Commentary on Luke 24:1-12

“Remember how he told you?” the youth in dazzling clothing says to the women gathered in the soft dawn light at the empty tomb (verse 6). The women, perplexed and terrified, do remember. They draw together their memories with their experience and proclaim the mystery of our faith for the first time.

We preachers, who have been in church each Sunday for many years, take for granted that we know what Jesus meant when he told everyone in Galilee that the Son of Humanity must rise again (Luke 9:21–22). As long-time preachers (or even new preachers with long church-going track records), we take for granted that the end of the story, as Jesus tells it in the middle, is comprehensible. We also take for granted that Jesus was very serious, very reverent, and very clear as he told the future—so serious, reverent, and grave that we just as often attribute a kind of foolishness or incomprehension to the disciples and Jesus’ other companions.

I still remember the first time I really heard this version of the resurrection story. I was in my mid-20s, studying to be a pastor, working as a part-time intern at a Lutheran church that was also a campus ministry site for the university next door. This was a congregation full of astrophysicists, unhoused people, feminist ethicists, students, precocious children, theologians, people struggling with mental illness, cancer researchers, social workers, refugees. And on that Easter Sunday in the early 2000s, I heard for the first time that Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, and the other women were the ones who proclaimed Jesus’ resurrection. They were the first preachers in the Christian tradition.

For sure, I knew that Mary Magdalene was the first one to the tomb. That it was women’s work (and often still is) to tend to family graves and care for the bodies of beloved ones who had died.¹ These women were fulfilling their roles within the gendered division of labor in the ancient world. The implication, however, each time I heard about the women’s diligent compliance with social norms was that they were mere messengers for the real proclaimers. Their report to Peter and the others about the empty tomb and the message to meet Jesus in Galilee were simply the information that the men needed to begin the real work of proclamation.

“Remember how he told you while he was still in Galilee?” Many of us hear these words on Easter morning with a tone of chastisement, as if the hearers should not be grief-filled or unbelieving—after all, Jesus said he would be resurrected, and the empty tomb is proof! So often we fault the biblical characters (in this case, the Marys, Joanna, and the other women who followed Jesus) for their inability to comprehend each word Jesus has said in the previous chapters. Such fault has the effect of blaming the women among Jesus’ disciples for doubt and forgotten memory. Thus, we assume that the women’s knee-jerk emotions keep them from understanding.

Along with this assumption, we also place Peter at the site of memory and understanding. Whether we connect the emotions with the women or memory with Peter and the other men, we often see Peter as the key confirmation of resurrection truth. Peter remembers Jesus’ words and the story moves forward. The women simply catalyze the movement from the men’s previous ministry to their future one.

Yet the dazzling youth does not remind Peter about Jesus’ words in Galilee. The Marys, Joanna, and the other women who are at Jesus’ grave on Sunday morning are the ones who receive this reminder. They were in Galilee, too. They are the keepers of the memory the dazzling youth invokes. These women are the ones who make meaning of both the memories and the emptiness of the tomb. These women are the ones who, though fearful that morning (wouldn’t you be, too?!), connect their experience and their discipleship in Galilee with their discovery.

These women not only proclaim resurrection hope but translate that hope into future action and community continuity. It is not and should not be surprising that women were the ones who did this intellectual, emotional, and social labor.

The subtlety between the idea that the women were the first witnesses who enabled the male disciples’ proclamation and the idea that the women themselves proclaimed Jesus’ resurrection for the first time to the male disciples is sometimes dismissed as trivial. Yet the shift in interpretive framework is enormous. Preachers often assume that ancient misogyny is something worth pointing out as a contrast to our more contemporary understanding of women’s roles in the life of the church.

But ancient misogyny should not be used as a foil for our own enlightenment about women’s capabilities. Such a move ignores the misogyny that still pervades our churches, our communities, and our politics. Such contrasts between then and now also ignore the realities of women’s power in the ancient world (and our own).

Furthermore, we often theologize these contrasts, suggesting that malevolent ancient Jewish practices were corrected with an egalitarian liberation of the Jesus movement. This last move adds a component of Christian anti-Judaism into our telling of the story.² As preachers, we need make no comment at all about expectations that women could not proclaim resurrection. We need to simply tell the story of the women proclaiming the resurrection as the true story.

For contemporary searchers, for those who might be at Easter services for the first time, or for those coming back for the first time in a long while, it might be helpful to point out the dynamics between Jesus’ disciples. While we do see the rifts between the 12 male disciples, particularly with Judas’s conspiracy to hand Jesus to the Romans, the gendered divides within the community of those who followed Jesus rarely feature in our preaching and teaching. These intra-community dynamics, rather than the dynamics of the society at large, present a truer angle for our gender critiques—in both the ancient story and our contemporary world.

This divide is most clearly evident in verse 11, when Peter and the men do not believe the women. When the women return from the grave with their news, Luke writes that the men thought the women were telling “an idle tale” and did not believe them. Luke uses the Greek word lēros for “an idle tale” (New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition). The dictionary suggests that “trumpery” or “showy but useless words” would be another way of capturing the word’s meaning.³

Once we have a fuller picture of lēros, we start to see that the tension between Jesus’ followers is not an inherent issue with women. The issue is the community’s response to the women’s experience. Suggesting that their story was a fanciful tale, or showy but useless, dismisses their experience of resurrection—their fundamental experience of God bringing life from death. Is that not the fundamental experience of our faith?

Here is the crux of the Easter message. In some Eucharist liturgies, we proclaim the mystery of faith together as a community: “Christ has died. Christ is risen. Christ will come again.” In the depths of that mystery lies a kind of fullness of human experience, too: Grief. Joy. Anticipation. Hope. Some among us feel all of these—or perhaps just one—deeply on Easter Sunday. That is what makes for a rich worship and proclamation experience. When we distrust our fellow followers’ experience of this mystery, we lose a connection to the collective multifaceted experience of Easter.

Christ is risen! May we never call that truth “trumpery,” “showy but useless,” or “an idle tale.”

Notes

1. For a good overview of women’s roles in first-century Judaism see Tal Ilan, “Jewish Women’s Life and Practice in the World of the New Testament,” Oxford Handbook of Gender and Sexuality in the New Testament, ed. Benjamin Dunning (Oxford University Press, 2019), 221–237.
2. See Judith Plaskow, “Feminist Anti-Judaism,” JFSR 7 (1991): 95–133.
3. LSJ, s.v. “λήρος.”

PRAYER OF THE DAY

Risen Messiah,
Hallelujah! Christ is risen! Christ is risen indeed! Glory be to you, whom death could not defeat. Praise to the savior of heaven and earth. Honor and glory are yours, now and forever, Christ our savior and redeemer. Amen.

HYMNS

Jesus Christ is risen today ELW 365, H82 207, NCH 240
Christ the Lord is risen today ELW 369, UMH 302, NCH 233
Now the green blade rises ELW 379, UMH 311, NCH 238

CHORAL

Surrexit Christus, G. B. Pergolesi