"Da Vinci Code and the Divine Feminine"

The Rev. Bruce Russell-Jayne
May 11, 2008
Northern Hills Fellowship

Reading The Gospel According to Mary Magdalene

Chapter 4 verse 33 through Chapter 5 verse 11
When the Blessed One had said this, He greeted them all, saying, Peace be with you. Receive my peace unto yourselves. Beware that no one lead you astray saying Lo here or lo there! For the Son of Man is within you. Follow after Him! Those who seek Him will find Him. Go then and preach the gospel of the Kingdom. Do not lay down any rules beyond what I appointed you, and do not give a law like the lawgiver lest you be constrained by it. When He said this He departed.

But they were grieved. They wept greatly, saying, How shall we go to the Gentiles and preach the gospel of the Kingdom of the Son of Man? If they did not spare Him, how will they spare us? Then Mary stood up, greeted them all, and said to her brethren, Do not weep and do not grieve nor be irresolute, for His grace will be entirely with you and will protect you. But rather, let us praise His greatness, for He has prepared us and made us into adults.

When Mary said this, she turned their hearts to the Good, and they began to discuss the words of the Savior. Peter said to Mary, Sister we know that the Savior loved you more than the rest of woman. Tell us the words of the Savior which you remember which you know, but we do not, nor have we heard them.
Mary answered and said, What is hidden from you I will proclaim to you. And she began to speak to them these words: I, she said, I saw the Lord in a vision and I said to Him, Lord I saw you today in a vision. He answered and said to me, Blessed are you that you did not waver at the sight of Me. For where the mind is there is the treasure. I said to Him, Lord, how does he who sees the vision see it, through the soul or through the spirit? The Savior answered and said, He does not see through the soul nor through the spirit, but the mind that is between the two that is what sees the vision.

Sermon The DaVinci Code and the Divine Feminine Rev. Bruce Russell-Jayne

Dan Brown’s runaway best seller novel and thriller movie, The DaVinci Code, revives an ancient controversy - the mythology of Mary Magdalene. Some of you may have read or seen it or might want to after I talk about it today, so I’ll give only a brief synopsis. The drama begins in Paris with the murder of the director of the Louvre. A professor of religious symbols is brought in to decipher a baffling clue left at the body. The deceased man’s estranged granddaughter, Sophie, joins the professor at the murder scene, and they soon discover he was a member of a secret society known as the Priory of Sion, a group charged with guarding a powerful secret about Jesus and Mary Magdalene's relationship and its connection to the mysteries of the Holy Grail. The professor and granddaughter follow the trail of clues all the while pursued by members of the Catholic organization, Opus Dei, who would like nothing better than to have the precious secret lost forever. The two decipher a series of clues and anagrams that lead them to the truth about the Holy Grail.

Brown’s story is full of intrigue in the sense of a modern detective thriller, and it slowly builds its complex case by explaining arcane religious symbols. We are shown DaVinci’s painting, The Last Supper, in which a woman stands near Jesus, and we’re told she is Mary Magdalene. This is DaVinci’s “code.” It is alleged Leonardo and several other famous figures were Grand Masters of the Priory of Sion. From this and other historical “clues,” those who possess this esoteric knowledge have concluded Mary Magdalene was married to Jesus, was pregnant when he died, and birthed a daughter whose descendents survive to this day.

