THE LAST SHALL BE FIRST; THE WOMEN AND THE RESURRECTION
One of the most notable aspects of the Easter accounts in the four canonical gospels is the presence of women at the crucial moments. And one woman in particular is named as being present at virtually all of them, namely Mary of Magdala or Mary Magdalen. She is there at the crucifixion along with other “women who had accompanied him from Galilee” (Luke 23: 49),as Luke puts it, some named some unnamed, and only John’s gospel places a male disciple at the cross. Mary Magdalen is named (in Matthew and Mark) as being one of the group of women present at the burial of Jesus, although John’s gospel is again the exception in having no women present at the burial. It names only Joseph of Arimathaea and Nicodemus.
And then come the events of Easter morning. All four gospels have Mary Magdalen as first to arrive at the empty tomb. In John she goes alone. The others differ slightly in saying who accompanied her. Matthew adds one name, “the other Mary”; Mark adds two, “Mary the mother of James, and Salome”; while Luke adds “Joanna and Mary the mother of James”. He also mentions “other women” as being there but doesn’t name them.
What is significant about all this is that it shows the importance of women in the community of disciples that surrounded Jesus. The way some people talk you would think that there were only twelve disciples, all of them men, but this was clearly not the case. Even though the later church ignored, fetishised or otherwise diminished the women around Jesus, in the early church women had a far more central and honoured place as the successors of Mary Magdalen and her sisters. One of the most important aspects of the first Christian communities was their reversal of the old order of things and the affirmation that those who were last shall be first (Matthew 19: 30), and that certainly included women. Only in John’s gospel does a male disciple stand by Jesus at the cross, otherwise they are scattered and in hiding while the women are there at his death and burial. They are also the first witnesses of the Resurrection, with Mary Magdalen foremost among them.
It is impossible to say “what really happened”, in a literalistic sense, on that Easter morning. All we can say is that something really happened and that women were at the heart of it. The Resurrection ushered in a new order and a new humanity in which the fixed and oppressive relationships of old were dissolved. In the new community, the new Body of Christ, the distinctions of gender, class, nationality and ethnicity were replaced by oneness, equality and love of neighbour. When we look at the events of Easter as described in the New Testament we see women moving centre-stage, and none more so than Mary Magdalen. She was clearly the leading woman disciple and arguably the primary apostle, for it is she who first experiences and announces the Resurrection. She is the apostle to the doubting, sceptical male apostles. Luke writes that when Mary and “the other women” tell the men what they have witnessed “the story appeared to them to be nonsense and they would not believe them” (Luke 24: 11). This attitude has too often characterised ecclesiastical attitudes to women and their experience in subsequent centuries.
Perhaps the most powerful, the most moving and the most lyrical of all the Resurrection stories is that of Mary Magdalen meeting the risen Christ in the garden on Easter morning, as told in John’s gospel (20: 10-18). It makes clear the very special bond that existed between Jesus and Mary, and which she still felt even after his death. Mary went on to have a leading roll in the early church - although you will find no evidence for this in the New Testament outside the gospels! What happened? Perhaps, as the church itself sought acceptance in the male-dominated world around it, it lost its initial radicalism with regard to women. They were relegated to a subordinate role with an exclusively male hierarchy ruling the roost for two millennia, as it still does in much of the Church and in the minds of all too many Christians. The quite unjustified relegation of Mary Magdalen from leading apostle to guilt-ridden, half-witted prostitute has been part of this, and it would surely make Jesus weep.
It was not always so. It may be significant that the wonderful scene in the garden on Easter morning appears in John’s gospel. Although beloved of conservative, orthodox Christians today, this gospel was once viewed with suspicion because of its Gnostic overtones and it was the last of the four to be recognised as ‘canonical’. In particular, Mary Magdalen, although effectively written out of Christianity except as a dubious and marginal bit-part player, was of immense and central importance in forms of the faith that once flourished but which were then suppressed as heretical. Documents such as the Gospel of Mary and the Gospel of Philip reflect a situation in which Mary Magdalen is the close confidante of Jesus and is recognised as an authority by the other disciples. We may not know exactly what went on but we do know that Mary Magdalen was a key figure in forms of Christianity dubbed ‘Gnostic’, a situation which probably had its roots in the place that Mary occupied in the original Jesus community. And her displacement from a truly honoured place in Christianity is witness to the way that a growing “orthodoxy” sought to eradicate its rivals. Forms of Christianity that honoured women, which practised a radical equality that eliminated the distinctions of gender, were downgraded, even when they had the support of the teachings of Paul, whose true views in this regard are too often ignored and misunderstood, not to say distorted and misrepresented. And so branches of the faith which recognised women as celebrants, priests and bishops, as true successors of Mary Magdalen, were persecuted and exterminated. Thus one of the achievements of the Resurrection – the overturning of the old unjust order as regards gender – was greatly weakened, something not without its continuing malign consequences today.
We sometimes get obsessed with arguing about whether the Resurrection is “true” or not, whether we should try to explain it or explain it away, whether we should see it as physical or spiritual, or whether we should dismiss it out of hand. But rather we should see it as a radical revision of what it means to be human, what it means to live in a community moulded by a fundamental respect for each other, and by a truly reverent love. What matters is not whether a dead man came to life again two thousand years ago. What matters is that the love preached by Jesus and both given and received by Mary Magdalen should suffuse our own lives and, through us, make this troubled world a happier and more equal place for women and men of all kinds. This is the ‘promised land’ and although it may be forever out of reach in its perfection, in the attempt to achieve it we can make things a whole lot better and our fellow human beings a whole lot happier. This is what we do as a community of the Resurrection, both a physical and a spiritual reality, offering life where the human spirit all too often lies in the darkness of the tomb.
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