Mary Magdalene: The Feminist Jesus Movie
Fourth Friday of Lent
I was originally going to do next week’s film today, but I switched things up because today is International Women’s Day. Naturally, that means today is set aside for The Feminist Jesus Movie. Mary Magdalene. Starring Rooney Mara in the titular role and Joaquin Phoenix as Jesus. It’s a quiet, intimate, and naturalistic adaptation of the story of both Mary Magdalene and Jesus. The film generally follows the plot and details from the Gospels, but it often branches out and fills in or outright changes the details. Originalists and fundamentalists won’t like this, but I usually prefer these kinds of liberties being taken. I remember when the Visual Bible movies came out when I was a kid, and they were just so boring. The text was verbatim — literally word for word — with no variation whatsoever. Change it up a bit! I’ve even read a few of the Gnostic Gospels, and they’re completely fascinating. Some of them may even date to around the same time as the canonical ones, so they’re not all third, fourth, or fifth century fan fiction forgeries. It makes you wonder about all of the depth and richness of various spiritualities and Christianities that were buried, burned, suppressed, or lost to the centuries. And how much poorer we might be now because of it.
From the very beginning of the film, Mary is set up as an independent, free-thinking woman who will follow neither what her family tells her nor what her society expects of her. The various members of her family are prodding or even pressuring her to get married. Her father comments to her, “It would please God for you to be a mother. It would please me.” Mary doesn’t respond to this; her silence is pregnant with disagreement. How does her father know what God wants? He is speaking only for himself, his family, and his society. Mixing his desires with those of God.
When Mary finally does break away from her constraints and joins Jesus and his followers, her family chases after her. Her oldest brother in particular, the one who has put the most pressure on her to wed, is extremely antagonistic and controlling. He demands she return home, that she has brought shame on her family. Mary refuses. The scene becomes almost a mirror image of a wedding, but instead of her father giving her away with a full blessing to a husband, Mary gives herself away to a rabbi and his movement against the will of her entire family. It almost resembles a first-century beach wedding followed by an impromptu baptism. A new vision of family. “Whoever carries out what God wants is my brother and sister and mother.” (Mark 3:35, The Gospels: A New Translation)
Mary’s family had thought she was crazy. Possessed by demons. Why else would she run off into the night to pray in a synagogue? Women prayed at home with their families or on Shabbat. Why else would she be refusing a marriage proposal? They wake her in the middle of the night and guide her down to the beach where several men wait to perform an exorcism. They try to drown the demon out of her. She thrashes violently in the water, struggling to draw breath for the few moments she remains above the surface before being plunged down again. When she goes limp, from shock or distress or fear, her father finally interrupts the ceremony and brings the attempted exorcism to an end. It has been a violent encounter, attempting to control Mary’s body, mind, and soul, and she goes into a sort of depressed shutdown.
In contrast to this violent scene of dominion and control shown by the men in her family, Mary freely chooses to be baptized herself. After disentangling herself from the suffocating tyranny of patriarchy, she walks into the water ahead of Jesus, silently demanding that he baptize her, that she be visually freed from whatever had been possessing her. It is likely the same body of water as that previous encounter, but the dynamics are completely different. Instead of control, chaos, and violence dominating the interaction, it’s freedom, trust, and love.
Later on when the disciples are sent out in pairs to preach, Mary and Peter come across a cave filled with villagers hiding from the Roman soldiers who had attacked their village. Most of them are either dead or close to death. Peter doesn’t want anything to do with them. “They’re beyond our help,” he insists. Mary won’t hear any of it. She brings water to the people in the caves, and while some of them are too far gone, at least they won’t die alone. Mary’s vision of the kingdom is nurturing. Spreading love and changing the world for its own sake. “The world will only change as we change,” she says later on after witnessing some kind of Resurrection. Peter’s vision of the kingdom is gathering more able-bodied members of society to support the insurrection and rebellion against Rome necessary to implement it. Peter is stuck in the mindset of a coerced exorcism while Mary has advanced to the ethos of a freely-chosen baptism.
One of the most interesting recurring motifs was the midwife imagery used throughout the film. Being present with, accompanying, witnessing. It begins within the first few minutes. Mary is called back from her morning work to help with her sister-in-law’s labor and delivery. Leah is having a very difficult birth, and they “have to stretch her” which probably means that the baby is stuck or breached. Mary lays down on the floor beside Leah, telling her to focus on her and not on what the other women are doing. They hold each other’s eye contact, Mary helping her breathe through the pain and refocus her mind until they hear the baby’s cries. Within the first major scene, Mary Magdalene is established as a gifted and talented midwife.
When we get to the film’s adaptation of the Lazarus story, it’s presented very differently from the Gospels. Jesus and his followers just sort of come upon a funeral scene with mourners gathered around the corpse. He hasn’t been buried yet, and it isn’t clear how long he’s been dead. Just as Mary had laid down next to Leah to midwife her nephew’s difficult birth, Jesus lays down on the ground next to Lazarus to midwife his difficult reawakening into life. In a beautifully mystical scene of rhythmic breathing and elemental flow, Jesus coaxes the breath back into Lazarus’ lungs. As if he were breathing into them himself with some kind of esoteric CPR. The color slowly returns to Lazarus’ skin and his head, to the shock of those watching, suddenly turns toward Jesus. They make eye contact.