This is the fifth in my series of sermons this year on “Ways of Knowing,” in which I have described different methods people approach what Unitarian Universalists call “the search for truth and meaning.” Why have I chosen this pop culture thriller as a basis for a serious religious topic? Several religious groups boycotted the movie, it was full of violence, I would rate it only a C+ for its acting and plot. The story has to do with the sacred feminine, yet the movie’s female protagonist does not display extraordinary strength or intellect. The DaVinci Code purports to show us the inner workings of Opus Dei; the major villain is an Opus Dei monk — but in reality Opus Dei has no monks. Dan Brown has been criticized for playing fast and loose with the facts, and The DaVinci Code’s conspiracy theory has been debunked by a wide array of scholars and historians. The evidence in support of the book and movie’s central claim – that the Holy Grail is the bloodline of Christ - certainly wouldn’t pass scientific muster, and even if DNA evidence could confirm a living person carries Jesus’ genes, why would UUs care? Would a good UU risk being seen at the multiplex going in to see The DaVinci Code? I won’t ask you to raise your hands if you went. I saw it at home on DVD, and despite all the objections I just listed, the reason I did watch it was because there’s something about Mary, something intriguing about Mary Magdalene.
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One of the most liberal of modern Christian scholars, John Dominic Crossan, whose interpretations have been very helpful to me, doesn’t believe Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene. Crossan says Jesus was a poor man’s son who likely just couldn’t afford to get married. Even if he had been married or had a love affair, why would this be such a threat to the church, anyway? Why have there been groups throughout church history trying to wipe out the notion? For centuries, people have obsessed over the Holy Grail and how it might change the world. Is Jesus’ marriage really the Grail secret?

Mary Magdalene, one of the most revered of saints, is known from several references in writings of the biblical period which didn’t make it into the authorized canon of books called the New Testament, which I refer to as the Christian Scriptures. One of the books that didn’t make it into the canon is the Gospel of Mary from which we heard a reading this morning. In the Christian Scriptures Jesus talked with three unnamed women, and three Marys are mentioned. Over time, the characteristics of all these women have been conflated into the mythology of Mary Magdalene. This long after Mary walked with Jesus, with so many groups through the centuries twisting her legacy to fit their purposes, there is no way to know the actual events of Mary’s life. That DaVinci places her at the last supper at the right hand of Jesus is not so much a provable fact as it is a statement about Jesus’ relationship to the feminine. Some interpret the woman in the painting as Mary and believe she should be included as one of Jesus’s Apostles. Others say it is John depicted as a woman in order to bring in the theme of the Divine Feminine. By the way, DaVinci’s Last Supper was not the first painting to portray a woman at the last supper or John as a woman; those feminine representations had become the norm during the Renaissance age.
“Jesus’ attitude toward women was one of the things that set him apart from other teachers of his time. Jesus treated women with respect, as equals in his circle.” Some of the people who see Mary instead of John in the painting may think of Mary as Jesus’ wife, but others believe she was an apostle, equal to the male apostles. Some contend Jesus recognized her special gifts and asked her to be the leader in carrying on his legacy. They believe Mary, not Peter or John or Paul was his designated heir. Mary was the first pope if you will. Jesus rejected male dominance. Just think what a difference it would have made if that idea had held sway throughout Christian history. Unfortunately, the Gospel of Mary didn’t make it into the cannon, and Mary’s followers were disempowered so that succeeding sisters would not compete with men for control.

Women were important in the early church, but male dominance made a powerful comeback in the Jesus movement, and Mary’s story had to be changed. In the sixth century Pope Gregory turned Mary into a prostitute and repentance for her sins became her most revered character trait. “Simultaneously, an emphasis on sexuality as the root of all evil served to subordinate women. Women were reduced to their sexuality, even as sexuality itself was reduced to the realm of temptation, the source of human unworthiness.” At the same time Mary Magdalene was turned into a prostitute, the virginity of Mary, the mother of Jesus, was emphasized, and celibacy as the clerical ideal was embraced. Mary Magdalene, no longer the powerful equal of Jesus, “became the redeemed whore and Christianity’s model of repentance, a manageable, controllable figure, and an effective weapon and instrument of propaganda against her own sex.” Gregory’s became the accepted version of the Mary myth, and women have suffered because of it for the last 1400 years.
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The men who held power in the Byzantine Empire consolidated their control over the early Christian church by defining the standards for accessing the holy at the Council of Nicea in year 325 of the Christian Era. They did this by deciding what would and would not be Christian scripture and by declaring diversity of theological beliefs to be intolerable. A central principle of nearly all religions is Incarnation, the idea that divinity is real and present in the world. The church fathers said the church would enable people to experience divinity, to communicate with God through processes spelled out by the church. They said the church and only the church held the keys to the Kingdom of God. By placing the church at the gate between the people and God, they claimed control of the ultimate experiences of human life. It became imperative that they finally rid the church of the Gnostics because Gnostics taught another way for an individual to approach or experience divinity. They were afraid of the Gnostics because Gnosticism had had many followers, and they didn’t want the competition.

