The Suffering of Mary Magdalene

Have you ever received news so devastating that you wished you could rewind time—not to prevent the tragedy, but simply to have been warned? Perhaps a sudden diagnosis, an unexpected layoff, or the betrayal of someone you trusted. In those moments, we often think, "If only I had known what was coming, I could have prepared myself. The blow wouldn't have landed so hard."

Perhaps you've had anxious thoughts about what kind of unknown suffering or sorrow you might face in the future. My wife has a friend who just lost her 18 year-old daughter to cancer, she passed yesterday. As a parent, when I hear of things like this, I'd be lying if it didn't strike me with a kind of horror. I can't imagine what it would be like to go through that if it were one of my children, if it was my spouse. Even thinking about my parents in their 70s, I often wonder how many more years we'll have. How will I handle it when the news comes that one of them is dying? How will I cope?

Maybe, must maybe, I'm tempted to ask, if somehow I saw such a loss coming, if God warned me, would I handle it better? Would it spare me a modicum of the pain I'll go through if such a thing happens?

This tension between knowing and not knowing, between preparation and surprise, opens a window into one of the most profound mysteries of human suffering—and nowhere is this mystery more beautifully illustrated than in the story of Mary Magdalene at the tomb.

 

The Spices She Didn't Need to Buy

Picture Mary Magdalene on that terrible Friday afternoon. The Gospel of Mark tells us she was there, watching as Joseph of Arimathea wrapped Jesus' body and laid it in the tomb (Mark 15:47). She observed where he was laid. She made mental notes. Already, perhaps, she was planning her return.

The Sabbath must have been pure agony—those long hours when Jewish law prevented her from acting on her grief. But "when the sabbath was over, Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James, and Salome, bought spices, so that they might go and anoint him" (Mark 16:1).

Think about that shopping trip. These women, devastated by grief, walking through the marketplace. The vendor measuring out myrrh and aloes. The exchange of coins. The weight of the spices in their hands. Every step of this process was a meditation on loss, a physical participation in the reality that the one they loved was gone.

Now imagine hypothetically if Jesus had pulled Mary aside on Thursday evening. Imagine him saying, "Mary, tomorrow will be difficult. You'll see me crucified. But don't despair, and certainly don't waste your money on burial spices—I'll be rising on Sunday morning."

Would this knowledge have been a mercy? At first glance, perhaps. But let's look deeper.

 

The Apostle to the Apostles

If Mary had known the ending in advance, would she have stood at the foot of the cross with the same devastating solidarity? Would her tears have carried the same weight? When she ran to tell the disciples, "I have seen the Lord" (John 20:18), would her testimony have rung with the same transformative power?

St. Thomas Aquinas gave Mary Magdalene the title Apostola Apostolorum—the Apostle to the Apostles—recognizing that she was the first to announce the resurrection to those who would carry the Gospel to the ends of the earth. But this title wasn't just about being first in chronological order. It was about the authority that comes from having traveled the full journey from despair to hope, from death to life.

The Greek word for witness is martys, from which we get our word martyr. To be a witness, in the deepest sense, is not simply to report facts but to testify with one's whole being—to have been so transformed by an encounter that your very existence becomes evidence of its truth. Mary's witness was powerful precisely because she had not been spared the full weight of loss.

 

The Participation That Transforms

There's something profound happening here. As Pope Benedict XVI observed in his encyclical Spe Salvi: "It is not by sidestepping or fleeing from suffering that we are healed, but rather by our capacity for accepting it, maturing through it and finding meaning through union with Christ, who suffered with infinite love" (Spe Salvi, 37).

Mary Magdalene's suffering was not pointless—it was participatory. St. Paul would later articulate this mystery: "Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I complete what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church" (Colossians 1:24). This doesn't mean Christ's sacrifice was insufficient—far from it. Rather, it means we are invited to unite our sufferings with his, to participate in the great work of redemption not as passive recipients but as active collaborators.

 

Why Stories Succeed Where Philosophy Fails

Here we touch on something essential about human nature. We can read all the theological treatises on suffering—from Augustine's City of God to C.S. Lewis's The Problem of Pain—and still find ourselves unmoved. We can understand intellectually that "suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope" (Romans 5:3-4), yet still feel that our own pain is meaningless.

But when we see Mary Magdalene weeping at the tomb, something shifts. We're not receiving an argument; we're witnessing a transformation. We see ourselves in her confusion when she mistakes Jesus for the gardener (John 20:15). We feel the shock of recognition when he speaks her name. We understand in our bones what it means to have our "mourning [turned] into dancing" (Psalm 30:11).

