Mary Magdalene

In a world where we aren’t trusted, Mary’s encounter with the risen Jesus is an act of solidarity.

Julie Faith Parker reads the Bible without guilt or shame, leading readers toward a healthier way of relating to scripture.

Holly Carey turns up the brightness on the most faithful disciples in the gospels: the women.

“If John’s christological confessor is also the first person the risen Jesus appears to,” says biblical scholar Elizabeth Schrader Polczer, “that could make her a competitor to Peter’s authority.”

The Bible offers conflicting answers.

Christ’s invitation to new life is almost always unfamiliar and surprising, even disconcerting.

I've hungered this year for art that honors complexity.

What does God’s love smell like? Like honeysuckle on a warm spring day? Like a salty ocean breeze? Can God’s love also smell like a person who hasn’t bathed for days? For the people in the story in John 12, God’s love smells like their brother Lazarus, who has just been raised after four days in a tomb. Now his friends and loved ones are sharing a dinner in celebration and thanking Jesus, who has come out of hiding to see his friend Lazarus enjoying his new life.

Very early in the morning, on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene came to the tomb. Dark. First light. Dawn. A few minutes of extraordinary encounter. This scene at the tomb of Jesus bestows a supreme gift upon the beloved of God. Time and place and character unfold and then reveal a threshold through which the hearer of the word may enter. Here, as in an icon, you experience Mary’s transformation from desolation to animation, from inertia to action.

Each of the four Gospels tells about the woman who anoints Jesus while he is at table, and in each Gospel someone sharply rebukes her for her action. But Luke is unique: unlike event as told the other three Gospels, the act of anointing as told in Luke does not portend Jesus’ death. Instead, hospitality and table fellowship are the recurrent themes, and they are a clue to the meaning of this parable.