I Have Seen The Lord: The Feast of Mary Magdalene (John 20:11-18)

July 22, 2026, Feast of Mary Magdalene, Season after Pentecost

John 20:11–18, Psalm 42:1–7, 2 Corinthians 5:14–20a, Judges 4:4–10

Grace, mercy, and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ be with you on this feast of Saint Mary Magdalene.

Three days ago, on Proper 10, the parable of the wheat and the tares invited us to wait. Let both grow until the harvest. The Son of Man will send his angels at the close of the age. The harvest belongs to him and to his timing, not to us. It was a word for a long season: patient, faithful, groaning alongside creation for what has not yet fully come.

Today the feast interrupts that patience with an announcement. The harvest has already begun. The first Sunday after Pentecost to the last in November: all of it is the long ordinary season of the Church’s formation, the field with wheat and tares growing together. But in the middle of that long season, on July 22, a woman who came to a tomb in the dark stands up and says four words that change everything: “I have seen the Lord.” (John 20:18, ESV) The empty tomb she found is the sign that the new creation has already started. The harvest of the resurrection has already begun. The wheat and tares still grow together in the world, but in the risen Christ the first fruits have appeared. Mary Magdalene is the first to know it, and the Church gathers today to hear her say what she said: I have seen the Lord.

Scripture tells us almost nothing about Mary’s life before she encountered Jesus, and what it tells us is stark. Luke 8:2 introduces her in a single clause: “Mary, called Magdalene, from whom seven demons had gone out.” (Luke 8:2, ESV) Seven demons. The number is not explained. The nature of the affliction is not spelled out. We are only told that they were many, and that they were gone. She had been their captive; she was captive no longer. And from that day of healing forward, she followed Jesus. The collect for this feast keeps exactly the same proportion as Scripture: God’s Son restored her to health of body and of mind, and called her to be a witness of his resurrection. Two things: the healing and the calling. The collect does not speculate about what she had been. It states plainly what she became.

What we know about the season between her healing and the crucifixion is told in a single phrase: she followed Jesus. She was among the women who traveled with him and supported his ministry from their own means. She is at the Sea of Galilee, in the villages of Galilee, on the road to Jerusalem. When the disciples scatter at the arrest, she stays. When Peter denies him in the courtyard, she is somewhere in the city. When he is crucified, she is at the foot of the cross. When he is buried, she watches where the body is laid. When the sabbath ends, she is the one who rises early and goes to the tomb. The whole of her biography between the healing and the resurrection can be stated in one word: she stayed. Not because staying was safe. Because the one who had spoken her name in healing had become the one she could not leave.

Judges 4 gives us an Old Testament type for what Mary represents. Deborah is a prophetess and judge of Israel who summons Barak to lead the army against Sisera and is willing to go with him when he refuses to go without her. She is present where others are reluctant to be present. She announces God’s victory before it happens, and she is there when it does. The pattern that runs from Deborah to Mary is not accidental. Both women are present in moments when the men around them are absent or hesitant. Both bear witness to what God has done. Both are sent with a word that changes everything.

The connection between Deborah and Mary is not merely that both are women who bear witness in a man’s world. It is that both are present in moments of crisis when the appointed leaders are absent or uncertain, and both carry a word from God that changes the direction of the story. Barak will not go without Deborah; when she goes with him, Sisera’s army is routed and the victory belongs to God. The disciples have not yet believed without Mary; when she goes to them, the resurrection proclamation begins to take root in the world. In both cases, the woman goes. In both cases, the victory that follows belongs to God alone. The one who bears the word is not the source of the word; she is simply willing to carry it.

Psalm 42 is the prayer appointed for this feast, and it is Mary Magdalene at the tomb before she knows the tomb is empty. “As a deer pants for flowing streams, so pants my soul for you, O God. My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. When shall I come and appear before God?” (Psalm 42:1–2, ESV) The psalmist is in a place of desolation. The presence he once knew is gone. He remembers what it was to worship, and the remembering is its own grief. But he does not let go. He pants. He thirsts. He keeps asking when he will see the face of God again. Mary at the tomb is this psalm in a person. She is not resigned to the absence. She weeps, she looks, she asks the angels, she asks the man she supposes to be the gardener: where have they laid him? She will not accept that he is simply gone. She keeps looking for the one she loves.

And the one she is looking for is already there.

John 20:14–16: Mary turns and sees Jesus standing, but she does not recognize him. He speaks: why are you weeping, whom are you seeking? She supposes him to be the gardener. She asks where the body has been taken. She will go and get him herself if she must. And then the single word the whole passage turns on: “Mary.” (John 20:16, ESV) He speaks her name. She turns a second time. She recognizes him, not by sight, but by sound: the voice of the one she loves, speaking the name that belongs to her and to no one else. Her answer is the Aramaic word for Teacher: Rabboni (rah-BOH-nee). One word for his one word. The risen Lord has spoken. The resurrection is no longer an empty tomb or a folded cloth or two angels in white. It is a voice. It is a name. It is the one she has been looking for, standing in front of her, alive.

It is worth sitting with this moment before moving past it. Mary has spoken with two angels and not recognized the significance of the conversation. She has looked directly at the risen Lord and not recognized him. Her grief has, in some sense, blinded her: she is looking for a dead body, not a living person. She is in the posture of every person who has ever looked for God in the wrong place, in the place where he was rather than the place where he is. And the correction does not come through argument or evidence or the display of wounds. It comes through her name. One word. The unique sound that belongs to her and has been spoken over her since her mother first held her. He says it, and she knows.

