At that eventful moment when Jesus was arrested, tried and crucified, the men who had been closest to him in life were ... hiding. Whereas the women, as my wife has observed in her reflection below, were out and about, heading to the tomb in an effort to do something good even at that point.
The men hid. Was it simple fear? Men are inclined to be of the moment. To accomplish something and move on to the next thing. To live in the moment. Women are inclined to treasure what they've seen, known and done. So what had life before then been? To be with Jesus on earth was to be in the presence of Jesus' Father. That is why Jesus said, if you've seen me, you've seen the Father. They had a glorious three and a half years in a transcendent experience of Father's presence that they did not fully understand or appreciate until later.
And then, to their great dismay, Jesus was taken and killed and so Jesus' presence was stripped from them, and with it, their experience of life in Father's presence. They were left with nothing but ashes. Fear may have motivated them to hide, but despair kept them there.
Yet the women remembered and the women persevered. So it was to the women that Jesus first appeared. It was to the women that he first spoke. And it was the women he sent to alert the hiding, cowering men. He could have greeted the women and then headed off to the men but he did not. He honored the women by giving them the joy of first proclaiming the good news.
But Jesus did not return to pick up the threads of his prior life. Instead, he prepared them for the next big step, the moment in which the Presence would be theirs, directly and forever. That changed everything.
Here is Dorothy's meditation.
Why Women First?
Jesus must have been gentle with the disciples as He
Gently chided themFor their lack of faith,
For their stubborn refusal to believe
Those who had already seen Him and told them.
Mary had told them,
Mary, the mother of James had told them,
Joanna, Saloma and other women had told them.
And the disciples had not believed these women!ALL women.
So why did Jesus come to women first?
They weren’t in hiding.
They were out looking for Him,
Wanting to care for His body,
Wanting to be close to Him,
Hoping for Him,
Seeking joy for their grief.
P.S. We may well wonder why the gospels, sourced by these same disciples, include so many accounts of the disciples' failure. Perhaps they finally understood that all the issues that troubled them during their time with Jesus on earth were nothing compared with the overarching goal of knowing Jesus -- really knowing him -- through a life in the Spirit. The accounts of these flawed men help us to look beyond the now and into the eternal Now where true life begins.
