The Disciple Jesus Loved

 Nancy Schnieders is a feminist biblical scholar. I have chosen her book, Written that You May Believe, to get acquainted with a field of study regarding the Gospel of John, and in particular the scholarly treatment of Mary Magdalene in John 20. In John’s Gospel, Jesus invites Mary Magdalene to cross the threshold between despair and hope, spiritual blindness and sight, the economy of history and that of resurrection. 

John  20 is in many ways Mary’s story. The utter hopelessness she feels as she discovers the empty tomb so engulfs Mary that she is completely distraught. Being addressed by angelic messengers doesn’t penetrate her grief, which has left her spiritually blinded. Even when Jesus stands in front of her and speaks to her she doesn’t recognize him. Ironically she misidentifies him as the “gardener”which in reality he is, preparing the garden of God’s kingdom. But she can’t distinguish between the missing body of Jesus and his person.  Schneiders says she continually confuses “him” who is missing with “the body” that is missing. Mary is a victim of blinding spiritual sadness and hopelessness.

Mary is insistent, when she faces Jesus, that this person is not the object of her search. She is still looking for a body, not a living person. As a result Schneiders defines Mary’s “turning back” as a turning toward what lies behind;we’re reminded of Paul’s personal commitment: “Not that I have already obtained this or am already perfect; but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own.  Brethren, I do not consider that I have made it my own; but one thing I do, forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead,  I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus. (Philippians 3:12-14 Revised Standard Version)

It would not surprise me if Schneiders has thoroughly absorbed Kathleen Norris’s Acedia and Me, a personal treatise on “acedia, the deadly sin of sloth; spiritual torpor and apathy; a mental syndrome, the chief features of which are listlessness, apathy, and melancholia.” This is where Mary is trapped in her turning, moving not toward faith and the future but toward the past and death.

Norris relates at length her inquiry of Kierkegaard. In her study of acedia and despair, she states,

Kierkegaard valued the insight of Christian ancients in naming despair a sin, even as he presented a new term, “the sickness unto death,” that would so accurately describe contemporary humanity. Yet even as we suffer from this malady , Kierkegaard maintains, we are not merely ill but also caught up in the “battle of faith.” When someone faints,” he writes, “we call for water, Eau de Cologne, smelling salts; but when someone wants to despair, then the word is: Get possibility, possibility is the only salvation … for without possibility a person seems unable to breathe. (Norris, p 166-7) 

Mary’s dilemma often becomes ours.

Her conversion, for Schneiders, hinges on her protagonist finding a new possibility while caught in the grip of despair. In the face of a pandemic we ask, “When will everything return to the way it was?” Frankly it won’t. We can’t step in the same river twice, pandemic or no. Like Mary, what we’re caught up in isn’t working, but it is nonetheless inviting, this business of turning back to what we’ve embraced before. Mary, John hints, isn’t intent on opening a hair salon or a restaurant He suggests that she is the disciple Jesus loved. And her ultimate concern is, in John’s mind, salvation. For her salvation, Jesus offers the true conversion, the true possibility encased in calling her by name. He calls his own sheep by name, and they know his voice and they follow him (see 10:3-5

).

Returning to a previous paper, Mary and Easter, “www.Sailing Howard Prairie.blogspot.com” (April 1, 2021) I stated that John’s Gospel can become most confusing. It is easy to get lost in it. This is especially true in ch. 20, where a seemingly infinite number of commentators have addressed Mary’s role and the conflicts it engenders. There is tension in her relationship with the disciples, the political issues raised, the intent of the church to subsume Mary’s person to no more than a foil to deal with the resurrection, the male-female dynamics that pertain to every social system since the crucifixion, and finally the possibility of a physical, emotional, and moral love relationship between Jesus and Mary, the Disciple Jesus Loved.If the issues intrigue you, think about what Mary and Jesus meant to each other, and what you and Jesus likewise mean.