It was so wonderful to welcome back “Alleluia” to the liturgy after our Lenten journey without it. Hearing Mark’s account of the resurrection of Jesus yesterday morning, I was also reminded that our Easter Alleluia is possible at all because of women.
As I walked through the painful and poignant moments of Holy Week, anticipating the joy of Sunday morning, I realized in some fresh ways this year that we would gather on that glorious morning of Easter because of women.
All four accounts of the Gospel are very clear about this: women were the first witnesses of the resurrection of Jesus from the dead, and they were also responsible for telling others this good story—they were the very first apostles.
I had some more personal reasons for this kind of reflection as well: March 31 just happens to be the anniversary of my dear mother’s death, a woman who was faithfully a witness for me—from my earliest days, as far back as I can remember—she was a witness for me to the risen Christ by the way she lived and loved.
How she lived and loved—that’s what makes Easter “real,” how it changes our lives, and our relationships, and our communities.
Scientist and theologian Ilea Delio insists that “love lives in persons,” not ideas or doctrines. “Love is not a concept,” she writes, love is “a powerful, transforming energy that heals, reconciles, unites, and makes whole” (from her marvelous book, The Unbearable Wholeness of Being).
This transforming energy of love makes all things new, reminding us that whatever else “resurrection” may mean, it does not mean “resuscitation.”
The risen Jesus is not a corpse come back to life, nor is he a ghost. As St. Paul put it, the risen Jesus is the first fruits of a new creation (1 Cor. 15:20), a new way to live—and not just Jesus alone, but also the women, who were the first witnesses of the resurrection, they too, along with Jesus, were the first fruits of God’s new creation, a new way to live.
The indirectness, as it were, the obscurity of that first Easter morning, strikes me in very particular ways whenever we hear Mark’s account of it (16:1-8), which is the slimmest and thinnest description of whatever it means to say Jesus rises from the dead. All four Gospel writers treat the resurrection as utterly mysterious, but not the consequences. There is new life to be lived because of the resurrection of Jesus.
The heart of Easter is not only that Jesus is somehow alive, but also that we are, and that we live differently because of Easter. This is in large measure why, I think, Mark has the women run from the empty tomb in terror and amazement.
Of course these first witnesses to Easter are terrified, not only because God is so clearly at work in that empty tomb but also because of what it means for them and how they must and will live in a brand new way.
Preparing for Easter, I was reminded again of my trip earlier this year to southern Africa, where I met a young man in Johannesburg by the name of Nkululeku. His name in Zulu means freedom.
I devoted some energy this Lent to considering the various ways spiritual disciplines might foster a more vibrant and deeper freedom, and especially the precious freedom Jesus offers from the fear of death. Anxiety over death gets expressed in so many self-destructive habits and corrosive social patterns—from opioid addiction to environmental destruction.
Still further richness for this notion is coming the First Nations Version of the New Testament that we’re using here at All Saints’ Parish this Easter Season, the indigenous translation that presents the Gospel as the “Good Story of Creator Sets Free.”
Weaving all of this together brought to mind my firm conviction about the gendered character of our collective distress as human beings. For many years now, I have been thoroughly convinced that homophobia is rooted in misogyny.
Less abstractly, whatever keeps us enslaved to violence, whether because of race or sexuality or class or even species, has its roots firmly planted in patriarchy, in cultural systems that favor men and masculinity while degrading women and reviling the feminine. Ask nearly any gay man who has experienced taunts, jeers, fists, or rejection—the violence springs from our failure to be “real men.”
It matters—so much more than most usually suppose—it matters in the first-century world of patriarchal domination that women are the first witnesses to the resurrection of Jesus from the dead; the first to see that Jesus himself had been set free from the tomb; the first to experience the exhilarating trepidation of brand new life.
To no small degree, the joy of Easter is in proportion to how clearly we can name the severity of institutional systems of patriarchal domination that hurt women, and children, and men, as well as other animals and whole ecosystems. Imperial patriarchy killed Jesus, after all, and women are the first witnesses to God’s vibrant new life in the world.
Mark’s Jesus most certainly sets us free from the fear of death. Mark makes equally clear that we also need the courage to live this new life free of patriarchal control, and to shape our communities with it, and to imagine entirely new ways to be human on this precious Earth.
That’s how I read that moment in Mark’s account when an angelic figure instructs those first apostles of Easter, those women at the tomb, to go to Galilee. That’s where the disciples of Jesus, including women, first encountered Jesus as “Creator Sets Free.”
And now you must go back there, the angel says, and learn how to live that Easter freedom in your own lives with a fierce courage and with an enduring commitment not merely to resist patriarchal systems but to dismantle them entirely.
The Lenten road of discipline does not end on Easter morning, but from here on, there is no map to follow, no sacred GPS to consult. Our own “Galilee” of new life beckons to us, for which we have no blueprint.
Yes, of course that’s more than a little scary, but we are not on this journey alone. The One who is God’s very own freedom incarnate, and who is divine love in the flesh, lives and travels with us, among us, and in us.
We can rely on this Easter declaration, we can trust it with our lives—because of women.
