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Good morning. Today is the feast day of Mary Magdalene – a saint who, like certain works of art, has recently been subject to a radical clean up to take us back to the original. In the New Testament Mary Magdalene is dispossessed of demons, becomes a disciple of Christ and is said to have been present at his crucifixion, burial and resurrection. But in the course of the early centuries, she became conflated with other women in the Gospels, and in particular with an unnamed woman – a great sinner - who bathes Jesus’s feet with ointment and tears, and dries them with her hair. By merging the story of a close disciple with the story of a notorious sinner, the Middle Ages produced a dramatic composite figure of huge popularity – the ideal penitent who turns over a very big new leaf. Well, a pared down Mary Magdalene might be more proper according to biblical scholarship, but the imaginative power of the Mary Magdalene of medieval conflation is such that it is the dramatically penitent sinner who survives in popular consciousness. And it is easy to see why. In our moral lives as individuals we want to believe in the possibility of making a wholly new start. We want to believe that we have not reached the present on a set of tramlines which, in the way of tramlines, determines our direction into the future. Instead our moral imaginations hold on to the possibility of an individual acting not wholly within boundaries dictated by the past, but taking radically new and creative paths. Whenever history seems set on repeating itself in patterns of contention and conflict, the possibility of radically novel action has an important place in our imaginations. The current tragic situation in Gaza and Israel doubtless has particular elements and features which only someone with a deep knowledge of the geo-politics of the region in the last ten years could explicate; but for all that, in another light the patterns look only too familiar and repetitive. Rockets from Gaza and military action from Israel. Where ever it starts it becomes a cycle of reaction and retaliation. Of course, the UN has called for a ceasefire and in the short term even that may seem a lot to hope for. But the imagining of momentous change in the lives of individuals such as the great saints keeps alive a more radical hope yet than the mere cessation of violence –it keeps alive the hope that in our lives, individual but also social, patterns need not go on repeating themselves indefinitely. In fashioning saints such as Mary Magdalene, we are imagining and celebrating great moral innovators and inventors, who act beyond the limits of what is expected or seems possible. We surely need to hold onto such figures and stories if we are to find ways to different and better futures than the grim futures to which the past seems to point.