St Mary Magdalen 2026
She turned and said to him in Hebrew, “Rabbouni! ” (which means Teacher).
If, as Samuel Johnson said, ‘Greek, sir, is like lace; every man gets as much of it as he can’,¹ then it would be impolitic professionally and ill-advised for me theologically not to add that Hebrew (or in this case, Aramaic) must be like velvet: an adornment to one who truly understands its value, but all too often a ridiculous superfluity to someone who uses it merely to show off. Our patron, however, obviously knew what she was saying, as much as she knew to whom she was speaking, when she addressed the Risen Lord as Rabbouni, or as St John translates it, ‘My teacher’.
Now, the congregation of this favoured church may be forgiven if we think that ‘Teacher’ does not characterise Jesus in a particularly exceptional light. One can hardly asperge a pew here without several drops of water blessing teachers, who — learned and astute as they surely are — do not quite attain to the stature of Jesus himself. Indeed, one of the classic gestures in biblical scholarship involves deprecating disciples, adversaries, interlocutors of Jesus who address him as ‘teacher’ on the basis that this constitutes an inadequate sign of respect. Thus, many commentators wag their solemn heads at Mary Magdalene, who did not know deeply enough to confess a more profound, more exalted faith in Jesus than to call him ‘teacher’. Why, he might as well be just another non-stipendiary lecturer!
Now, granted that there’s nothing so exalted about teachers as a category; most of us will have encountered diffident, unsatisfactory teachers at one point or another in our lives, and if there’s one thing you could never call Jesus, it would be ‘diffident’ or ‘unsatisfactory’. But St John consistently refers to Jesus’s activity as teaching, throughout the gospel. Many of the characters in the gospel call him Rabbi or Teacher, from St Andrew to Nicodemus to the scribes and Pharisees (in the story of the woman caught in adultery), to Martha of Bethany. While scribes and Pharisees and Nicodemus held hostile or perhaps ambiguous views of Jesus, we should hesitate before we lump Andrew, Martha, and Mary in with these to form a nonpartisan panel of people who simply failed to understand Jesus. All the more so since, at the Last Supper, Jesus reminds his disciples, ‘You call me Teacher and Lord — and you are right, for that is what I am.’ Under the circumstances, it seems discourteous at best, and arguably outright wrong-headed, to single out Mary our patron for calling Jesus ‘Teacher’, especially when he himself has agreed that they allhad been doing so, and had told them they were right, for that is what he was.
It’s even more unfair to scold Mary when she has been calling Jesus ‘the Lord’ from the very dawn of Easter morning, twice saying, ‘They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we do not know where they have laid him.’ And when she carries the resurrection gospel to the other disciples, she exclaims to them ‘I have seen the Lord.’ For one disconcerted moment she utters the word Rabbouni, and for centuries afterward critical readers have found fault with her for remaining stuck in the past, attached to her earthly friend and teacher; she ‘keeps holdin’ on’, as the pop song goes, ‘to yesterday’.²
Under this roof, among these aisles, between streets to the East and West that bear her name, in this pulpit and especially at this altar, we do not derogate, but we acclaim Mary. While critics flinch and translators sneer, we keep St Mary’s flag flying here, and this morning I propose that we push back against the prevailing discourses of deprecation. Mary was no flighty, panic-stricken silly woman deluded by dreams, but a sturdy evangelist who, unlike Nathanael, never mocked Jesus’s home town, and unlike Thomas, never called into question the veracity of the witnesses of the resurrection. Mary stood by her Teacher at the foot of the cross, confessed faith in him as Lord, and proclaimed his gospel from Jerusalem perhaps even as far as Vézelay.
Moreover, our Magdalene mission — planted as we are in the foremost intellectual and theological centre in the academic world — calls us to take up Mary’s acknowledgement that Jesus is Lord andTeacher, both obeying his commandment that we love one another, and continuing his Advocate’s work of teaching everything, and guiding us into all truth. She calls us to stay by Jesus’s side in his suffering, not fleeing out of fear or convenience but standing in solidarity with faithful disciples whom the world hates for their love — trusting that their pain, our pain, will be turned to joy. Visiting the tomb, she reminds us to honour the testimony of the holy ones who have handed down the wisdom of the Lord to us, while attending closely to strange new circumstances that call evoke our startled, humbled, recognition that whom we had thought an ordinary gardener was in fact the Way, the Truth, and the Life. She calls us to proclaim the Lordship of Jesus over all the rulers and powers of this world, even every king, making known the glory of God. All this, and more, she entrusts to a congregation drawn here from around England, around our neighbouring nations, from enduring alliances in Europe and newfound friendships from around the world.
Here we may recall Samuel Johnson, though, for despite his prominence as a pioneer of English lexicography and his reputation as a prodigious reader of Greek — greatly to his credit — he was evidently only minimally literate in Hebrew³, and no doubt less so in Aramaic. Mary, contrariwise, would have been able to teach Dr Johnson a thing or two about her primary language⁴; and so it is a matter of no small significance that Rabbouni in several ancient copies of John seems to have been rendered ‘which in Hebrew is Lord’, corresponding to a difference between Rabbouni (from the Aramaic רבון, which only Mary uses in John) and Rabbi (רבי, which St John uses frequently in its ordinary acceptation as ‘scholar-teacher’).⁵ In other words, Mary may even in our morning lesson have been addressing Jesus as her Lord rather than her Teacher. But between St John’s Greek and Aramaic, and Mary’s Aramaic and Greek, and Johnson’s English and Greek, all would have understood well the problems with handing down and translating subtle theological texts; and all, I am sure, would forgive their earnest readers’ incidental confusions. All, likewise, would join us gathered here this morning to acknowledge and praise our patron, Mary Magdalene, Myrrhbearer, Holy and Equal to the Apostles; to affirm the special vocation of St Mary Magdalene Oxford to bear witness in this luminous city, and above all, to confess beside our patron: ‘Rabbouni! We, too, have seen the Lord!’
James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL. D. Vol. 2 (London: Henry Baldwin, 1791), p. 341.
Ambrosia, ‘Holdin’ on to Yesterday’, by David Pack/Joe Puerta, on Holdin’ On To Yesterday (Twentieth Century, 20th Century Records – TC-2207, 1975) 45 rpm single.
Apud Jack Lynch of Rutgers University; J. Lynch (2024), ‘Johnson’s Dictionary and “the Lexicons of Ancient Tongues”.’ LEA – Lingue e Letterature d’Oriente e d’Occidente 13: pp. 27-38. https://doi.org/10.36253/LEA-1824-484x-15825, p. 30.
I have not been able to find more than a single reference, in my casual surveys of Johnsonian writings (including his sermons), to Mary Magdalene; that single reference simply alludes to the Lukan pericope of the woman who washed Jesus’s feet with her hair. ‘He repeated to Mr. Langton, with great energy, in the Greek, our Saviour’s gracious expression concerning the forgiveness of Mary Magdalen, “Η πίστις συ [sic] σεσωκε σε· πορευου εις ειρηνην. Thy faith hath saved thee; go in peace.” He said, “the manner of this dismission is exceedingly affecting.”’ Boswell, Life of Johnson. Vol. 2, p. 331f.
Elizabeth Schrader and Brandon Simonson, ‘“Rabbouni,” which means Lord: Narrative Variants in John 20:16’, TC: A Journal of Biblical Textual Criticism 26 (2021): 133–154, p. 138.