A reading from the Gospel according to Luke, chapter eight, and one verse from the Gospel according to Mark, chapter sixteen.
"And it came to pass afterward, that he went throughout every city and village, preaching and shewing the glad tidings of the kingdom of God: and the twelve were with him, and certain women, which had been healed of evil spirits and infirmities, Mary called Magdalene, out of whom went seven devils, and Joanna the wife of Chuza Herod's steward, and Susanna, and many others, which ministered unto him of their substance."
And from Mark: "Now when Jesus was risen early the first day of the week, he appeared first to Mary Magdalene, out of whom he had cast seven devils."
Here ends the reading.
Friends, welcome to the Sabbath. Sit down. You have a whole day. Nobody is going to ask you to leave.
I want to talk with you today about a woman who is introduced to us by the worst thing that ever happened to her.
Listen to how the text does it. Joanna is introduced by her husband and his job. Susanna gets only her name. And Mary gets this: "out of whom went seven devils." That is her introduction. Luke says it. Mark says it again, on the morning of the resurrection, of all mornings. He appeared first to Mary Magdalene, and before the sentence is even finished, we are reminded of the seven.
Some of you know exactly what that is like. You walk into a room and your worst season walks in ahead of you. The one who was in the hospital. The one who drank. The one whose marriage ended. The one who left the faith, or was asked to leave it. The one who had the breakdown. People say your name, and then they lower their voice and say the other thing.
So let us read slowly, and see what the text really says, and what it does not.
It says she was healed. Luke puts her among the women who had been healed of evil spirits and infirmities. Healed is the word. It is the word you use for a sick person who got well. It is not the word you use for a criminal who was pardoned.
It does not say what the seven were. Not one of them is named. We are not told what they did to her, or how long they stayed, or what her days looked like while they were there.
And it does not say sin. Look for the word. It is not in those verses. The old picture of Mary Magdalene as a woman of the streets is not in these verses. It came later, when preachers folded her together with other women in the Gospels, women the text does not call by her name. The text itself gives us a woman who was afflicted, and then was not.
Now, seven. In the scriptures, seven is the number of a thing finished. Seven days make the week. The seventh day is the rest. So when the text tells us seven devils, we hear it this way, and many readers have heard it this way before us: she was completely afflicted. Not a little. Not on bad days only. All the way through, with nothing left over. Whatever it was, it had the whole house.
And then the seven went out. All seven. The text does not say six went and one stayed behind to be managed. It says they went. She was completely afflicted, and she was completely freed. The same number measures both.
I need you to hear that, you who were told that you are damaged for good. The number that describes how bad it was is the number that describes how free she became.
Now look at what she does next, because this is the part people skip.
The text tells us these women ministered unto him of their substance. Their substance. Their own goods. Their own money. Mary Magdalene and Joanna and Susanna and many others were paying for the road. The bread the twelve ate, somebody bought. The text tells us who.
So think about what that means. The woman with the seven devils was not a charity case trailing along behind. She was a patron. She was holding the purse. She was one of the reasons the glad tidings got from one village to the next.
I am not telling you this to ask anything of your pocket. I am telling you this because of what it says about her. The world wrote her down as a burden. The Gospel wrote her down as a provider. The one they would have pitied was the one carrying the others.
And notice that she did not wait to be respectable first. She did not go home for ten years to prove she was well. She was healed, and she was on the road, and she was useful, and her old name was still being said out loud. All of that at once. You can be of use while people are still whispering.
Now I want to bring you something from outside the Bible, and I will say plainly that it is outside. There is a later text called the Gospel of Mary. It was written in the second century. It is not scripture, and we do not treat it as history. But it is old, and it is worth hearing, the way you would listen to an old relative tell a story about the family.
In that later text, Mary describes a vision of a soul rising. And on its way up, the soul is stopped by powers that try to hold it. One of them, the text says, takes seven forms. To paraphrase them: darkness, and craving, and ignorance, and a kind of eagerness for death, and the rule of the flesh, and the foolish cleverness of the flesh, and a wisdom that is really only anger. Seven forms of wrath, the text calls them.
And these seven question the soul. They ask it, in effect, where do you come from, and where do you think you are going? They call it names. They tell it what it is.
And the soul answers them. To paraphrase again from this later text outside the Bible, the soul says: what bound me has been slain. What surrounded me has been overcome. My craving is ended, and my ignorance has died. And then it goes on, into rest, into silence.
We cannot tell you the seven in that text are the seven in Luke. No one can say that. But see the picture it draws. The seven do not only torment. They accuse. They stand in the way and they tell the soul its name. And freedom, in that picture, is the moment the soul stops accepting the name.
That is why we love her here. In this church we read the Scarlet Woman of Revelation as Mary Magdalene. That is our reading. It is not the plain sense, and most churches would not agree with us. But we read her as a woman who was handed a wrong name by a frightened age. And we read the Scarlet Beast as Jesus Christ, handed a wrong name too, each still looking for the other. Whether or not you can follow us that far, follow us this far. People who are frightened hand out names. And the names they hand out are not the truth about you.
So here is what I want to say to you, who were named by your worst season.
Your worst season was real. I will not tell you it was not. The text does not pretend with Mary, and I will not pretend with you. Seven is seven. Some of you are still in it. If you are, take all the help there is. The doctor, the medicine, the counselor, the friend who sits with you. Healing comes through many hands, and none of them are beneath God's use.
But your worst season is not your name. It is something that happened in the house. It is not the house.
And see where the Gospel puts her at the end. Mark says he appeared first to Mary Magdalene. First. Before Peter. Before any of the twelve. The risen Christ had the whole world to choose from, and the first face he chose was the woman with the seven devils.
They kept saying the old name. He said, Mary.
Listen for that this Sabbath. Under all the things you have been called, listen for your own name, said by one who knew every bit of the seven and came to you first anyway.
Let us pray.
God of the seventh day, you know what we have been called. You know which parts of it were true once. Let what is finished be finished. Let what has gone out of us stay gone. For those still afflicted, send healing by every hand that can carry it. And where the world says our worst season, say our name. Give us rest today, and something of our own to offer tomorrow.
Amen.