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15 Resisting Violence—Engendering Easter In this time before Holy Week and Easter we are poised to commemorate not only the suffering and execution of Jesus condemned to death as an insurrectionist by the Romans but also that of all those who seek justice and whose bodies or souls are being destroyed in the process. We have gathered in this sacred space at a time when right-wing reactionary voices in society and religion seem to be increasing day by day and when it becomes harder and harder to keep the Easter dream of life in fullness alive. We are gathered here to resist despair in the face of violence and to empower each other with the life-giving word of Divine Wisdom. The Passion and Easter story, however, cannot be told without also telling the story of Mary of Magdala, the primary witness of Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection, who was sent as apostle to the apostles. According to tradition she was the first one to spread the good news of Easter. The following historical scenario is most likely: Most of the Galilean disciples of Jesus fled after his arrest from Jerusalem and went back home to Galilee. Some of Jesus’ wo/men disciples, foremost among them Mary of Magdala, did not flee after his arrest but stayed in Jerusalem for his execution and burial. These Galilean wo/men were also the first to articulate their conviction that G*d did not leave the executed Jesus in the grave but raised him from the dead. The early Christian message that “Jesus the Nazarene who was executed on the cross and was raised in glory” is revealed first to the Galilean wo/men disciples of Jesus. Those wo/men disciples who remained in the capital probably sought to gather together the dispersed disciples and friends of Jesus who lived in and around Jerusalem. Some of these in all likelihood moved back soon to Galilee, their native country. Such a reconstruction of the events after the death and resurrection of Jesus is historically plausible, since it might have been easier for the wo/men of the Jesus movement to go “underground” than for the men. By keeping alive the good news of G*d’s life-giving power in the resurrection of Jesus the executed one, the Galilean wo/men continued the basileia movement of which Jesus was a part. 233 234 Changing Horizons Yet Mary of Magdala’s story also bespeaks the misogynism that wo/men face who dare to assume leadership. In Christian the*logy, Mary of Magdala, the apostle, has been turned into the repentant sinner and “most chaste” whore, the sexuate wo/man who is in love with Jesus and teaches him feminine ways of being. This stereotype of Mary Magdalene was solidified by Pope Gregory the Great (-). He offered Mary Magdalene as the example of repentance and conversion to the people of Rome suffering from famine, plague, and war. As Susan Haskins writes: “And so the transformation of Mary Magdalene was complete. From the Gospel figure, with her active role as the herald of the New Life—the Apostle to the Apostles—she becomes the redeemed whore and Christianity’s model of repentance, a manageable and controllable figure and effective weapon and instrument of propaganda against her own sex.” Today, Christian the*logians no longer emphasize the sinfulness of the Magdalene but they degrade her leadership by insisting that wo/men cannot be ordained because Jesus chose only men as apostles. Popular culture continues to reinforce this stereotype in books such as Niko Kasantzakis’s The Last Temptation of Christ, in films such as Martin Scorsese’s adaptation of that book, or in musicals such as Jesus Christ Superstar by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice. Mary Magdalene has become degraded from an apostle and witness to new life to a symbol of female sinfulness and feminine love for a great man. Despite such disparagement, the age-old tradition of Mary’s Easter witness and her mission to the male apostles, the “brothers,” still survives. Thankfully, because of feminist research it is gaining new strength today. She has become for many wo/men the symbol of hope that challenges those who fear freedom and lack the courage to stand up against injustice. Hers and the other wo/men’s testimony to the empty tomb was and still is used in the Easter liturgy and is the most frequently depicted image in early Christian art. Hippolytus...

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