My Lent has been blessed this year by an online art exhibit at Vanderbilt’s lectionary site:
https://exhibitions.library.vanderbilt.edu/different-eyes/
In my Bethany’s People books, I follow the minority opinion and present Mary of Bethany and Mary Magdalene as the same person. I do this because the multitude of Mary’s that we encounter in the scriptures is confusing. As a novelist, I’ve learned to keep my main characters few and fully fleshed out.
Doing this, I have had the opportunity to imagine her as someone who left home (Bethany) under tough circumstances — divorce was not kind to women in Jesus’ time — and fell further into mental illness as a stranger in the town of Magdalene, and then was restored to sanity and her family (Martha and Lazarus) by Jesus.
What all account agree on about Mary Magdalene, is that she became a “real” disciple of Jesus (Luke 8:2). She followed him to Jerusalem and was there at the cross. On the day of resurrection, she led the other women to the empty tomb. Then she witnessed to the guys who missed it.
Wow.