he says, spoke of this in a veiled manner so that the proclamation of the Resurrection could not be dismissed as a mother’s testimony concerning her Son. This interpretation establishes no rivalry between the Theotokos and the Magdalene, nor does it diminish the latter’s place in any way: the Gospel according to John preserves her face-to-face encounter with the risen Lord, His calling her by name, and her commission to the Apostles, an honor uniquely her own in the mystery of that morning.
Sent to Those Who Were to Be Sent
The word apostle means, in Greek, one who is sent. On the morning of the Resurrection, the woman from Magdala was sent by the risen Lord Himself to those who would be sent into all the world. For this reason the Church honors her with the title Equal to the Apostles: she carried out the first work of proclaiming the Resurrection, bringing it to the Apostles themselves, to men who did not yet believe. This title of honor does not say that she was numbered among the Twelve, nor that the ministries of the Church are confused; it bears witness to the measure of her work in proclaiming the Gospel.
After the Lord’s Ascension and the descent of the Holy Spirit, she continued to serve the first Church. The pious tradition of the Church relates that she journeyed as far as Rome and stood before the emperor Tiberius, to whom she offered an egg with the proclamation, “Christ is risen!” The story has been preserved in several forms: in some, the saint gives the emperor a red egg, a sign of the new life; in others, the egg is miraculously reddened in her hand. The Church received this as a pious tradition, not as a fact recorded by the historians of the age, and Orthodox devotion connects with it the custom of red Paschal eggs, preserved to this day.
Toward the end of her life she settled in Ephesus near Saint John the Theologian, the beloved disciple, and there reposed in peace. Tradition says that she was buried at the entrance to the cave of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus. Her holy relics were brought from Ephesus to Constantinople toward the end of the ninth century, in the days of Emperor Leo VI the Wise, and placed in the monastery of Saint Lazarus. Today her incorrupt left hand is kept at the Monastery of Simonopetra on the Holy Mountain of Athos, while portions of her relics are venerated in many places throughout the Orthodox world. In Romania, a portion of her relics is kept at Pantocrator Monastery in Drăgănești-Vlașca, where her feast gathers thousands of pilgrims every year. Besides her feast on July 22, the Church commemorates her together with the other holy women on the Sunday of the Myrrh-bearing Women during the season of the Pentecostarion.
Her True Image
Few figures in the Gospel have been covered by so many foreign additions as Mary Magdalene. To honor her rightly, two distortions must be set aside: an old Western one and one belonging to our own age.
The first arose in the West. Certain Western writers had already inclined toward such an identification, but the conflated image received its decisive form in the year 591, when Saint Gregory the Dialogist, bishop of Rome, united three women into a single figure in a homily on the Gospel (Homily 33): Mary Magdalene, Mary of Bethany, the sister of Lazarus and Martha, and the sinful woman who washed the Lord’s feet with her tears in the house of Simon the Pharisee (Luke 7:36-50). From this conflation arose the Western image of the “repentant harlot,” represented for centuries in Western painting and literature. The East never knew this mingling. The Orthodox Church has always honored the three women distinctly: Mary of Bethany is commemorated together with her sister Martha; the woman in the Pharisee’s house remains unnamed in the Gospel; and Mary Magdalene is the disciple healed of demons, the Myrrh-bearer, and the herald of the Resurrection. The Eastern synaxaria attribute to her no past of fornication, and Saint Modestus of Jerusalem bears witness, as we have seen, to the purity of her life. It should be said that, in the end, even the Church of Rome set aside this conflation: since the revision of its liturgical books in 1969, the commemoration of July 22 has concerned Mary of Magdala alone.
The second distortion belongs to our own age. Widely read novels and films have made Mary Magdalene into “the wife of Jesus,” relying on late Gnostic writings such as the so-called Gospel of Philip, composed in the third century and rejected by the Church from the beginning. Yet even that text does not say what is attributed to it: it speaks of a particular closeness in symbolic language that scholars themselves do not interpret in the same way. In any case, a writing that appeared two centuries after the apostolic testimony can prove nothing about the Lord’s life. The Gospel shows Mary Magdalene as the Lord’s disciple: healed by Him, ministering to Him from her substance, standing beside His Cross, and proclaiming His Resurrection. Whoever looks for something else in her no longer seeks her at all, but invents another figure, foreign to Scripture and to the tradition of the Church.
Both distortions attribute to her what she was not and pass over in silence what she was. Mary Magdalene’s greatness lies in the steadfast love that remained beside the Cross when the disciples had fled, and in the honor that no one can take from her: that she saw the empty tomb and carried to the Apostles the tidings that the Lord had risen.
The Love That Sees the Resurrection
The Fathers of the Church saw in Mary Magdalene an image of the soul seeking Christ. Her search on the morning of the Resurrection fulfills that of the bride in the Song of Songs, who goes by night through the city seeking him whom her soul loves, seeks and does not find him, questions the watchmen, and does not stop until she has found him (cf. Song of Songs 3:1-4). So too Mary walked through the darkness of the morning, questioned the angels and the One she supposed to be the gardener, and did not stop until the One she sought called her by name.
Her life thus leaves us a teaching that does not grow old. The first proclamation of the Resurrection was entrusted to a woman whom Christ’s grace had healed and who had answered grace with steadfast love. She remained by the tomb when all seemed ended; she wept, sought, and asked, and it was to her that the Lord spoke her name. Her love did not purchase the Lord’s appearance, but it kept her in the place where the risen One was pleased to reveal Himself. So God works with every soul that seeks Him steadfastly: He allows Himself to be found by the one who remains. Whoever does not leave the tomb comes to see the Resurrection.
Holy Myrrh-bearer Mary Magdalene, Equal to the Apostles, pray to Christ our God that He may grant us your steadfast love and the joy of your proclamation: Christ is risen!