John 10:3–4 said it in advance: “The sheep hear his voice, and he calls his own sheep by name and leads them out… and the sheep follow him, for they know his voice.” (John 10:3–4, ESV) Mary Magdalene is the first fulfillment of that promise after the resurrection. The good shepherd has laid down his life. He has taken it up again. And the first thing he does on Easter morning is call one of his sheep by name, “Mary”. She knows his voice. She follows.

He then sends her. “Go to my brothers and say to them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’” (John 20:17, ESV) The one who had been healed and had followed and had stayed at the cross and had come early to the tomb in the dark is now commissioned. She is sent with a message, exactly as a prophet is sent with a message, exactly as an apostle is sent with a message. The ancient tradition’s title for her, apostola apostolorum, the apostle to the apostles, is not an overstatement. She carries the first resurrection proclamation to the ones who will carry it to the world.

And the proclamation she carries is not a theological position or a report of an empty tomb. It is a testimony. “I have seen the Lord.” (John 20:18, ESV) Not: I believe something remarkable has occurred. Not: the tomb appears to be empty. I have seen the Lord. First-person singular. Past tense. Personal. She is not reporting what others have experienced; she is testifying to what she herself has seen. This is the difference between hearsay and testimony, between secondhand faith and the witness of the one who was there. This is the shape of all genuine Christian witness: not argument, not evidence, not persuasion, but the testimony of the one who has encountered the risen Christ and cannot say anything else. Before Peter preached at Pentecost, before Paul wrote his letters, before any epistle or council or creed, a woman from Magdala who had been healed of seven demons stood in front of the disciples and said these four words. For a few hours on Easter morning, the entire resurrection proclamation rested on her word alone, and she did not flinch from it.

Paul writes in 2 Corinthians 5:17–18: “If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come. All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation.” (2 Corinthians 5:17–18, ESV) What Mary carried to the disciples that morning was not only news. It was the ministry of reconciliation in its first moment: the announcement that the God who was in Christ had conquered death and was reconciling the world to himself. The old had passed away. The new had come. The empty tomb was the sign of the new creation that the resurrection inaugurated. Mary stood at the threshold of the two ages and said: I have seen the Lord. She was carrying the new creation’s first message to the people who would carry it to the world.

It is worth noting what Mary’s commission means for the community she carries the word to. Luke tells us her report seemed to the disciples an idle tale, and they did not believe. John adds that even after Peter and the beloved disciple saw the empty tomb for themselves, they did not yet understand the Scripture, that he must rise from the dead. (John 20:9) The first Easter proclamation was not immediately believed. The apostle to the apostles carried the word to men who could not yet receive it. This is the shape of faithful witness in every age: we say what we have seen; we cannot do more. Even eyewitness testimony requires the Spirit’s illumination to be received as truth. Our role is faithful witness, not guaranteed immediate belief. The Spirit does the rest.

The one who spoke Mary’s name in the garden speaks still. The collect for this feast moves from Mary’s story to ours in the characteristic Anglican way: the historical action of God becomes the ground of present petition. He restored her to health of body and of mind; now we ask: “Mercifully grant that, by your grace, we may be healed from all our infirmities and know you in the power of his unending life.” (BCP 2019, p. 630) Her healing is not only her story. It is the pattern of what God does. Whatever holds us captive, whether illness of body, darkness of mind, addiction, the grief that will not lift, doubt that has settled like a fog, or the spiritual oppression that the seven demons in Mary’s life represented: the seven demons were not a biblical metaphor for emotional difficulty; they were real spiritual powers, personal evil, tormenting spirits. The collect does not speculate about the nature of what afflicted her. It uses the language of restoration, health of body and of mind, comprehensive enough to include demonic oppression without reducing it to metaphor or naming it more than Scripture does. And it does not minimize our own need. It brings us to the same Lord who spoke Mary’s name and says: do for us what you did for her. The Lord who cast out seven demons can address whatever holds us. There is no category of captivity outside his reach. Heal us. Call us. Send us.

There is a final word from this feast that belongs to everyone who has prayed the long prayer of Psalm 42, who has thirsted for the living God in a season when the felt presence of God was absent, who has come to the tomb in the dark and wept and asked where the Lord has gone. The Feast of Mary Magdalene says: keep looking. The one you are looking for is already there. He has not abandoned the field. He has not forgotten the one who came early. The same Lord who spoke her name in the garden on Easter morning is the Lord who speaks ours.

We do not all come to faith in the same darkness or at the same hour. Some of us have long seasons when the presence we once felt is simply absent, when we come to the place where we expected to find the Lord and find only the folded cloths of what used to be. The Feast of Mary Magdalene does not minimize that experience. It honors the one who lived inside it fully: she wept, she asked, she kept looking. What the feast says is that the Lord who was present in her healing did not abandon her in her grief. He was already at the tomb when she arrived. He spoke her name before she recognized him. The recognition came not because she found him but because he found her.

The Feast of July 22 is not primarily a commemoration. It is the annual invitation to stand with Mary at the threshold of the empty tomb and say what she said, not as a historical report about a first-century event but as a present testimony about the living Lord who still speaks names and still sends his witnesses: “I have seen the Lord.”

The collect ends with a remarkable phrase: “know you in the power of his unending life.” Not know about him. Not know the facts of his biography or the claims of his resurrection. Know him. The word is personal, relational, the same knowing that is implied in John’s account of the resurrection: Mary does not recognize him by sight, but she knows his voice speaking her name. To know him in the power of his unending life is to be the kind of person who recognizes his voice when he speaks, who turns when he calls, who can say in response to his word what Mary said in response to hers. The feast of July 22 is the annual invitation to be that person.

The Feast of July 22 is the annual invitation to say it with her: “I have seen the Lord.”

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.