“There’s Something About Mary” Decoding Da Vinci #1 Luke 8:1-4 and John 20:10-18 Preached on Sunday, June 4, 2006 By Rev. David G. Carpenter At the Presbyterian Church in Morristown

She is so cute! She is so good! I do not mean this with any disrespect to any of you, Ginger or Jim, but our dog is the best dog in the whole world. I wish you could see her. She sits, lies down, comes, stays, and goes to her crate….at least when you are inside. Take her outside and, well, let’s just say, it is a whole different story. The minute you hit the street, all the other commands go straight out the window. Get outside and there is only one thing you have a chance to say—“This way, Zanzibar! Come on, girl, this way!” It’s nuts! If she sees a squirrel, she’s off like a rocket wrapping her leash around a tree. “This way, girl.” Then she is lunging into the neighbor’s flower garden or leveraging her weight and mine around Marilyn Hummer’s mailbox. It is like some physical law of the universe; you pass on one side of a telephone pole and she darts around the other side. I never realized our neighborhood could be such a maze. Zanzi runs past a parked car, to the right of this bush and to the left of that tree. “This way, girlie, come on, baby, no, no, no, THIS WAY.” It has never been any different for our faith. From the moment we took it out onto the streets, it has been a never ending struggle to keep things on course, “No, no, no, this way. Come on, girly, this way. Not there, over here, this way.” For every human being who has followed a religion of any kind, there is the faith as it is given, and then there is the faith as we wish it had been given. As a result, there is always someone trying to add something. It comes with the territory. Moses goes up the mountain for a few days, and the next thing you know, they have a Golden Calf. The Jews go off into exile and it is just a matter of time before they are weaving Baal worship and Temple Prostitution into the equation. We added Jesus; the Muslims added Mohammad. And it did not stop with the advent of Christianity. Just in those first few hundred years, there were the Montanists, the Docetists, the Gnostics (about whom we will be hearing much more). More recently we see Joseph Smith adding the Book of Mormon and the Angel Maroni, The Celestine Prophecy adding crystals and auras, and Tom Cruise adding Dyanetics and silent birth. It is as predictable as death and taxes; people like to add things to the faith that they have been given. It is a never ending process. “This way, girlie! Come on, this way!” Nowhere in recent years have we seen this phenomenon more fully than in Dan Brown’s runaway smash hit, The Da Vinci Code. It certainly has caused quite a stir. It has been read by over 50 million people world wide in almost 50 languages. Do you know that there are more than half a million websites devoted to discussing the merits, mistakes, and claims of this book? I do not know if you have seen the uproar that the release of this movie has caused, but all over the planet there are boycotts, demonstrations, hunger strikes, and governments making decisions in the highest courts of their land whether to postpone or cancel the movie’s opening. In the process, Dan Brown has done the impossible: he has actually brought together Christians and Muslims in the Middle East where they have jointly condemned the book and demonstrated together against the movie. Perhaps the real miracle is that Dan Brown has managed to make the Council of Nicea a hot topic around ordinary dinner tables all over the world. As Brown writes in the beginning of his book, “Everyone loves a conspiracy.” And honestly, I am no exception. I hate to admit this, but when I first read the book I wanted it to be true. Not that I wanted the actual theories themselves to be true, mind you. I just loved the idea that such scandalous beliefs could actually exist out there; that there could really be secret societies lurking around from millennia ago that honestly believe this stuff. There was a part of me, a very human part, and I think this may go a long way in explaining our fascination with this book, that didn’t want the conspiracy to be true, but did want it to be real. Do you understand that distinction? I was not about to believe the book’s ludicrous claims, but I loved the idea that there might be people out there who did. If nothing else, The Da Vinci Code certainly does make some wildly controversial claims—that Jesus was not God at all but just a normal human being who was deified nearly three hundred years later by the emperor Constantine for his own political purposes, that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene and had a child with her, that the Holy Grail is not the chalice from the Last Supper that held the blood of Jesus as most have always thought, but Mary Magdalene’s womb that held the bloodline of Jesus in the form of their daughter Sarah. The book claims Jesus’ descendants are still alive today in France, that it was Mary, not Peter, who Jesus intended to lead the church after His departure, that Leonardo Da Vinci’s painting of “The Last Supper” proves Mary’s rightful place by placing her, not John, next to Jesus in the painting, that the Christian faith was supposed to be much more an amalgamation of masculine and feminine, god and goddess worship, and a celebration of the “sacred feminine” than it is today. The book claims that it was the