AFTER a predictably dull deanery-synod meeting, one cold and dark December night, I used to be driving home to the vicarage within the centre of Ipswich. The busy Christmas traffic was moving slowly through the red-light district, and one particularly attractive young woman with beautiful teeth was not only standing on the road corner, but smiling and waving on the cars to encourage them to stop.
It was a fearful time in Ipswich. Between October and December 2006, five women can be murdered. Annette — the one I saw that night — became number 4. The media circus was astonishing. Fake news is nothing latest. There were those that were eager to have their comments published within the papers, or to be interviewed on radio or TV. The police (who were wonderful) needed plenty of pastoral care and support.
A yr later, after a few of the dust had settled and the murderer was behind bars, we held a memorial service at St Matthew’s for the ladies: Tania, Gemma, Anneli, Annette, and Paula. In contrast with the time I led the memorial service at St Mary-le-Tower for Sir Alf Ramsey, with members of the victorious ’66 World Cup squad within the congregation, there was neither fuss nor a crowd, and definitely no “survive Sky” TV. The service was deliberately very quiet and low-key; and it was a privilege to satisfy their families.
MANY and varied are the stories and circumstances that lead women into the vulnerable and soiled lifetime of prostitution. Remember I, Daniel Blake, Ken Loach’s deeply disturbing film in regards to the poverty trap, and the plight of the one mother Katie? There is a scene by which Katie goes to the foodbank within the church hall and literally rips the highest off a tin of baked beans because her stomach is so empty. Later, she is caught shoplifting, and compelled to go on the sport, due to her inability to feed her family.
The thread that linked the Ipswich women, who got here from all types of backgrounds, was drugs, and the insatiable need for money to feed that habit. Their boyfriends would drop them off for work on street corners just as any person might drop off their girlfriend or wife on the office. The women would stand on those street corners in all weathers, often soaked to the skin. Much to the credit of the people of Ipswich, they were all the time known as “the ladies” — not as prostitutes. We began a charity, “Somebody’s Daughter”: a moving phrase coined by one in all the locals to explain one in all the ladies; and I used to be one in all the trustees.
I’ll all the time wonder what may need happened if I’d have stopped the automobile that December night and tried to assist Annette. What would I even have said? What would I even have done? Would it have saved her life? (How would I even have explained that one to the Bishop — as an ecclesiastical variation on the activities of former Prime Minister William Gladstone?) But I didn’t. I passed by.
ON MONDAY, the church remembers St Mary Magdalene. Like us all, the normal figure related to that name is a mixed picture, a posh character. Mentally sick, the good-time girl from that busy city on the banks of the Sea of Galilee. What would you expect with all those sailors? The tart with the guts? Traditionally portrayed as sensual, what form of welcome would she get in a lot of our churches?
It is St Luke, along with his special emphasis on the ladies around Jesus, who tells us all too briefly about Jesus driving seven demons from Mary Magdalene. Just before this episode, Luke sets running an exegetical hare — which has encouraged many mistakenly to conflate the 2 events — by recounting the story of the sinful woman within the Pharisee’s house, pouring an alabaster jar filled with perfume over Jesus’s feet and wiping them together with her hair.
But the headline message is that Jesus didn’t pass by. He embraced Mary Magdalene along with his love, channelled her love; and she or he became a key member of his apostolic band. Repeatedly, he didn’t pass by on the opposite side.
IN A sermon marking the 1600th anniversary of the conversion of St Augustine, Rowan Williams reminded us that the story of the Bible is the story of God in the hunt for humanity. Again and again, God in Christ is trying to find — and finding — us.
Jesus trying to find, and finding, and saving the lost is a significant theme for St Luke, and he drives this home with a vivid intensity in those familiar parables (some peculiar to this Evangelist): the lost coin, the lost sheep, and the Prodigal Son.
We aren’t human beings a lot as human becomings. It will not be what we’re but, quite, what, by God’s grace, we may change into that matters. In German, there may be a saying, “Become that which you might be.”
The prophetic Lithuanian poet Czeslaw Milosz, in his poem “Mary Magdalene and I”, says of her:
. . . Forever between
The element of flesh and the element
Of hope, she stays still.
The Johannine encounter within the garden between Mary Magdalene and Jesus should be one of the crucial moving of the resurrection stories: the words, the scene, the emotion — heartbroken despair turned to incredulous joy on the speed of sunshine. The Joshua and the Miriam of history change into the Jesus and Mary Magdalene of religion. The Easter garden becomes the brand new Garden of Eden, a picture of our latest creation in Christ. You can dig for ever into the story of that encounter and never run out of gold.
Mary Magdalene — the one we might have frozen out, the one we might never have invited round (especially if our husband was present) — is the primary witness of the resurrection. With her heart set on fire with joy, she becomes the Apostle to the Apostles, a model of what it’s to be the church on the earth today, and bearer of the excellent news: “I even have seen the Lord.”
The Ven. Peter Townley is an Assistant Curate within the Sherburn-in-Elmet group of parishes within the diocese of York.
