Practical Wisdom: She Was There First

It's Easter and we're likely to hear the story most of us have heard many times before. This time, I invite you to pay special attention to a detail: When Yeshua rose from the dead, he appeared first to a woman.

Sit with that for a moment.

The most world-altering piece of news in the history of Christianity, at least for those who hold it as truth, came first through a woman. Mary Magdalene. She was the first to see him. The first to speak to him. The first to carry the message back to the others. Yet little focus is given to this significant detail.

History edits with intention. And women have been edited out of the sacred record with particular thoroughness.

Across religious traditions, in nearly every era, women have been systematically moved from the center to the margins of spiritual authority. We've been told that our voices carry less weight. That our leadership is provisional, or derivative, or somehow conditional on the approval of structures built largely without us. We've been handed a diminished version of our own story and invited to be grateful for it. And many of us, for a long time, were.

But the text itself keeps telling the truth, even when the institution tries to manage it.

In first-century Judaism, women were barred from giving legal witness. Their words were considered unreliable before they were even spoken. That was the world Mary Magdalene walked back into when she ran to the disciples saying, "I have seen the Lord." She'd had every cultural force working to silence her before she opened her mouth.

A critic of early Christianity named Celsus, writing around 175 CE, pointed directly at this detail and called Mary "a hysterical female," arguing that her account couldn't be taken as serious historical testimony. He meant it as an attack. I read it as the most compelling kind of evidence.

Because here's the question worth considering: if you were going to construct the most important story at the foundation of a new religion, why would you place a woman at the absolute center of it, knowing the world would push back? You'd only tell this story if you were committed to sharing the truth. The very detail that made Mary's testimony inconvenient is the detail that makes it so important.

The story survived every attempt to diminish it. So did she.

But there's more here than historical argument. There's something theological happening that we women need to hear directly.

Mary Magdalene came to the tomb in grief, weighted by love. She went in the dark, alone, to tend to what she cherished. She arrived and found the stone rolled away. And when she encountered the risen Christ, she mistook him for the gardener, unable to see clearly through her tears. Then he called her by name. Just her name. "Mary." That was the moment everything changed.

I've read that passage more times than I can count, and it still moves me. Because resurrection announced itself first as intimacy. As one voice speaking one name, personally, to one faithful woman.

Before Easter became a proclamation to the world, it was intimate recognition.

The very first person commissioned by the risen Christ was a woman. She was sent to carry the news. She was sent with his word. That's the founding act of Christian witness, and a woman performed it.

Let that be said plainly and let it be said often.

This knowing stands in direct contradiction to every religious system that has since tried to limit what women are permitted to carry, to say, or to lead.

And we're living through one of those moments of limitation right now.

Across religious institutions and in the broader cultural conversation, there's a renewed and deliberate effort to pull women back from positions of authority and spiritual leadership. It's dressed in the language of tradition and divine design. But what it actually is, when we look at it honestly, is fear. Fear of what women carry when we're given room to lead. Fear of our capacity. Fear of our courage, because women who lead from a place of genuine spiritual authority are difficult to control, and the systems built on control have always known it.

Here's what I know from more than thirty-five years of walking with women in the most tender and demanding passages of their lives. Women are built for this. We're wired for the weight of significant moments. We don't flinch from grief, from complexity, from the long vigil in the dark. We've always been the ones who stay. We've always been the ones who prepare the body, who keep the fire, who hold the thread of community together when life is challenging.

Women carry a formidable kind of strength.

Mary Magdalene didn't go to the tomb because someone assigned her the task. She went because she loved, and because love made her brave. She went in the dark, before sunrise, to a place of death, in a political climate where association with a condemned man was dangerous. She went anyway. And when she encountered something entirely outside the boundaries of what she'd believed was possible, she didn't collapse or retreat. She received it. She carried it. She ran to tell the others.

That's leadership – and its exactly the quality of courage the world requires from women right now.

This pattern is older than any single scripture. Long before the Gospels were written, women were the ones who kept the fire burning at the edge of death. It was women who sat through the dark hours and who carried the news at dawn. The pattern moves through the bloodline of feminine knowing, through every culture that understood grief as sacred work and witness as a form of love. We've always been at the threshold. We've always been trusted by life itself with the knowledge that love outlasts every ending.

The question, the one still worth sitting with, isn't whether women are capable of leading in these times. We've always been capable. We've always been leading, whether or not we were given the title for it. The question is whether we're ready to stop apologizing for it, and whether we're ready to receive the full authority of our own story, told at last in our own words.

She was there first. And we're still here.