Johanna Who?
There is an opinion that Pope Benedict wrote his best selling book, Jesus of Nazareth, as a commentary of the media hype over the DaVinci Code, a few years ago. The Pope says that the book represents his personal search for the face of Jesus. Hopefully, just as many would read the Pope’s book as the many who mindlessly gobbled up Dan Brown’s book. (Do you ever feel that you might have been taken?) The new one is out now!
The crucial figure of Mary Magdalene appears in our Gospel this weekend. Recall, please – THE WOMAN IN THE FIRST PART OF THE GOSPEL READING TODAY IS NOT MARY MAGDALENE. REPEAT THAT ONE MORE TIME!!! THE WOMAN IN THE FIRST PART OF THE GOSPEL READING TODAY IS NOT MARY MAGDALENE. Dan Brown probably knew that when he wrote the book, but what difference when you are laughing all the way to the bank!
Sadly, the second part of the Gospel today is really charged with food for thought, but for which manipulated minds might not be capable. St Luke tells us that Jesus had cast out seven demons from the Magdalene. This is quaint, but bizarre language in the opinion of many post moderns. Yet, the use of demons in Scriptures also indicated in many cases, whatever obsesses us and keeps us from focusing on what is truly human. Who can deny that many individuals, families, groups and communities might be described as obsessed and not focused on what is truly human. The demonic today might mean addictions, compulsions and enmeshments that beset individuals and groups. How frequently, honest, yet obsessed people might say to themselves, “If only I (or we) could rise above this all.” Such might involve mindless concern for possessions, power, pleasure, prestige. (Some even are adding petroleum as addictive! Something that we cannot not have!) Jesus’ empowering Mary Magdalene to snap out of it, see reality as it really is, smell God’s coffee, and in the process, get a new life makes the statement about her neither quaint nor bizarre at all. With Jesus’ Help, individuals and cultures could do the same.
However, there is another lady mentioned today, viz., Joanna, the wife of King Herod’s steward, Chuza, who provided for them out of their resources. Whoever this lady was, she was not a marginalized figure. Her husband was on Kings Herod’s payroll. There were a few shekels in her change purse. Joanna could be described as a middle class wife of a management figure in her day. However, here, St Luke describes her as a part of the growing “Jesus Movement” who will soon be on their way up to Jerusalem for the great events to occur then. An unescorted wife following an itinerant preacher must have raised some eyebrows. Did Jesus eat his meals with any and everybody on the journey up to Jerusalem? In addition, she is picking up part of the tab! One might wonder what evil spirit or malady Jesus cast out from her that caused such life-altering behavior modification! Something more is clearly going on in this story than meets the eye.
In addition, the person of Joanna, the wife of Chuza, possibly recovering, because of Jesus, from an addictive pathology, slips under the radar screen for most folks. She represented the un-convention mores of Jesus and His Movement.
St Luke tells us that Joanna continued on the way up to Jerusalem. In fact, he names her (and Mary Magdalene) among the ladies who arrive at Jesus’ empty tomb on Easter Sunday morning and who announce the empty tomb to the rest of the Jesus Movement. (The group did not believe the women.) St Luke tells that several women who had come up to Jerusalem were there when the Spirit gave birth to the Church on Pentecost morning, c. 30 AD.
Pope Benedict writes of these ladies. “Yet Luke makes clear—and the other Gospels also show it in all sorts of ways -- that “many women” belonged to the more intimate community of believers and that their faith-filled following of Jesus was an essential element of that community, as would be vividly illustrated at the foot of the Cross and at the Resurrection.”
Apparently, in the very earliest days of the Jesus Movement within Judaism, most were captured by the Consciousness of Jesus (aka the Kingdom of God), they saw reality in a different light, in a alternative paradigm. Two thoughts from St. Paul’s Letter to the Galatians bring that New Consciousness to light. 1) The baptismal hymn quoted in Gal 3.28, “In Christ, there is no Jew or gentile, slave or free, male or female. All are one in Christ Jesus.” In addition as St Paul says today in today’s, “(We) have been crucified with Christ. The lives we live now are not our own. Christ is living within us (and we are living in Christ). We still live our human lives, but they are lives of faith in our Lord Jesus Christ, Who loved us and gave Himself for us. The ladies might have played a bigger role in the earliest days of the Jesus Movement. What might have happened?
Sadly, a presumption that many Western thinkers make is that we are always in advance over the past. Some say that the West has made Progress a goddess! Do we really know more now?
Obviously, we focused on Mary Magdalene because of her greater prominence in the Gospels. However, imagine what Dan Brown (or a committed Christian woman) might do with the figure of Joanna in reflecting on the role of women in the Jesus Movement then (and now, as well)? In the words of the late Karen Carpenter, “We’ve only just begun!” 061613AD jfq