Mary doesn’t only midwife life though. She does the same for death. When Peter and Mary came upon that cave of survivors, there was one woman whom they both knew was at the point of death. Peter picks up the woman’s child and walks away so that she won’t witness her mother’s dying breaths. Just as Mary had coaxed the new life from her sister-in-law’s body, she gently coaxes the life from this woman’s failing body. Releasing her from the pain of life with her dignity intact.
The final repetition of this motif includes only Jesus and Mary Magdalene. Just before what comes to be known as the Last Supper, Mary washes Jesus’ feet. It seems that she is the only one who has a decent understanding of his message. It’s clear to both of them that the male disciples don’t get it. They’re all talking about military leaders and revolutions and tactical plans. But Mary Magdalene is on his level. She understands. When Jesus tells her that, “the path, it goes into darkness,” she responds with, “Then I will walk it with you.” And she does. She makes her way to the cross, making direct eye contact with Jesus as she gently stays in solidarity with his suffering. Mary is his midwife in death, and she is there to help release him from his pain.
There is a rich, deep, and ancient history of feminine imagery and metaphors within Christianity. Perhaps most well-known is when Jesus likens himself to a mother hen, gathering her chicks under her wings, when he arrives in Jerusalem for the last time. Aramaic, the native language Jesus would have spoken, was gendered just as Spanish, French, and other Romance languages are today. The Aramaic word for spirit — ru-ah — was feminine. The Gospel of the Hebrews, now lost to us, was sometimes quoted by prominent early Christian scholars. One of the surviving quotes in their writings has Jesus referring to the Holy Spirit as his mother.
The Savior says: Even so did my Mother, the Holy Spirit, take me by one of my hairs and carry me away on to the great mountain Tabor.
When early Christianity moved from the Aramaic-speaking Near East to the Greek-speaking cities of of the Roman Empire, its language had to adjust too. In Greek, the word for spirit wasn’t feminine. Pneuma was neutral. As the faith moved further west toward Rome, the Latin Christians intentionally altered the word for spirit — spiritus — to spirita. Spirita Sancta rather than Spiritus Sanctus. The Holy Spirit was the only feminine face of God they had, and they would rather alter their language than alter Her.
The church itself — not the buildings throughout history but rather the concept of a community of Jesus-followers — has always been described using feminine language. The church is depicted as the Bride of Christ all throughout the New Testament. Even today, it’s a feminine word in Latin-based languages: iglesia, église, chiesa, igreja. Some recent New Testament scholars have also proposed the theory that when Jesus sends out his disciples “two by two” in the Gospels, he was actually sending them out in pairs of one male and one female. Not two male disciples as is often envisioned. Their reasoning is that the language seems to specifically mimic that used in the Genesis account of Noah’s Ark. Noah gathered animals “two by two” which in that case meant one male and one female. It also makes sense from a cultural perspective. Ancient societies were often highly segregated by sex, and there were places men simply could not go. If you had two male disciples trying to preach to a community, then there is an entire half of the community that they have almost no access to. If these scholars are correct in this, then it also makes it more evident of just how important women were to Jesus’ ministry and how many of his original followers were women. They are always there in the background with only a handful ever getting names: Mary Magdalene, Mary and Martha, Salomé, Joanna, Mother Mary. But there were likely many more. It seems that Jesus was an even more egalitarian rabbi than the four canonical Gospels let on.
Jesus also violated several cultural gender norms of his day. According to the Gospels, he was apparently unmarried. This would have been highly unusual for a first-century Jewish man, and even more so for a rabbi. He also taught non-violence while living under foreign occupation when almost all of the great Hebrew heroes of the Old Testament had been fighters and warriors of some kind: Joshua, Gideon, Samson, Saul, David, Jonathan. Even Abraham had won a battle or two. The Maccabees’ revolt was also about as far removed from the time of Jesus as the American Civil War is from us today. This revolution is still commemorated every year at Hanukkah just as Americans commemorate Independence Day every Fourth of July. A violent struggle for freedom, liberty, and independence. And yet Jesus devoted a large portion of his teaching to non-violence, which would almost certainly have been viewed as weak and feminine in that era, culture, religion, and political climate.
Moving a bit forward in history, there was an entire medieval devotion to Jesus’ wounds that were depicted as female genitalia. His side wound in many a medieval prayer book looks suspiciously like a vulva and vaginal opening. Mystics of the era made connections between Jesus’ side wound and the birth of the church itself. Mystical interpretations from the Middle Ages viewed the church as being born from the opening of Christ’s side, emerging somehow alongside the blood and water. Other mystics viewed themselves as being nourished from Christ’s side wound, much like a mother would breastfeed her infant. Some even referred to Jesus as their mother. Just as the Jesus of the Gospels often painted himself with feminine brushstrokes, the Jesus of medieval mysticism was decidedly genderqueer.
