As a Christian, sometimes you need to take a hard-line stance. One of those hard-line stances is the resurrection — it's impossible to accept every miracle Christ performed if you don't believe in that Jesus conquered death.
After we look at the resurrection, however, we have to look at Jesus's choices and analyze the reasoning and power behind them. The one I want to look at today is the choice of Mary Magdalene as the first witness to the resurrected Christ.
Think about, today, how crazy a woman like Mary Magdalene might have sounded.
She talked about seeing this man who was just hung on a cross two days ago resurrected, and even the closest followers of Christ, like Thomas had trouble believing her. She and the other Mary saw the tomb of Jesus with no body, and were shocked before an angel came to them.
In Matthew 28, an angel tells Mary Magdelene and the other Mary to tell the other disciples that Jesus rose from the dead. In Mark 16, an angel tells Mary Magdalene that "he has risen" and to tell the other disciples that Jesus was alive. In Luke 24, the first witnesses to the risen Christ were Mary Magdalene, Mary, and Joanna and told to tell the other disciples. In John 21, Mary Magdalene came to the tomb herself to find that the body had left the tomb. Jesus would later appear to her and ask "woman, why are you weeping?" He would commission her to tell the other disciples.
Mary Magdalene being the first witness to the resurrected disciple is one of the most important parts of the Gospel. While the Gospels might have slight differences on who Mary was with or when Jesus appeared to her, the fact remains that in all four, she was the first to discover the resurrection and the unearthed tomb. We will explore why the decision was so important.
Who was Mary Magdalene?
As her name suggests, Mary Magdalene, before she met Christ, was a Jewish woman from Magdala, a fishing town on the western shore of the Sea of Galilee. As Galilee was where Jesus performed most of his miracles, the fact that Mary Magdalene came from Magdala had its own form of significance. Magdala was a town with significant social and economic development, that saw fishing and salting as its two biggest industries. Magdala was, as such, a wealthy resort town on the Sea of Galilee with prosperity.
As such, Mary Magdalene was a rich woman with money and resources for Jesus's ministry. Luke notes that Mary Magdalene, Joanna, and Susanna provided for Jesus's ministry "out of their own means." Luke also talks about how Jesus exorcised seven demons out of Mary Magdalene, suggesting that Jesus saved her from a physical or psychological malady. It is clear that Jesus healed her very strongly. Mary was a tortured and pained woman, a sinner saved by grace that recognized how much Jesus had come to save her.
Perhaps her intense need for God is why Jesus chose her as such an important disciple.
Contrary to popular belief and artistic expression, Mary Magdalene was not a prostitute. She was not the wife of Jesus. Some scholars, including Carla Ricci, note that Mary Magdalene was the female equivalent to Peter. Despite the fact that all 12 of Jesus's disciples were men, Jesus brought women greater liberation in mainstream Jewish society.
Jesus first appearing to Mary Magdalene, however, had even stronger implications.
Why was it so important that Jesus first chose a woman?
It doesn't take much imagination to picture how patriarchal first-century Jewish society must have been for women. But in first-century Israel, women were not allowed to testify in a court of law, men were not allowed to greet women in public, and some Jewish writers, including Philo, even wrote that a woman should never leave the home except to go to the synagogue.
Not only did Jesus meet with women in public, but he chose women to be witness to his greatest miracle of rising form the dead. He chose women as his most important witnesses, and he commissioned women's voices to be heard in the resurrection of Christ.
Imagine 1st century Israel for a second, and how hard it would have been for a Jewish man to believe a woman saying that this Jesus man rose from the dead.
We don't know why Jesus first appeared to Mary — perhaps it was just an arbitrary decision. At the time, the men who followed Jesus, including Peter, the man. who denied Jesus, were in hiding and trying to put as much distance between themselves and Jesus. But Mary Magdalene and other women continually went to visit Jesus's tomb. They weren't scared to associate themselves with Jesus, even if doing so may have meant death.
What does that say about the courage of Peter versus the courage of Mary Magdalene?
Jesus chose Mary Magdalene as a spokesperson in a world where the court of law did not trust the testimony of a woman. In fact, if the Gospel writers wanted to make up the story of Jesus as make-believe, they would not have chosen women as the first witnesses to the resurrection. Instead, the Gospel writers would probably have made up a well-regarded Jewish man in the community to be the witness instead, especially if they were to cater to the 1st and 2nd-century churches.
His choice of Mary Magdalene as the spokesperson for his greatest deed, then, should not be ignored. It has profound implications for role of women in the church, and for the ordination of women as pastors. Her prominence and role in Jesus's early ministry cannot be questioned. No church should make women not feel included, especially since Jesus did not. In this day and age, it's up to us to seriously reconsider what we think a woman's role in the church should be, and embrace what Jesus would have done.
