While eleven solid young men hid behind locked doors in fear, a woman walked alone to a tomb in the dark. And it is to her, not to Peter, not to John, not to any of the Twelve, that the Risen Christ chose first to appear (John 20: 11-18). Thomas Aquinas, who was not known for his generosity toward women in theological roles, nonetheless called her apostola apostolorum the apostle to the apostles, and recognised this as a title of genuine honour. For Aquinas, the mode of apostolicity matters: she was sent, she proclaimed, she was believed.
John 20 is the most quietly radical passage in all four gospels. Read it carefully and you notice that the resurrection narrative does not begin with a council of high priests, a gathering of the Twelve, or a male voice of authority. It begins with a woman, alone, weeping, in a garden, before dawn. Mary Magdalene comes to the tomb while it is still dark; the darkness is not merely meteorological. It is existential. The disciples have scattered. Hope is entombed. And yet she comes anyway.
When the angels ask her, Woman, why are you weeping? she answers not with theology but with grief: They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him. She is not performing faith; she is loving. And it is precisely love that is raw, unguarded, and unstrategic; that causes her to linger at the tomb when everyone else has gone home. The great Dominican theologian Edward Schillebeeckx wrote in Jesus: An Experiment in Christology that the resurrection was first experienced by those whose love for Jesus was total and non-transactional; those who had nothing to gain from allegiance to a dead prophet. Mary Magdalene fits this profile with devastating precision.
Mary meets Jesus in multiple levels at once. Firstly, when Jesus speaks her name, Mary, she turns and says one word, Rabboni, Teacher. This exchange is worth pausing over. In the ancient Jewish world, the relationship between a Rabbi and a disciple (talmid) was the most formative relationship a person could enter. Secondly, that Jesus calls her by name; and that she recognises him by voice is an enactment of the Good Shepherd passage from John 10, He calls his own sheep by name... the sheep follow him, for they know his voice. Mary Magdalene is, in John's Gospel, the first sheep to hear her name and follow. She is the first to know him after the resurrection.
For Mary Magdalene, the encounter at the tomb is not merely a meeting, but she is commissioned. Go to my brothers and tell them, is the language of apostleship. Elizabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, in her landmark feminist theological study In Memory ‘of Her, argues that the category of ‘apostle" in earliest Christianity was far broader than the later institutionalized Twelve. An apostle, in the Pauline sense, was one who had seen the Risen Lord and been sent by him (1 Corinthians 9:1). By this definition Mary Magdalene is an apostle before any of the men. She is sent first, to people who have not yet seen, with news they do not yet know.
If Mary Magdalene was the first witness, the apostle to the apostles, the one sent before the Twelve; why did tradition bury her? Karen King, Professor at Harvard Divinity School and an author, offers a careful historical argument: the suppression of Mary Magdalene's authority was not a conspiracy but a gradual institutional process. As the church moved from charismatic, Spirit-led communities toward hierarchical, episkopal structures (bishop-led orders), the memory of female leadership became theologically inconvenient. The Twelve were recast as the sole legitimate lineage. Women who had led, prophesied, and proclaimed were remembered, if at all, as assistants rather than initiators. Perhaps, in 2016, Pope Francis elevated the feast of Mary Magdalene (July 22) to the level of a feast; the same liturgical rank as the male apostles; precisely to correct this centuries-long minimization.
This is not incidental. Dorothee Sölle, the German liberation theologian, wrote that mystical encounter with God is available not to those with the most credentials but to those with the most availability; those who have made themselves empty enough to receive. Mary Magdalene, standing at the tomb, weeping and searching, is a figure of radical availability. She has no agenda except love. She is not running for anything. She is not positioning herself. She is simply there, in the dark, looking for someone she loves. And that, perhaps, is the deepest answer. The Risen Christ did not appear first to the Twelve not because they were unworthy, but because they were not there. Discipleship, in its deepest form, is not a title conferred. It is a posture, a turning toward. And Mary Magdalene turned, and kept turning, until Love itself called her name.
this perhaps puts Mary Magdalene in a right perspective. thank you.
ReplyDelete