Mary Magdalene in the Grotto, by Jules-Joseph Lefebvre

The Ballad of Mary Magdalene


This one is perhaps the biggest stretch, but as you may have noticed before, I’m interested in how artists tell stories around a central, more well-known story.  Richard Shindell’s brilliant “Ballad of Mary Magdalen” is just such a song, telling the story of Jesus’ sacrifice from the perspective of a lover and, as suggested song, partner in ministry.  


It’s of much more recent vintage than most of our material here, but we’ll get back to the older material soon enough, and I think you’ll hear some resonances here.  It’s also worth noting that despite being called a ballad, the song is different from much of our genre in not having to tell pretty much all of its story, putting aside the question of its formal structure.  It depends on the listener already knowing the rest.  In this way, it’s more like Elvis Costello’s “What Lewis Did Last.”


Here is Shindell performing the song with Lucy Kaplansky.  There’s an extended and somewhat amusing intro where he explains how his song, which was released in 1995, got rolled up into Da Vinci Code mania after the release of Dan Brown’s book in 2003.

Shindell’s original performance of the song is on his 1995 album Blue Divide :

Richard Shindell Credit:  Diegoloo

“Ballad of Mary Magdalen” by Richard Shindell (Spotify)  Lyrics

About 15 years ago, Shindell teamed up with singer-songwriters Dar Williams and Lucy Kaplansky (in the clip above), for a collaborative album, mostly of covers, entitled Cry Cry Cry.  Dar Williams sings the lead on this version.

“Ballad of Mary Magdalene,” by Cry Cry Cry (Spotify)

Lucy Kaplansky performs her own solo version as well ,flipping the second and third verses (note, this song is so new there is not really much variation among any of the extant recorded versions, particularly compared with our typical fare):

“Ballad of Mary Magdalene,” by Lucy Kaplansky (Spotify)

Dar Williams’s liner notes to the Cry Cry Cry recording explain that her duet performances of this song with Shindell were an inspiration for the entire project.  She writes of the song that in it, “Richard’s ‘roots can be heard at a place where half-explained stories from his stint at Union [Theological] Seminary [in New York] meet the soul-baring genius of George Jones.”


Whatever one’s take on what may or may not be heretical in this song and for whom, there is quite a bit going on within this short song that opens up a range of imaginative possibilities, theologically or otherwise.  Again, it’s a story constructed around the story that everyone knows–and the tale of the circumstances of Jesus’ death and why it happened is told in relief, through the story of another character.

Lucy Kaplansky

Without wanting to dissect every moment in the song, I’ll note just a few things.  A strain of thought within Roman Catholicism for over 1100 years considered Mary Magdalene a prostitute. Several literary treatments of the Jesus story have repeated this.  On the other hand, a variety of Apocryphal or Gnostic sources have presented her as Jesus’ partner in ministry.  I’ve heard introductions of the song that suggest that Mary’s role in the founding of the church might have been much greater had not the patriarchy intervened to downplay it and hide it away.  The first verse delightfully works with both options, and more as well.


This song is not alone in presenting the “heresy” of an intimate relationship between Jesus and Mary Magdalene.  Whether a Christian believes this to be true or not, the story in the song provides ample room for thought as to how Jesus’ exemplary life might translate differently into informing the life of a believer in relationship to a spouse or partner.  For non-Christians, it’s interesting from a literary standpoint, as I’ll explore in a second, and socio-historically, if one considers how Western culture may have taken shape differently had the “truth” of this relationship been allowed to emerge.


OK, OK, so what does all this have to do with murder ballads?  Isn’t this all just a musical thought experiment about Jesus and romantic relationships?  A priest friend of mine would likely see this song as a grown-up version of the “Jesus is my boyfriend” vibe of adolescent female Christianity.


Well, to a certain extent it is a sad, romantic song about Jesus.  Did you note, though, that there are two subtle alterations of wording in the choruses?  In the first two, “Jesus loved me”; in the last, the singer shifts to the present tense, “Jesus loves me.”  Also, in the first two, Mary asks “Why on earth did I ever let him go?”; in the last, “Why on earth did he ever have to go?”.

Dar Williams Credit:  Ken Schles

I hear Fair Ellender‘s mother asking similar questions, as might Nancy and Henry, the children of Naomi Wise.  


Murder ballads are likely popular because they are tragedies, presenting the clash of incompatible visions of the good.  In most, the meaning or fundamental truth of somebody’s existence comes head to head with the continuation of that existence, and it is that meaning or fundamental truth, be it good or evil, that wins.


Mary Magdalene’s wrestling back and forth in these two different “Why on earth?” appeals takes her through reckoning with at least three possible questions:  “how could I have let this happen?”; “why did he choose to leave?”; “why did he have to go?”.  Mary Magdelene confronts her own sense of responsibility at first, and then moves to thinking about her private loss in the implicit context of a much broader story.  (For another musical meditation on the mess Jesus leaves behind for the women in his life, give a listen to Patty Griffin’s “Mary.”)


There are oceans of thought about the nature of freedom and destiny, love and sacrifice, duty to one another and duty to the world within these questions.  Perhaps in a way at odds with some more modern notions of the self, the song also tells the tale, through the Jesus Mary Magdalene describes, of how the deeper truths of our lives may pull us from the longings of our hearts.


My feeling is that this song is eminently successful in laying out the tragedy in a fresh and distinctive way, and that its success lies, despite what I or anybody else can say about it, in leaving the listener with those questions as an enduring source of reflection.


Coda:

Mikhail Bulgakov

A bit off-topic for the blog, but I’ll mention that I’m something of a fan of literary, non-canonical Jesus stories. My favorites are José Saramago’s The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, and Christopher Moore’s bawdy and comic (mostly), Lamb:  The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal..  All three pull out a variety of imaginative twists for different artistic purposes, and are extraordinarily good reads–although Saramago’s style is initially challenging, and I’ll confess that it took me at least a half dozen attempts before Bulgakov fully roped me in to his narrative.


Less successful, in my estimation, is Philip Pullman’s The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ.  There are a number of frustrating inconsistencies in the world created by the story.  Oddly, he’s less successful that Bulgakov in creating a realistic Jesus narrative.  In my opinion, Pullman lets his artistry succumb to his animus against the institutional church.  If you really want the ideas worth thinking about, the epilogue for that book is the place to go.

Mario Brelich

And speaking of books that have taken me a few attempts to get into, a colleague pointed me in the direction of a lesser known work (in the English speaking world) by Mario Brelich, entitled The Work of Betrayal.  Brelich takes over Edgar Allen Poe’s famous Detective Lupin for an extended forensic dialogue about the true role of Judas in betraying Jesus.  The person who recommended it to me said that when he started it, it seemed to him that the book was likely to be an extended bore, but that it wound up being an extraordinarily compelling meditation on these themes.  Alas, I have yet to get past the boring part.