The Real Mary Was There All Along
Recovering the Witness Who Never Left—and the Love That Never Died
How does someone get written out of history when her presence was never in question?
That’s the central paradox of Mary Magdalene’s role in Holy Week.
Every canonical Gospel names her at the tomb. Three place her at the burial. At least that many put her at the crucifixion. In terms of narrative consistency, no other disciple—not even Peter—is more reliably present across the Paschal Mystery.
And yet… she is virtually invisible in the liturgical memory of the Church.
Not because Scripture forgot her. Because we did.
What Opened the Eyes
In her retreat series Through Holy Week with Mary Magdalene, Episcopal priest and contemplative teacher Cynthia Bourgeault shares the moment this omission came into sharp relief. During a Holy Week visit to the monastic community at Vézelay, France, she witnessed an entombment ceremony unlike anything in the American or British liturgical tradition.
Three nuns carried the corpus—a sculpted body of Christ—to the altar, wrapped it in the altar cloth (symbolic of the shroud), lit candles, and read from the Gospel of Matthew.
And there it was:
“Mary Magdalene and the other Mary were sitting there, opposite the tomb.” (Matthew 27:61)
For Bourgeault, this line landed like a thunderclap. She had presided over years of Good Friday services, sung the great Bach Passions, and yet had never consciously registered that Magdalene was there at the burial. A key moment. A named presence. A steady witness.
It was in the Bible all along.
So why had it been invisible?
The Answer: Liturgy Shapes Memory
The Church teaches its theology not just through Scripture, but through what it reads aloud, what it enacts in ritual, and what it visualizes in sacred art. In other words, liturgy shapes memory.
And Western liturgy largely left Magdalene out.
The readings for Holy Week focus heavily on Peter’s denial and Judas’ betrayal. We sing entire cantatas about Peter’s remorse. But Mary Magdalene’s constancy—her presence at the cross, tomb, and resurrection—rarely makes it into the spoken or sung parts of the liturgy.
Even when Scripture explicitly names her, traditional lectionaries skip the verse. For instance, John 19:25 reads:
“Standing near the cross of Jesus were his mother, his mother’s sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene.”
But the standard liturgical reading of the Passion often jumps straight to verse 26, erasing her presence in one seamless editorial cut.
This isn’t an oversight. It’s a pattern.
Redacted by Art as Well
In most Western crucifixion art, the viewer is presented with a familiar scene: Jesus hangs on the cross, with his mother Mary standing to the left, and John—the beloved disciple—to the right. These two figures become the visual shorthand for “those who stayed.”
Where is Mary Magdalene?
If she’s there at all, it’s often as a weeping figure kneeling at a distance. Passionate but powerless. Emotional but sidelined. She is never centered. Rarely upright. Almost never the equal of the others.
This artistic marginalization is just as powerful as the liturgical one. What we see in sacred art becomes what we assume is true. Over time, omission becomes “truth.” And like any redaction that persists for centuries, it becomes invisible.
Even to the faithful.
Even to the clergy.
Even to those who thought they knew the story.
The Gospel Record: A Threefold Witness
When one strips away the centuries of visual and liturgical erasure and simply reads the text, a startling picture emerges:
At the Cross: Mary Magdalene is named explicitly in Matthew, Mark, and John. In Luke, she is referenced just a verse earlier, grouped with the “women who had followed him from Galilee.”
At the Burial: Matthew, Mark, and Luke describe her watching as Jesus is placed in the tomb.
At the Tomb: All four Gospels. Without exception. She is the first to arrive, and in Matthew and John, the first to encounter the risen Christ.
From a textual-historical perspective, this level of agreement across four different Gospel traditions is rare and immensely significant. It means her presence was part of the bedrock of early Christian memory.
And yet—she’s still portrayed as a footnote.
What We Lose When She’s Missing
When Mary Magdalene is left out of Holy Week, the narrative shifts. It becomes a story of abandonment. Of male cowardice. Of isolation and betrayal. And yes, those elements are there.
But so is love. So is loyalty. So is presence.
If Magdalene is restored to the story, Holy Week becomes a story not just of suffering but of faithful accompaniment. Someone stayed. Someone witnessed. Someone received his last breath—and was still there to greet the first light of resurrection.
And that someone was a woman.
This Is Not a Feminist Agenda. It’s a Wisdom Agenda.
Cynthia Bourgeault makes it clear: this is not about political correctness or even justice, as important as those are. This is about wisdom.
To remain present through crucifixion, burial, and resurrection—not just physically, but emotionally, spiritually—is the fruit of deep inner knowing. It is the fruit of a nondual heart. And Magdalene had it.
Her fidelity is not simply sentimental. It is grounded in a different way of seeing.
As Bourgeault puts it, Mary Magdalene becomes a guide “not only to our wholeness and celebration, but to what I call the alchemical feminine—a guide to the passage that takes us beyond dualism into a unitive way of thinking and seeing.”
That’s why her restoration matters.
Not to correct the record.
But to awaken the heart.
No One Wrote Her Out. We Just Stopped Looking.
We don’t need apocryphal gospels to reclaim Mary Magdalene. The canon never erased her.
She was always there—named in every resurrection account. Present at the cross. Watching the burial. Bearing witness to everything the others abandoned.
The problem isn’t absence. It’s amnesia.
Liturgy trained us not to see her. Art kept her kneeling in the margins. Doctrine turned her into a sinner. Centuries of repetition did the rest.
And so now, when we picture Holy Week, we still see Peter denying, John comforting, Mary weeping—but we miss the one disciple who never fled.
The record is clear. The omission is ours.
She didn’t vanish. We looked away.
Now the question is: do we have the courage to see her again?
Not as a symbol. Not as a footnote. But as the central witness to death, burial, and resurrection.
The first to stay.
The first to see.
The first to be sent.
Not a legend.
A fact.
A woman.
A disciple.
Credits: This article was inspired by Cynthia Bourgeault’s Through Holy Week with Mary Magdalene, a course that dismantled the ritual amnesia I didn’t even know I had. If you’ve ever felt like something’s missing from the story of Holy Week—like there’s a silence that’s too loud to ignore—you might find the missing voice was Magdalene all along.
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Both, Mary Magdalene and Mother Mary were taken out of their true power - the power of woman’s heart, her way of perception. One was made small, the other put on pedestal that’s golden cage. Why? Because that power of the feminine, that love, that wholeness of Mother and Lover, heart and womb, makes us whole and so, not controllable. The whole Christian history evolves around suppressing that and controlling hearts and minds, making Christianity a religion of fear, more than love. Thank you for writing about it!
From the teachings & companionship of Jesus, Mary gained deep inner knowing. She knew that although his human life had ended, his spiritual life was eternal, so she waited because she knew she would see him again. Jesus reassured her by appearing to her again, & his Resurrection assured everyone that there is more to reality than a human life. 🌅