Reflection on the Gospel – Tuesday, July 22, 2025

Here we have Mary Magdalene – a real champion. She’s not just a saint we remember every year in the liturgy on this day. In today’s Gospel, she is the one chosen by the risen Jesus to go and announce his resurrection to the other disciples. That makes her a saint of great importance.

Someone might say, and rightly so, “Look at her then and look at her now.” Because in another part of the Gospels, it says that Jesus had cast out seven demons from Mary Magdalene (Luke 8:2). Not one or two—seven! That means she must have had a very troubled life. And since we often assume that when a woman is called a sinner it must be something related to sex, people tend to think she had been a serious prostitute. Maybe she wasn’t, but with seven demons, it’s clear she had a hard past.

And yet, here she is—one of the first people chosen by Jesus to witness his resurrection, and later recognized as a saint. What does this tell us? That God always gives us a second chance (and a third, a fourth, and a fifth too…). That’s the greatness of a God who is infinite love—who is Love itself: welcoming, merciful, patient, and tender.

We find it hard to give second chances—let alone a third or fourth. It’s hard to forgive others when they’ve failed us. And sometimes it’s even harder to forgive ourselves. We get discouraged, we lose hope, we fall into sadness or depression. Thank God that He is not like that!

Today is a day to rejoice with Mary Magdalene. We don’t really know what her life was like before she met Jesus. And it doesn’t really matter. What matters is that, after meeting the Teacher, she learned to live differently. She learned to love, to love deeply and without limits. Let’s hope we can learn to do the same!