Mary the mother of Jesus, Mary from Magdala, Mary the mother of James and Joseph, Joanna, Susanna, Salome and many others

It’s the courage of the women that is so impressive.  And their staying power.  They have had very little historic recognition, so it’s important to mark the fact that women were an essential part of Jesus’ public life from first to last.

Early in Jesus’ preaching “the twelve were with him, and also some women who had been healed of evil spirits and infirmities: Mary called Magdalene … Joanna the wife of Chuza, Herod’s steward, and Susanna and many others who had provided for them out of their means”.

Just pause for a minute – women paying for men?  It was not unknown for a wealthy woman to contribute to the support of a rabbi – but for a woman to leave her home, and travel with this messianic figure, to follow his preaching and pay for the group’s costs?  Women of independent means funding a man and travelling with his apostles?

Luke’s sophisticated Greek readers would have found such behaviour alienating, his Jewish readership must have condemned it, and for the women, and in the society at the time of Jesus, it was scandalous.

So the evangelist mentions it in passing, hurriedly, and like the other Gospel writers returns to the women only when they must, at the crucifixion.  However, there is no doubt that the group of women followed Jesus for all those months in Galilee, and then travelled on foot with the others down through Judea to the Passover in Jerusalem.

Now Joanna, the wife of Herod, Antipas’s property manager Chuza, must have been well-connected politically; must have known how dangerous it was to cause any disturbance at Passover.  The feast was religious – but it was also political dynamite.  Jews from around the Roman world would make pilgrimage to Temple sacrifice at this most important feast of national liberation, and the city would swell to two or three times or perhaps more than its normal population.  With every room full and people encamped wherever they could, it was an administrator’s nightmare.

In the riots around Herod’s death a couple of decades before, three thousand Jews were killed in the Temple courts.  In further disturbances, the Romans crucified two thousand rebels around the city walls.  Latterly, Pontius Pilate the Roman governor, in a move of either bravado or stupidity, sent in troops with Roman standards carrying the portrait of Caesar and left them within a stone’s throw of the Temple.  This time the Jews resorted to passive opposition, but the popular antagonism was so overwhelming that Pilate realised that he had over-played his hand, gave in, and took the standards from the city.  The truce that followed was at best uneasy.  Pilate resorted to living outside Jerusalem in the comfortably modern Roman city of Caesarea up the coast, and it fell to the chief priest of the Temple to ensure that the city was peaceful.

I wonder if the women held their breath when Jesus, at that crucial time of Passover in Jerusalem, spoke of “destroying this Temple and rebuilding it after three days,” realising how such a firebrand claim would invite retribution?  Did they understand how tough Caiaphas, the chief priest, could be or how determined he was to have no disturbance in this tinderbox ?

So then to the Passover feast, where women were traditionally full participants as well as helping with the preparation of food; there’s every reason to believe – especially in the light of what was to follow – that Mary, and the Mary from Magdala, and Joanna and Susanna and the ‘others’ were all with the apostles at that last meal together.

I can only guess that women would not have gone walking outside the walls of the city at night over in the area of Gethsemane, but the news of Jesus’ arrest and trial must have reached them quickly.  We know that the apostles fled into the local community in fear of being identified – even their Galilean accents betrayed them, and they were right to be afraid.  If Jesus were a threat to the peace then his followers were certainly in danger – and that would also have included the women.  The soldiers supporting Pilate in the city were Auxiliaries; less disciplined than the Legions and more willing to rough up the locals.  The women with Jesus would have had every reason to be terrified.

Nevertheless, they went with Jesus to Golgotha, frightened and sickened.  And stood there surrounded by soldiers for all to see and jeer at for all those hours.

How did the women manage to get Jesus’ mother home afterwards?  At least John was on hand.

Burial had been cut short by sundown of the sabbath so the women, who had already endured so much public condemnation and private grief, set out in the dark of Sunday morning.  Women doing women’s work embalming the body.  It’s hard to imagine how they could gather enough strength; certainly none of the men helped them.  And then they found the empty tomb.  Was it a triumphant vindication of their faith or more awful persecution?

Every evangelist gives women credit for the first understandings of Christ resurrected.  Each account, written so many decades after the event varies slightly, but it’s the women who tell the men of the resurrection.  Women as disciples may have been rarely mentioned through accounts of Jesus’ preaching life, but in the end each gospel must tell of the women’s courage and fidelity, and of their reward.

Mary from Magdala is rightly called apostle to the apostles.

By Sandy Curnow

Image: The Holy Myrrh Bearing Women