The Unexpected Jesus: Week 4 // Mary the Magdalene

Takeaway: If Jesus commissions you - and he did - well, then let's go.

Hi friends,

Well, my apologies for being a couple of days late with our Field Notes this week. I could point to a dozen external reasons related to family life and our Canadian Thanksgiving long weekend,¹ but the real answer is that I’ve been lost in the story of Mary the Magdalene for nigh on two weeks now and I haven’t quite wanted to resurface yet. It’s been the best kind of treasure hunt, the kind where each new discovery leads to another revelation which leads to another whole entire book to read and digest, which leads to more discoveries and so on like an unending quest of wisdom. (Enneagram Fives, I feel like I understand you for the first time in my life.)

If you’ve been reading my work for a while now, you know that I’ve written about Mary the Magdalene more than a few times here at Field Notes but also in my books, particularly in Miracles and Other Reasonable Things as well as Jesus Feminist. Yet this series has definitely enriched my understanding, deepened my love for this saint, and even rocked my world a bit.

I know we’ve talked before about how dazzling and bracing it can be to fall back in love with the stories of Scripture, as one of the unexpected gifts of an evolving faith but this series has been a whole other level for me. I started The Unexpected Jesus because I wanted to write through four encounters with Jesus that personally and historically meant a lot to me at pivotal moments in my life. Originally, I envisioned writing this series as one looking back, but as the weeks have unfolded, it has felt as though the Spirit has been resolute in moving me forward while also going deeper in my understanding. Twenty-years-ago-Sarah would never have imagined there was still so much richness to discover here. I am also highly aware that I’ve barely scratched the surface in this series.

An entire book wouldn’t be enough to do Mary the Magdalene justice (true story: the notes I took for my research here currently number no less than 86 single-spaced pages…), but well, how about this? Can I interest you in an overlong essay with exhaustive footnotes?

GOOD, BECAUSE HERE WE GO.

So yes, better late than never, here is the last big (for now??²) instalment in our current series The Unexpected Jesus.

If you are new around here,

• here’s the introduction post to the series;

• here is the first instalment on the incarnation;

• this is the second on the wedding at Cana;

• this is the third on the woman at the well, and

• this is last week’s community conversation on the topic.

• Today we’ll spend some time with Mary the Magdalene.

Next week, I’ll share a brand new blessing/benediction for this series to wrap it up so make sure you stick around for that.

The Secret Field Notes Podcast is waiting for you, too

There is an audio version on The Secret Field Notes Podcast, too. Here’s the link to listen to that (and here’s an article explaining how to add this Secret Field Notes Podcast feed to your podcast app, too so that you have it in your preferred app as soon as it’s published).

Just as a note, the platform I use to send these newsletters - Substack - provides an auto-AI-version of narration for accessibility on every post, which is great, but if you want to hear actual me reading it to you, then you do need to go to this other link and press play there.

Scripture Reading: John 20:1-18

This week, I read the full scripture in our audio version only, since it’s on the long-ish side and the word count limit is working against us today. For fellow readers, I will just link to the story over at Bible Gateway for us. It is the story of the resurrection of Jesus, as seen through Mary the Magdalene.

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Showing Up

I am an eldest daughter and oh, I love to be useful. I am a “put me to work” kind of person. A “stack up the chairs at the end of the church service” person. A “you just had a baby, here’s your Shepherd’s pie in a tinfoil casserole dish” kind of gal. If “doing” is in competition with “simply being,” well, I know which one I prefer.

I have always believed - and was explicitly taught - that all work is honourable and that work is a gift. So we love people by showing up and getting to work. These are the ways of my people.

This can be helpful - I mean, someone has to fold the laundry for you while you recover from surgery and I volunteer as tribute every time - but there can be a shadow side because I’ve not exactly been great at holding space in the tension when there is simply nothing left to fix.

And yet, in the darkest and scariest and loneliest moments, I know by now that we don’t want a busy bee hovering around while we sink to the floor.

We want someone who will sink with us.

Sorrow is common. We all need each other in the end. We aren’t even that special because we’re sad; it’s a quieter welcome to being a person who dared to love in the world. It wasn’t until my forties that I began to understand that no one needs the casserole, not really. Any casserole is just the door-opener or the excuse for what we know we all really need: presence.

If we do nothing else, we can show up.

In times of uncertainty and grief, I’ve made a lot of meals for people in my life. I’ve folded a lot of laundry and washed more than a couple of floors. I have planned funerals while being inside out with grief. I have talked to the national media about a dear friend who died under my hands less than five hours earlier. I have cooked and cleaned and edited obituaries and made announcements and picked up toys and greeted guests while wearing pantyhose I hadn’t worn in years. I have volunteered and served and worked like my salvation depended upon it.

And even so, the holiest moments of my life, the ones that I count as most sacred, are the ones when I was simply there, holding vigil, staying long after hope has been surrendered and possibility has ceased.

There.

There at the graveside, holding vigil for a lost son, as the darkness gathered us in and lanterns floated out on the river.

There on the couch, holding a gone-cold cup of coffee, in the quiet house, while a brokenhearted mother stared at the wall. (Today at least, she will not stare alone on my watch.)

There in the room, with a friend’s still body and the eerily silent machines, waiting for the nurses to come take her away.

There in the hide-a-bed while they cried it out against my neck, scabs not yet forming for the wounds on their arms.

There in the field under the sky, beside a friend with a scary diagnosis, while the stars came out.

There in the aftermath of the flood, shovelling out sand and muck that stinks.

There, on the other end of the phone, listening, as the words about what happened finally come pouring out.

There.

There, in the moments when comfort is meaningless and the worst has already happened and dawn is a long ways off.

Sometimes, being there, showing up, is enough. (Sometimes it isn’t, we all know this. But sometimes, it’s everything. And sometimes it’s just the something that is better than nothing.)

I suppose that’s just one of the reasons why I have grown to love Mary the Magdalene and her relationship with the unexpected Jesus. My brilliant friend Nadia Bolz-Weber called her “the patron saint of just showing up.” She writes, “Showing up, to me, means being present to what is real, what is actually happening. Mary Magdalene didn't necessarily know what to say or what to do or even what to think when she encountered the risen Jesus. But none of that was nearly as important as the fact that she was present and attentive to him."³

I don’t know if Mary the Magdalene was an eldest daughter. I’m certain that she didn’t have an evangelical hero complex with an origin point in the Protestant work ethic coupled with a Scottish-heritage suspicion of idleness (ahem, not naming names, *cough* SARAHBESSEY *cough*).

But the fact that she showed up, burial spices in hand, ready to go to work, feels to me like, well, I understand this lady.

It’s always been the work of women to show up, I suppose. So at the very least, she’s doing women’s work.

Why would it surprise us that Mary the Magdalene is doing the work of showing up, even after the death of her beloved friend and teacher?

Why would it surprise us that when he told her to go and tell everyone that he had risen, that she ran headlong into her new calling as an apostle?

I think I would do the same thing. I’m pretty sure you would do this too.

When someone we love has died, horribly, unjustly, publicly, what is there left to do but to bear witness? to show up? to be there? Even when we have nothing left to do, let alone a way to help, well, we can show up.

And so we do.

And when that someone surprises us with the greatest surprise of them all?

Well. Then it gets fun.

Who is Mary Magdalene?