Mary Magdalen
In Palestine 2000 years ago, women did not testify before judges in legal actions because their word was deemed untrustworthy.
I’ve already said that we in modern times find the Resurrection preposterous—and in those times people were the same way. Even the disciples themselves, the men Jesus hand picked to learn directly from him, stumbled over the idea though Jesus told them multiple times it would happen, and then when it did happen they themselves didn’t believe it. Even when Peter and John, the two disciples closest to Jesus, heard the tomb was empty and ran to it and saw for themselves that Jesus’ body was gone, they had no thought whatsoever that Jesus had come back to life.
So why, when the earliest followers of Jesus began to declare this preposterous story, did they identify the first witness of the event as a woman? And not just any woman, but one who was fallen?
Fallen, not just because all of us are fallen, but fallen in the fuller sense because the narratives and traditions suggest a complex woman with a difficult past. The Bible says Jesus had cast demons out of her; she was the one who broke a jar of expensive ointment to anoint Jesus’ feet as she washed them with her tears and dried them with her hair—and what an image of emotion and devotion that is! She may have been the woman who was dragged before Jesus by a mob intent on fulfilling their tradition of stoning to death any woman caught in the act of adultery. (Yes, men got away free.)
Mary Magdalen…her name itself strikes me as beautiful, and I have always thought of her as physically attractive. But was she, if in fact she was a demon-possessed sex worker in Roman-occupied Palestine?
When I was a boy my father sometimes took me along to work on Saturday mornings (my father worked 6 1/2 days a week). As a salesman he called on wholesalers who worked out of warehouses in areas known as rough. Most of the time he’d take me in with him; sometimes he’d tell me to stay in the car with the doors locked.
One Saturday morning when I was sitting in his car alone I noticed a commotion on the sidewalk behind me; two young police officers were arresting woman for prostitution. I understood this, even at age 12, because she was trying to seduce her way out of the situation by throwing her arms around the waist of the younger of the cops and saying, “Please, honey, let me go! Even a dog will lie in the bed for greenbacks!”
That was enough to brand my brain with the memory, but what really burned was how she looked. Her teeth were gone—either rotted or punched out, so that her mouth had the caved-in look of a crone, though now I’d guess she was no more than 40. Her hair was stringy, her body had the collapsed look of abuse.
She was a woman at the Bottom—mentally, emotionally, physically, she was in living hell. Even the policeman were trying distance themselves, one of them trying to squirm from her embrace while his partner stood back and smirked. To say she was a prostitute is too polite; she was a whore, possessed with everything even we moderns would call demonic.
What if Mary Magdalen was like her?
Mary Magdalen met Jesus. And Mary Magdalen became new. Mary Magdalen knew with absolutely clarity that Jesus could—and already had, in every dimension of her own life—accomplish something everyone else found impossible, even unthinkable.
Even she found it unthinkable! When she discovered the tomb empty on the morning we now celebrate as Easter, she thought someone had taken his body; it didn’t occur to her that he might have returned to physical life and walked out.
The she saw him. Saw—not felt, but saw him. She didn’t recognize him until he spoke. Then she had no doubt.
So here is one reason for believing the preposterous story of the Resurrection: Mary Magdalen believed it. She saw it first. Even the disciples couldn’t deny that. She told them. At first they couldn’t get their minds around the truth of it. Later, they believed her.
So do I.
-Randall