power-hungry, patriarchic church in Rome that squashed Jesus’ intended direction for Christianity, demonized Mary, arbitrarily chose the books of the Bible to make Jesus appear divine, set up Peter as the successor of the church, and has been covering it all up ever since through an intentional agenda of murder and mass deception. Talk about provocative! “This way, Zanzi! Come on, girl, this way!” Of course, there is so much to correct in The Da Vinci Code that we could spend the rest of the summer unpacking it all. This morning I would like to zero in on some of the most deliciously scandalous allegations of them all— the questions surrounding Mary Magdalene. Exactly who was Mary? Why is she such a mysterious and fascinating figure in Christianity? What exactly do we know about her? To answer the last question first, “We don’t know a whole lot,” which very well may be the reason for all the speculation that has cropped up around her. Mary Magdalene, or Mary of Magdala, a small town along the shore of the Sea of Galilee, is mentioned only a few times in the entire New Testament. But in those few times, she plays a remarkably significant and revolutionary role in the events that formed our faith. In all four Gospels, she stands at the foot of the cross and waits with Jesus even after all the other disciples have fearfully run away. We know she helps prepare Christ’s body for the burial. She is the first, or at least among the first depending on which Gospel you read, to go visit Jesus’ body and discover the empty tomb. And according to John’s account, she is not only the first to see the resurrected Christ, but she is the one whom Jesus entrusts to carry the news of his resurrection back to the rest of the disciples. She serves an overwhelmingly important role that earned her the name with which she has been honored through the centuries, “The Apostle to the apostles.” Do you understand just how revolutionary that was? Back in those days it was crystal clear: women were not considered worthy enough to be entrusted with anything of that magnitude. I apologize before I even say this, but back in those days the typical Rabbi viewed women as totally inferior. Please, don’t throw anything at me, but there was actually an ancient rabbinic adage stating that it was better for the Torah to be burned then to teach it to a woman. Well, isn’t that special? There was a very common rabbinic prayer in Jesus’ day that actually started, “Blessed art Thou, Oh God, for not making me a woman.” Honestly! In fact, there was a whole sect of Jewish Rabbis in Jesus’ day that not only refused to teach women, but actually took a vow to refuse to even look at them. If they saw a woman approaching out of the corner of their eye, they would shut their eyes as tightly as they could and wait until they felt quite certain that the coast was clear. They were famous for constantly falling off things and running into buildings and trees. Really! They were called the “bruised and bleeding rabbis.” I promise you, it is all true! I am not making this up! Of course, this makes Jesus’ approach to dealing with women almost inconceivable by comparison. The only other time that we see Mary Magdalene mentioned, apart from the death and resurrection, is much more incredible. Soon afterwards he went on through cities and villages, proclaiming and bringing the good news of the kingdom of God. The twelve were with him, as well as some women who had been cured of evil spirits and infirmities: Mary, called Magdalene, from whom seven demons had gone out, and Joanna, the wife of Herod’s steward Chuza, and Susanna, and many others, who provided for them out of their resources. —Luke 8:1-3 Do you have any idea how radical it would have been for women to have been traveling with Jesus and the disciples and to have actually been taught by Jesus? Do you have any idea how unheard of it would have been for women to be engaged in public discourse, to be taken seriously, to be given ministry responsibilities, and for Jesus to accept their money? I am telling you that women like Jane Fonda, Gloria Steinem, and Naomi Wolf are amateur feminists compared to the way Jesus treated, understood and respected the women of his time. There had never been such an egalitarian community like that before. When Paul said, “There is now neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, but you are all one in Christ Jesus,” it was Da Vinci Code caliber scandalous. If that is the case, then why not? Is it not possible that Mary Magdalene could have been married to Jesus or that Jesus could have intended her to take over the church after he left? It might have been possible, but it is not the reality. The scholars are all of one voice on this; there is no credible evidence for any of it, anywhere. The only place that could even be misconstrued as hinting at such claims is in the Gospel of Mary Magdalene (written almost 200 years after Jesus’ death and long after Mary Magdalene died) and to an even lesser degree in some of the other Gnostic Gospels. None of these books has ever been taken seriously for a number of very good reasons. First, they were all written long after Jesus died and long after Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were written. They were actually based on the original four Gospels and said a lot of really far out, bizarre things that nobody took seriously. In one it says that the cross was actually resurrected along with Jesus. The