Juxtapose all of this with one of the dominant themes in Western Christianity overall, but specifically within evangelicalism: what has come to be referred to as toxic masculinity. You can see it in Western culture overall, but it’s glaringly obvious within American evangelicalism. And even more so in its fundamentalist-leaning flavors.
I’m originally from the Seattle area and attended Seattle Pacific University for my undergraduate studies. The infamous Mars Hill Church was located just over the bridge in Ballard. During the academic year of 2002–2003, Mark Driscoll led a weekly Bible study on campus. I never attended since even then as a thoroughly church-going evangelical, I had gotten creep vibes from him on several occasions. My high school pastor was a sort of protégé of his, and Mark Driscoll had been our summer camp speaker in 1998. Twice a day for a week, my entire youth group of 80+ kids was exposed to his toxic version of Christianity. A few years later when I was shopping around for a Sunday church near SPU, I tried out Mars Hill. I suddenly put two and two together that Mark Driscoll was the creep speaker from that high school summer camp I had attended several years before. I could maybe have looked past that and tried out Mars Hill once or twice more, but that week they were doing Communion. Mark was handing out one of the elements, either grape juice of chalky wafers, but when his wife came up, they kissed while taking Communion in front of the entire congregation. I’m definitely not prudish or anything, but this was weird AF. I had never seen this before in any kind of denomination I had ever attended. There’s a time and place to (briefly) make out with your wife, and Communion ain’t it.
Anyway, about half of the girls on my dorm floor attended his on-campus Bible study. Roughly half of them tended to like these sessions and the other half repeatedly came back annoyed with whatever he was telling them. It was a source of drama on the floor, and apparently in other dorms on campus as well. I was already thoroughly uninterested in attending anything to do with Mars Hill or Mark Driscoll, so I just didn’t pay much attention to the whole situation. But then SPU kicked him and his “Bible study” off campus. Huh, interesting. SPU was hardly a hotbed of leftist sentiment back then (or now). It got around that he had made remarks about how women taking out loans to pay for their education was unfair to their future husbands who would have to pay back those loans with interest. He was essentially suggesting that it would be unethical, maybe even an insult, for women to get an education if their future husbands were going to end up footing the bill at some point in the future. Better to just depend on a man (who might not even exist in your life yet), than better yourself and work hard to achieve your educational and professional goals. This also all happened in the early 2000s when women made up roughly 80 to 90 percent of the student body at SPU. From a financial perspective, I can see why SPU was not amused. The university was (and still is) massively expensive, so a large percentage of its students take out loans to attend. Most of those students are women. And that’s not even touching on the obvious inequality being pushed by this branch of Western Christianity. Denying women an education simply because they are women.
There were also numerous other issues over the years with Mars Hill Church, most if not all stemming from Mark Driscoll’s abrasive personality and domineering obsession with power and control. It appears that the same tactics he used to keep people in line in Seattle are now being used at his new church in Scottsdale, Arizona. Except this time, there are no elders to keep him in check as there were at Mars Hill. (He ignored them anyway.) What’s that old saying? Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. His is just the most visible and dramatic example, and the only one that I encountered somewhat directly, but there are dozens (hundreds probably) of examples of this kind of behavior, rhetoric, and obsession with control. Controlling women. Controlling children. Controlling LGBTQIA+ people. Controlling BIPOC. Controlling non-Christians. Controlling immigrants. Controlling the poor. Controlling anyone and everyone who doesn’t fall exactly within their demographic. At what point do you realize that you’ve lost the plot?
Mary Magdalene ends in the same way it began: diving into the depths of the open water with a voiceover monologue of the parable of the mustard seed. In the opening, Mary is alone. As she rises to the surface in the ending though, we can see the shadows of people rising from the depths with her. As she walks away from her encounter with an unbelieving Peter, she seems to be gathering her fellow female followers to her. The Apostle of the Apostles pledges to continue Jesus’ unfinished work in a way that the male apostles evidently will not. In this film adaptation, they don’t understand him. They don’t really in the Gospels themselves either. Not until later, and even then they get things wrong. Two-thousand years of Christian history, and we have been getting things wrong too. Constantine’s institutionalized church. The Crusades. Religious wars. The Inquisition. Witch hunts. Colonization. Manifest destiny. Dispensationalism. The second-class status of women. The persecution of Jews and Muslims. Christian nationalism. The hatred of LGB, queer, trans, non-White, non-Christian, and non-Western peoples, religions, and worldviews. We have to get beyond it all; God belongs to everyone equally. Male and female, cis and trans, straight and gay, bi/pan and ace, Eastern and Western, Black and White, neurotypical and neurodivergent, rich and poor. God isn’t a White man; They are a spectrum.
I’ll close with one of my favorite quotes from Richard Rohr about the incarnation of God. “He came in mid-tone skin, from the underclass, a male body with a female soul, from an often-hated religion, and living on the very cusp between East and West. No one owns him, and no one ever will.”
