'The Last Shall Be First: The Women and the Resurrection' by Rvd. Cliff Reed

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. Matthew places her at the Crucifixion as do Mark and John, and although Luke only mentions “the women who had accompanied him from Galilee”, we may safely include Mary Magdalen in that group. Only John’s gospel mentions the mother of Jesus as being present at the crucifixion, along with her unnamed sister and Mary of Clopas. And only John’s gospel places a male disciple, John, at the crucifixion.  In Matthew and Mark we have a different set of names at this point in the story Both name another Mary, identified as the mother of James and Joses (or Joseph), while Matthew mentions the unnamed “mother of the sons of Zebedee” and a mysterious “other Mary”. Mark names Salome. 

The next crucial event is the burial of Jesus, and Mary Magdalen is named as being there by Matthew and Mark. Luke sticks with his “women who accompanied him from Galilee” formula. Who else was there? Matthew adds his otherwise unidentified “the other Mary” while Mark mentions Mary, the mother of Joses. John has no women present at the burial, 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, and in John she goes alone. The others differ slightly in saying who accompanied her. Matthew adds “the other Mary”. Mark names “Mary the mother of James, and Salome”, while Luke mentions “Joanna and Mary the mother of James”, and he adds “the other women” without naming 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 on 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.

I don’t intend to get into one of those “what really happened?” discussions. 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 – whoever she or he might be. 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. 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. In particular, Mary Magdalen, although effectively written out of Christianity except as a dubious 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 she 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 Gnostic Christianity, 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. And 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.

(CMR260321)

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'Famous Last Words' by Rvd. Cliff Reed

The last words of Jesus on the cross will be much read and much reflected upon today, but what were they? In fact the gospel accounts differ on this, and the most agonising and the most challenging version of those last words appears in only two of the gospels, Mark and Matthew. It has been suggested that Luke and John omitted them because a despairing and desolate Jesus did not really fit with the triumphant Christ that the early Church was preaching.

So what were those words? As translated from the Aramaic into Greek and from Greek into the 16th-century English of William Tyndale they are, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” And these were, in turn, ‘borrowed’ by the committee which produced the Authorised, or King James, Version of the Bible in 1611. And it is those words which continue to puzzle and perplex us today. Did Jesus really say them? If he did, what did he mean by them? If they are authentic, what do they tell us about him?

Given the situation in which Jesus found himself: in terminal agony on the cross, deserted by his closest disciples – the male ones, at least – with his hopes dashed and apparently abandoned to his fate, I would say that those words sound perfectly plausible. It must indeed have seemed that God had forsaken him. It can be argued that their very desolation not only testifies to their truth, but also to the truth of the crucifixion itself. If, in the early days of Christianity in the Roman Empire, you were trying to prove that Jesus was the Son of God, a figure of supernatural power and status, the Saviour of the world, you would hardly make up a story in which he is executed in disgrace for sedition and rebellion against Rome and dies as broken in spirit as he was in body. Which is why, perhaps, Luke and John soften things up a bit and omit the words of desolation, substituting others that seemed to them more suitable for the Anointed One of God.

So even if there were not some independent evidence for the crucifixion of Jesus by the Roman authorities, the last known words of Jesus in Mark and Matthew would seem to support it. But what are we to make of them: “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” Do we take them as the very understandable cry of someone dying in the most appalling circumstances – both physical and spiritual? They are certainly credible when seen in that light, and maybe we should be content with this most obvious explanation.

However, there is another way of understanding that cry. Those exact words open Psalm 22 and it has been suggested that Jesus was quite deliberately quoting them, intending his Jewish hearers to find his meaning in the Psalm as a whole. The Psalmist writes as one who is indeed in the depths of misery, humiliation and even self-loathing – “I am a worm and no man” (v. 6).  He is at the mercy of his enemies and his words seem to be a prophecy of what happened to Jesus: “They pierced my hands and my feet” (v. 17); “They part my garments among them, and cast lots upon my vesture” (v. 18) They have been used by Christians, along with other Old Testament sources, to ‘prove’, as they see it, that the life of Jesus was the fulfilment of prophecy. Others, more sceptically, have argued that the whole story of Jesus was concocted by the gospel-writers out of a hotch-potch of Old Testament verses and prophecies.

But there is a third possibility. That when they contemplated the story of Jesus and came to write it down, they found in it echoes of Old Testament passages, like Psalm 22, and moulded their accounts accordingly. Those words of desolation may indeed have been spoken by Jesus on the cross, as remembered by the faithful women disciples mentioned later, but it was the gospel-writers Mark and Matthew who used them to reference the whole of Psalm 22. Why? Because after describing the despair and suffering of the Psalm’s unidentified subject it closes with an affirmation of faith in God’s deliverance. The psalmist’s life is restored and his powers of preaching and prophecy are renewed: “I will declare thy name unto my brethren: in the midst of the congregation will I praise thee” (v. 22). Interpreted in this light, those words on the cross become more positive and, for some, a promise of the Resurrection.

Without this, though, the words of desolation pose a problem for those wanting to present Jesus as God and as a supernatural divine being. For God to lament his desertion by God; for an omnipotent divine being not to know about his own Resurrection – these seem nonsensical. For the crucifixion to have any relevance for us it must involve the death of a real human being as weak and as subject to pain and despair as any other. The hope lies in his humanity, in his courage, in his integrity, in his witness for what he believed was saving truth for the human spirit. By putting his own self aside, by accepting death rather than deny the Way that he taught and lived, he revealed divine truth in a way that no magic or miracle ever could. It is in humanity in all its weakness and fallibility that the Divine Mystery is to be found. Without these there is no courage, no resilience, no faith, no love.

This is something that Jesus exemplified but we have seen it too in the response to the current pandemic at its best. Waiting around for divine intervention does no good, nor does denial, brittle bravado or a belief that one is too holy to catch the virus. It is frail, fallible human beings working selflessly with whatever gifts they have who have carried us through, and who continue to do so. Those despairing words of Jesus must have been on many lips this past year, and for some – as for him – they will have been their last words. But for many a deeper and unsought determination has been kindled – determination to serve, to nurse, to heal and to restore; determination to understand the deadly virus, to counter it and to protect us from it. And, not to be forgotten, there has been the simple determination to be a good neighbour. Yes, these are all human qualities but they are also what we really mean by divine. It is in humanity’s strength in weakness that we find God. Maybe this is what that Roman centurion meant when, at the very moment of Jesus’ death, he said, “Truly this man was the Son of God” (Mark 15: 39).

(CMR240321)

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