How Can We Preach like Mary Magdalene?

Last summer I was blessed to make a pilgrimage to La Sainte-Baume, which literally means the Holy Cave. It’s in the south of France near Marseille, and it’s where—according to a tradition maintained for centuries—Mary Magdalene lived out the remaining years of her life after the Resurrection and Ascension of Jesus. It’s a majestic place of quiet and contemplation on the side of a sheer mountain ridge. For several hundred years now, this shrine has been in the care of Dominican friars, because our Order has always honored Mary Magdalene as a special patroness. We are the Order of Preachers, and she was the first to proclaim the Resurrection of Jesus. All Christian preaching, in some way, can trace itself to that first exhilarating moment when this formerly sinful woman ran to tell the Apostles about the empty tomb.

But there’s a deeper relationship still between our vocation and Mary Magdalene. Our preaching is not just sharing information. We dedicate our lives to contemplating and then handing on what we’ve contemplated, intimately encountering Jesus in our own lives of prayer and then inviting everyone else into that same encounter. John’s Gospel tells us that Mary Magdalene “came to the tomb early in the morning, while it was still dark.” She is the first to share the marvelous light of Jesus’s Resurrection precisely because she is the first to do him honor even in the darkness of his burial. As the Venerable Fulton Sheen says, “Unless there is a Cross in our lives, there will never be an empty tomb.” How fitting, then, that Mary Magdalene would go on to live so much of her life in another cave, a place of contemplation that would resemble the very tomb where she received the greatest news in history.

Even if we can’t see Jesus in the same way that the first disciples did when he walked among us, all of us—Dominican or not—are invited to encounter and share the power of his Resurrection. The more we enter the quiet cave of prayer, the more we die to ourselves and are inwardly conformed to God’s Love, the more our lives will declare that Jesus is risen and death is defeated. Which brings me back to my own pilgrimage last summer. Inside La Sainte-Baume there’s a full chapel where the priest with whom I was traveling was able to offer Mass, and—when Mass was done—I thought about what a remarkable thing it is that the same Jesus who rose up from that cave in Jerusalem 2,000 years ago was now present in this cave, ready to share his life with me just like he shared it with Mary Magdalene, with his Apostles, and with so many of the great French saints who had made this same pilgrimage through the centuries. That same Risen Lord waits for all of us once again at Mass this Easter and indeed every Sunday. Run to meet him there, brothers and sisters. Happy Easter!

Image: La Sainte-Baume, Marseille, France