Mary Magdalene and Jesus and Easter Morning

The following is an article by Loretta Kimsley about Jesus and Mary Magdalene, who may have been his wife and lover.

"I read…the sto­ry of the great­est morn in his­to­ry: “The first day of the week com­eth Ma­ry Mag­da­lene ear­ly, while it was yet ve­ry dark, unto the se­pul­cher.” In­stant­ly, com­plet­ely, there un­fold­ed in my mind the scenes of the gar­den of Jo­seph….Out of the mists of the gar­den comes a form, halt­ing, he­si­tat­ing, tear­ful, seek­ing, turn­ing from side to side in be­wil­der­ing amaze­ment. Fal­ter­ing­ly, bear­ing grief in ev­e­ry ac­cent, with tear-dimmed eyes, she whis­pers, “If thou hast borne him hence”… “He speaks, and the sound of His voice is so sweet the birds hush their sing­ing.” Je­sus said to her, “Mary!” Just one word from his lips, and for­got­ten the heart­aches, the long drea­ry hours….all the past blot­ted out in the pre­sence of the Liv­ing Pre­sent and the Eter­nal Fu­ture."




So wrote Aus­tin Miles in March 1912. Miles was the author of my favorite hymn, In The Garden. When I was a child, I did not know it was about Mary Magdalene or the depth of the role she played in the life of Yeshua.



In The Garden is the story of their meeting in the garden after his resurrection. It's refrain is simple, deep and filled with love:



And He walks with me, and He talks with me,

And He tells me I am His own;

And the joy we share as we tarry there,

None other has ever known.



None other...that speaks of a special love as does his choice of her to be the first witness to his resurrection. In The Dialogue of the Savior, a Gnostic text that was discovered in 1945 in Nag Hammadi, Egypt, Mary Magdalene is termed The Woman Who Knew The All.



But what is The All? It isn't what we're taught in church on Sunday.



I've long known that what was translated as Kingdom of Heaven would have been Queendom of Heaven in Aramaic. Maldukah, a feminine word, refers to the lower circle of the Tree of Life in Kabbalah, a sefirot related to Shekinah and expressed in Jewish tradition in feminine terms. The Greek term for kingdom is Basilia, which means "basis" and that was the word used to translate the passage into Greek.



Even so, when I found these two references, I was surprised to have the Queendom to be directly related to Mary Magdalene and The All.



From The Hidden Gospel: Decoding the Spiritual Message of the Aramaic Jesus by Neil Douglas-Klotz



...They [male disciples like Peter] had to keep asking what things meant and really held tight to the idea of a physical kingdom in this world versus what Magdalene understood by the 'Queendom is within' which is actually the literal translation of the Aramaic 'the Kingdom is within'. The term malduka speaks to Queen and not King...



.Seeking the Kingdom by Savitr Ishaya is a long and wonderfully written article about our oneness with The All. I pulled out a paragraph to use as highlight but to understand fully, the entire article should be read:



The Aramaic word we translate as "kingdom" is malkutah, or 0tuklm (Ah-T-K-L-M); the word we read as "heaven" is shemaya, or 0ym4 (Ah-Y-M-Sh ); and the word that Jesus always uses for "God" in this particular context is Alaha, or 0hl0. (Ah-H-L-Ah). If we could imagine a western-style Grammar based on the Hebrew alphabet, it would be correct to say that the meaning of a word is presaged, or foreshadowed, by the meaning of its first letter. The first letter of malkutah is Meem (m), which is an extremely feminine letter and which, at the beginning of a word, refers to a very proximate reality. Moving directly to the patterns formed by the individual root letters, we find the following: M-L = A full, or completely formed, expression; K-T = Envelopment, mystery, a hiding place; and Ah (Alap) by itself, meaning God, Sacred Unity, The All that gives birth to the all..



So The All is Sacred Unity. We do not need a historical and agonizing blood sacrifice to be part of The All because we are already part of The All. The All is the queendom we find within and that exists around us.



In this context, Yeshua's relationship with Mary Magdalene is clear and very understandable. Margaret Starbird writes extensively about their relationship and their expression of The Sacred Union. On my Mary Magdalene discussion list, Margaret recently wrote:



The "Easter Mysteries" of Christianity begin with the anointing of the Sacred Bridegroom, suffer through the sacrificial death of the Bridegroom/King and culminate with his resurrection and the reunion of the Beloveds in the garden. This "never-ending story" celebrates the eternal--cyclical-- return of the Life Force at the vernal equinox. The sad fact is that, while celebrating the "new birth" inherent in the Resurrection of the Christ, Christianity failed to notice the role of the Bride--the "Sacred Complement" of the sacrificed King. The image of the Divine as "Partners" was lost when the Bride was silenced and defamed.



Clearly, the "sacrifical death" was not factual. It was mythical, representing the importance of our Selves in The All and the eternal cycle of life. This cycle of eternal life is not complete without the sacred feminine anymore than it would be without the sacred masculine. Mile's In The Garden interpretation of "the sto­ry of the great­est morn in his­to­ry" reflects this joyous reality, as expressed in the rites of spring when life begins anew and in great abundance.