St. Mary Magdalene – What Does This Mean?

Yesterday the church remembered and celebrated St. Mary Magdalene. Before the new hymnal came out the Gospel lesson for her day was Luke 7:36-50, the story of an unnamed prostitute coming into anoint the head and feat of Jesus while he was eating at the table of a Pharisee. We learn more about Mary from the next chapter of Luke’s gospel: she had 7, yes 7, demons cast from her. You put that all together and you a picture of a woman who knew God’s grace and knew it came from Jesus, God’s own Son in the flesh, and it makes sense as to why she stuck so closely to Jesus, following him and providing for him and the disciples out of their means.

Mary you might say is an unlikely saint. But are not we all unlikely saints? Becoming a Saint is not something that we do for ourselves, no we must be acted upon. God must do the work of making us saints. Just as he did for Mary. Just as he has done for you dear saints loved by God.

If you keep score of this stuff just think about who God chooses to be his own. Abraham, he was the son of an idolater and a liar as the story in Egypt shows. Jacob was a deceiver. Judah took a prostitute who happened to be the wife of his dead sons. David, the best of the Old Testament Kings, had a man killed because he would not lay with his wife to cover up the fact that David had taken her for himself and that a child was on the way. The ones chosen by God are not saintly by the world’s standards at all. That’s just the Old Testament, the New Testament is just as littered with unlikely saints, Paul being the most profound.

But that is what our Lord does. He does not find saints, instead he makes them. He makes saints out of sinners. He takes hold of them, gives them his love, through his Son Jesus, says, “Forgiven, free, mine!” He makes them clean, He cleanses them just as He cleansed you by water and the word to be his holy bride. And that’s no matter who you are. Jesus wants you for himself. He came that you might be His and His alone.

Rev. Jacob Hercamp
St. Peter’s Lutheran Church
La Grange, MO