Who Was “Also There”

AM Psalm [70], 71 • PM Psalm 74
Judges 4:4-23 • Acts 1:15-26 • Matt. 27:55-66

At the risk of heresy, here is a rewrite of today’s gospel, with a bit before and after it.

Jesus is dead. During the agony of crucifixion he has been mocked by

Roman soldiers and by the two men on neighboring crosses. As others in the crowd taunt him—“Hey, Mr. Bigshot Son of God, save yourself and come on down!”—Jesus finally cries out in despair and surrenders his spirit. Priests in the temple see the curtain torn in half, and one of the soldiers realizes that he has helped kill God’s son.

Also, there are a bunch of women there.

Then a rich guy, one of Jesus’s followers, goes to the man who sentenced Jesus, and with whom Jesus engaged in a verbal sparring over his fate, and asks for the corpse. He gets it, wraps it in a fine cloth, lays it in his own upscale tomb, and has a large stone rolled over the entrance.

Oh, and two women are sitting over to the side. One of them may be Jesus’s mother.

There certainly are passages that let us know what some of the gospel’s women were thinking and feeling—the Annunciation, the pregnant Mary’s visit to her sister, and that kitchen business with Martha and another Mary. But there are so many long stretches of the story when we assume, as today’s reading begins, that “many women were also there,” and yet they are voiceless.

As Christians, we see the roughly three years of the gospel narrative as, among other things, the central pivot of human history. It was nothing less that the revelation of God walking among us. The pull of somehow imagining our way back into that time is so very strong, but when I choose some episode and try to give it a go, I realize that usually half the cast of characters are mostly left out.

We’re told that the women in this passage were “ministering” to Jesus or, in another version, “caring for his needs.” Besides the question of what that involved, there’s the deeper one of what it meant to the women—how they grappled with the bewilderment, the upending of their realities, and the transformative love that we see the men experience in the accounts we know well.

Jesus is dead in this reading. No ministering needed. And yet there the two Marys are as the tomb is closed, and there they will be the next morning when they find it empty and the angel tells them to (of course) go tell the guys. We will get a rare glimpse into their inner world. They were “afraid yet filled with joy,” and when they see Jesus himself, they clasp his feet in worship.

How did they get there? What did they see in him, and what did they make of what they saw? If our call is to encounter the gospel soul-deep, trying to answer such questions and their kin is as great a challenge, and as much a spiritual opportunity, as any I can think of.

Written by Elliott West

Elliott is emeritus professor of history at the University of Arkansas. He has been a member of St. Paul’s for more than thirty years.