cross supposedly came out of the tomb on Easter morning and started talking to people! It is obvious to scholars, academics and just about everyone, that these books were clearly crafted as an attempt by this quasi-religious Gnostic sect to meld their pseudo-pagan philosophy with mainstream Christianity. By the time they got to the council of Nicea, the Gnostic Gospels would have been seen for exactly what they were, very much what the Book of Mormon or The Celestine Prophecy is to us today; a very clear, unambiguously unorthodox addition to the accepted, long standing tradition and theology of the church. Dan Brown suggests that the vote was close. The truth is, the vote was 298….to 2. “This way, Zanzi. Come on this way.” What about the assertion that Mary moved to France and had Jesus’ baby, that Jesus’ ancestors are still living there today, and that there is an ancient organization called the Priory of Sion that has been protecting this secret since earliest times? Well, those legends come from two rather silly books, one written in 1982 entitled, Holy Blood, Holy Grail and the other published in 1997 entitled The Templar Revelation. Perhaps the only thing I have time to say about these books is that the other two major books written by the authors of The Templar Revelation include one on the Shroud of Turin and another on Unidentified Flying Objects. Even the Priory of Sion, by its creator’s own admission in a French court of law, was a big hoax developed in 1956. “Come on, girl, this way.” Okay. What about Leonardo Da Vinci’s Last Supper? All you have to do is look at the painting with your own two eyes to clearly see for yourself that the individual standing next to Jesus cannot be the disciple John. The individual standing next to Jesus looks exactly like a woman. Well, again—no. I am telling you, part of me wants it to be true. How cool would that be, not if it was true, but if Leonardo thought it was true and was actually trying to communicate hidden messages to us through his art? Unfortunately, the art historians, the scholars, and the academics all agree. During the Renaissance period, young men were typically painted just like this, particularly the disciple John. He is almost always painted in a very feminine way during that period and Leonardo, even more than all the others, almost always depicted young men just like this. And as if that is not enough, there exist original sketches of Da Vinci’s first draft of The Last Supper. And would you believe it? He actually labeled each person around the table, and yes, you guessed it, he actually labeled the man standing next to Jesus as John. “Come on, Zanzi, this way girl!” But you know, to be fair, it is not just Dan Brown. There has been so much built up around Mary Magdalene through the years, so much speculation and legend. Did you know that there is really no reason for us to believe that she was a prostitute? It was probably because she played such an important role and yet we know so little about her that people have always felt tempted to add things to her resume. You see, there are a number of Marys mentioned throughout the various Gospels as well as a few other significant unnamed women. Throughout the centuries, Christians have often either confused the various Marys or wondered if there might be a reason to associate or lump together a Mary mentioned in one place with a Mary or an unnamed woman mentioned somewhere else. This is exactly how the Mary of Mary and Martha, introduced in John 12, came to be associated with Mary Magdalene as well as the “unnamed sinful woman” from Luke, Chapter 7. But it was not until 591 AD that Pope Gregory I pulled it all together by adding the piece de resistance. In one of his most famous sermons, he asserted that this unnamed woman’s sin from Luke 7 must have been prostitution and the unnamed woman was indeed, Mary Magdalene. The label has stuck ever since. “This way, girl. Come on, baby, this way!” So is there anything we can learn from Dan Brown’s book? Well, yes. We can learn just how badly people consistently want to add things to our faith. And it is not just overly zealous fiction novelists and heretics either. We all do it—every denomination, every church, every individual, all the time. We all take our pictures of who we want Jesus to be and place them over and on top of who Jesus actually is. Every time we take our faith out for a walk, we have this tendency to add our own little twists and turns, our own preferences. We like to lunge into flower gardens and wrap ourselves around mailboxes. We focus in on certain passages of scripture while virtually ignoring others. We skip right by the stuff that does not jive with our personally crafted theologies and just add our own take on the things that we wish Jesus had said or done. If there is anything that the Protestant Reformation taught us, it is that it is not just the Dan Browns of this world who need to be held accountable and called back for trying to add or take away things from our faith. Without this novel we may never have been reminded that Jesus was much more of a feminist than the church has recognized or acknowledged through the years. So be aware, keep your heads up, because we are all part of the problem. Sometimes it is a wildly fanciful, intriguing, thrill a minute novelist, but other times it is us or our church that needs a good, firm, attention grabbing, “This way, Zanzi! Come on, girl, this way!” AMEN