The Lake of Dreams - Kim Edwards [112]
“Now, the next window, this woman with the scroll, is Hulda. She’s from the Hebrew Scriptures. It’s a wonderful story—when the king found ancient documents hidden in the temple walls, he consulted Hulda, who was a prophet, to find out what they meant. There were plenty of male prophets around, but he chose Hulda, for her wisdom and her compassion. See how she’s standing on the temple steps, holding the scrolls, the crowd gathering to hear what she says?
“This next one I just love,” she went on, nodding to the radiant woman turning from the cave. “That’s Mary Magdalene. Look at her expression—the amazement, and the fear. The story is so familiar that I don’t know if anyone really hears it anymore. But imagine if a person you loved had died, and you went to the cemetery and saw that person again. That’s Mary Magdalene’s story—she’s the person to whom the Resurrection was first revealed, the one charged with telling others. Very little attention has been paid to the fact that the first person to witness the Resurrection was a woman, but it’s so. As I said, your great-great-aunt really intrigues me with her choices.”
We were quiet for a minute. I wasn’t thinking of the windows, really, but rather of my father on the day they’d carried his body to the shore.
“I thought that was Mary Magdalene in the last window,” I said, finally. “I thought she was the woman holding the jar.”
“No. It’s not entirely clear who the woman with the alabaster jar is. There are different ideas. But it’s probably not Mary Magdalene.”
I hesitated to ask, but I had to. “You said the women on this wall were prophets, but wasn’t Mary Magdalene—you know—a fallen woman?”
“Mary Magdalene was not a prostitute,” Suzi said. She spoke calmly but also forcefully. “That’s the story you grew up hearing, probably. Around the fourth century one of the early popes conflated all women into one fallen woman, and that image has stuck. But it’s not true. It’s not anywhere in the Scriptures. This woman, too, with the alabaster jar, has been mislabeled that way for centuries. This story appears in all four Gospels, which underscores its importance, but only in Luke is she described, in a very nonspecific way, as a sinner—a term which, when you think about it, applies to everyone. In John she’s identified as Mary of Bethany, sister to Martha and Lazarus. Yet, like Mary Magdalene, she’s been labeled as a prostitute for centuries. It’s a diversion, I think, a smoke screen. Because if they call her a prostitute, she can be dismissed, and the rest of the story can be dismissed, too. No one has to look any deeper into the narrative. No one seeing this woman standing before Jesus with her jar full of nard, pouring it over his head, has to say, Look, look at this: anointing a king is the action of a prophet. Yet it’s true, and that is exactly what she’s doing.”
We studied the woman, her flowing hair, her robes flowing, too, the alabaster jar cradled in her hands.
“It’s such a moment of emotional intimacy,” Suzi went on. “Sometimes I try to imagine it: the room fills up with the fragrance of the nard, and she pours it over his head. She anoints him. The disciples protest—she’s wasting money—but Jesus defends her. ‘This story will be told in remembrance of her’—that’s what Jesus says. Yet here we are, millennia later, and we don’t tell her story. We don’t even have her name.”
“A forgotten woman,” I said. I thought of Rose, who was no prophet, no saint, just an ordinary young woman walking home in the quiet darkness along