Easter
The empty tomb
John 20
That woman was the first word spoken
must have taken even the angels by surprise,
who were used to bringing their fiery glory
down to the clanging swords of battlefields,
to priests tugging at their beards
in lamentation, to voices thundering in temples
and muscles hefting stones from mountaintops,
not to a trembling woman whose hair clung
to her neck with tears, who for a moment
held the souls of the nations like a basket of figs.
Tania Runyan
This poem brings home to me how utterly radical the good news was and is. When I was ten years old, I wrote a school essay that for some reason made the point that Jesus was one of the first male religious leaders to treat women with compassion and respect. The fact that the Church has historically utterly failed in that respect does not negate the testimony of the gospels.
John 20: 11-16
Mary stood crying outside the tomb. Still crying, she bent over and looked in the tomb, and saw two angels there, dressed in white, sitting where the body of Jesus had been, one at the head, the other at the feet. "Woman, why are you crying?" they asked her.
She answered, "They have taken my Lord away, and I do not know where they have put him!"
When she had said this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing there; but she did not know that it was Jesus. "Woman, why are you crying?" Jesus asked her. "Who is it that you are looking for?"
She thought he was the gardener, so she said to him, "If you took him away, sir, tell me where you have put him, and I will go and get him."
Jesus said to her, "Mary!"
She turned toward him and said in Hebrew, "Rabboni!" (This means "Teacher.")
"Do not hold on to me," Jesus told her, "because I have not yet gone back up to the Father. But go to my brothers and tell them for me, "'I go back up to him who is my Father and your Father, my God and your God.'"
So Mary Magdalene went and told the disciples that she had seen the Lord, and that he had told her this.