Mary Magdalene was both a Gnostic and a Christian as were many pre-Nicene Christians. Religions such as Gnosticism, which incorporated both male and female in their concepts of the divine, were part of the culture centuries before Christianity arose. In Biblical times, Greeks and other people loved Sophia, the personification of Wisdom. To a Gnostic, Sophia is the closest thing to a human embodiment of divinity. It was only natural for early Christians to incorporate the Sophia tradition into the Jesus story. At various points, both Jesus and Mary Magdalene were compared to Sophia as they each had a similar role and message for humanity.

In Sophia mythology, in the beginning there was a state of infinite potential, a unity called “the Fullness.” Sophia was born from this and at one point conveyed a small piece of the Fullness, a spark of divinity if you will, into everything and everyone. “She served a most important theological purpose: connecting humans with the creative force of the universe, or what some call God.” People have always sought knowledge of where they came from and wisdom which would allow them to transcend this mundane life and enter the realm of the divine. Sophia’s act, of planting divinity in each person and telling people it was there, gave people access to such wisdom.

Gnosticism comes from the word ‘Gnosis,’ which means spiritual Knowledge. To a Gnostic, insight into your spiritual character leads to salvation because the human character contains at least a spark of divinity. Accessing that divine spark sets one free. And how would one access that divine spark inside our human bodies? Sophia and Mary tell us that we can access such Wisdom through direct experience.

They say we gain such knowledge intuitively – in the Transcendentalist mode – thru immediate connections with nature, our own bodies, and thru intimate relationships with other people. It is a way for each individual to find meaning, but meaning gained through understanding and having compassion for others. It is a knowledge of the heart, a Feminine way of knowing. It is something women, who may have been cut off from the wider world in a patriarchal society, could experience in their homes.
The process of seeking spiritual knowledge involves each person negotiating their relationships with the powers of the universe. We each must personally name the elements of our world, argue and debate with the players in it, and come to a livable accommodation with them. It is an almost universal experience for humans to sense that the ignorance, disease, war and other ailments of the world are not the entire deal, not the sum total of the way it’s supposed to be. As we seek to establish our place, we choose not to align ourselves with the cruel or insane powers that bring such suffering and look for a connection to something better, a benign power that can help us transcend the negative influences.
Sophia and Mary, and I believe Jesus each tell us we don’t have to look far to find support from the universe. Jesus said the Kingdom of God is within us. Experiencing first hand an internal connection to the divine is called gnosis, an intimate spiritual knowledge that precludes the need for any third party to enable salvation.
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Sophia describes our purpose as humans as being containers for divine spirit. She advises us to access our own goodness in ways that probably seem natural to many women and that men can learn to do also. Seeking knowledge and wisdom is a very Unitarian Universalist approach to creating meaning. We need to acknowledge that our own creative insights are just as important as data collection and analysis. Using Sophia’s way of wisdom could counter balance the modern obsession with information. Maybe we could benefit by adopting a little more of Sophia’s feminine way of accessing divine wisdom as we continue to explore the workings of the cosmos and to make meaning for our lives. How ever you do it, I wish for you a direct connection to the fullness of creation that will sustain you through the good times and the bad.

Murray, Rebecca. “The DaVinci Code Movie Review,” http://movies.about.com/od/thedavincicode/fr/davinci051906.htm
Wikipedia.
Crossan, John Dominic. “The Unmarried Jesus,” CSER Review, (Amherst: Fall 2006) 7.
Carroll, James. “Who Was Mary Magdalene?” Smithsonian (Washington, D.C.: June 2006) 112.
Ibid. 116-120.
Stratford, Jordan. The Da Vinci Prayer book: Gnostic Reflections on the Divine Feminine, Azrael Press (Victoria: 2006) 16.
Stratford. 33.
Macomber, James H. “Toward a Strategy of Inclusion: Jesus as Sophia.”
Stratford. 20.
Stratford. 35.