The "story" of enduring suffering is the only way that explanations, like those offered by St. Paul, actually hit home in a way that makes sense not just to the mind, but the heart. This is why God saw fit to give us a New Testament that is built on the foundation of the Apostolic witness—on the Gospels. The Epistles have to be read in the light that's cast upon them by the Gospels. Without the narrative of the Cross and the Empty Tomb, the theological explanations remain dry abstractions. We need the story to ground the truth.

The heart learns more by loving than the mind by studying.

Mary Magdalene's story teaches us about suffering not by explaining it, but by showing us how one woman's devastation became the seedbed of apostolic joy.

 

The Hidden Mercy of Not Knowing

Return now to our original question: Why didn't Jesus spare Mary the suffering by telling her in advance? Perhaps because advance knowledge would have robbed her of something precious—the opportunity for her love to be purified and proven in the crucible of loss.

Consider how we treat those we know we're about to lose. There's often a desperate quality to our love, a grasping that paradoxically pushes away the very presence we're trying to hold. When I was a pastor I had the priviledge of being with several people (and their families) in their last moments. People react in a lot of ways, but one that's startingly common is that sometimes those who love the person who is dying the most avoid being there. They struggle to accept it, to face it. I think that's one reason why (in addition to being afraid) that so many of the Apostles ran away and weren't there at the foot of the cross with Mary Magdalene, Mary Jesus' Mother, and the Apostle John.

But Mary's love for Jesus after his death was pure gift—she expected nothing in return. She came to anoint a corpse. The service she offered was entirely gratuitous, born not of hope for reciprocation but of pure devotion.

In other words, the money spent on those spices wasn't wasted. Far from it!

This is what the mystics call "disinterested love"—love that seeks no reward, that gives without counting the cost. It's the kind of love God has for us, and suffering often seems to be the strange workshop where this divine love is forged in human hearts.

 

The Authority of Scars

When Mary proclaimed "I have seen the Lord!" she spoke with an authority that couldn't be contradicted. She had been to the absolute bottom—the place where hope dies—and had discovered that even there, especially there, Christ was present. Her tears gave weight to her testimony. Her scars became her credentials.

This is why, throughout Christian history, it has often been those who suffered most who spoke most powerfully about joy. St. John of the Cross wrote his most luminous poetry about divine love while imprisoned in a dark cell. Julian of Norwich received her revelations of God's love while suffering from what she believed was a mortal illness. St. Therese of Lisieux wrote what might be the greatest exposition on Divine Love ever composed outside of the Bible in her Story of a Soul which she wrote on her deathbed. These weren't people who spoke about theoretical suffering from comfortable armchairs—they were witnesses who had purchased their wisdom with pain.

Practical Applications: Living the Story

How do we apply Mary Magdalene's story to our own lives?

Resist the temptation to fast-forward through suffering. When we're in pain, our instinct is to numb it or rush toward resolution. But Mary's story suggests there's value in staying present to our grief, in "buying the spices" even when it hurts. Remember, even Jesus wept after Lazarus died, all the while knowing what he was about to do. Jesus allowed himself to feel the pain. He cried in agony in the Garden of Gethsemane even though he could have numbed himself with divine power, even though He knew he'd rise again in three days.

Look for the invitation hidden in your suffering. Mary's devastation didn't disqualify her from apostleship—it prepared her for it. What might your current struggle be preparing you to become? What authority might your scars be conferring?

Remember that not knowing what's coming is sometimes a gift. We often pray for clarity, but perhaps the uncertainty is part of the formation. We learn to trust not because we can see the path, but precisely because we cannot.

Allow your suffering to unite you with Christ and his body. Mary stood at the cross with others; she went to the tomb with companions. Suffering shared is suffering transformed. Find your community.

 

The Dawn That Always Comes

Mary Magdalene has become for twenty centuries a sign of hope for all who mourn. Not because she was spared suffering, but because she shows us what lies on the other side of it. She reminds us that our tears are precious to God, that he "keeps count of my tossings" and puts our "tears in [his] bottle" (Psalm 56:8).

The spices she bought were not wasted, even though they were never used for their intended purpose. They were transformed from instruments of burial into symbols of love's persistence beyond death. Similarly, our own wrestling with grief is being woven into a story whose ending we cannot yet see but whose Author we can trust.

In her tears, we see our own. In her joy, we glimpse our future. And in her story, we discover that the question is not whether we will suffer, but whether we will allow our suffering to become a doorway to resurrection.

The next time you find yourself wishing you had been spared, remember Mary and her unnecessary spices. Remember that sometimes the greatest mercy is not to be saved from suffering, but to be saved through it. The God who seems silent on Friday knows your name and will speak it on Sunday morning.

And when that morning comes—as it always does, as it always will—you too will run to tell the others: "I have seen the Lord!"