idle tales (on Luke 24)

I think about re-naming this project every now and then. “Dana, Defrocked” serves me well for the time being - that comma is doing a lot of heavy lifting, and I love it. But if and when I get far enough away from the event of defrocking and its corresponding identity shifts, a new name might be called for. There are a few possibilities in the running, but my current favorite is “an idle tale.”

You know where that phrase comes from, right? It’s this year’s Easter lectionary gospel text. Jesus has been arrested, tried, convicted, murdered by the state and buried in a rich man’s tomb. [Yes, it’s a good, long, nuanced story that gets shrunk down, smoothed over and stuffed into a few minutes’ worth of interpretation this week. If you want to inhabit the whole thing, maybe consider reading pieces of one gospel account each day this week between Palm Sunday and Easter. Or find a mid-week service or two or three to attend.]

All of that has already happened by the time we get here, to Luke 24 and Easter Sunday, and the women - the women! - have set out with spices and linens to perform the belated work of preparing Jesus’ body for burial. It had been a WEEK, you know, and the women - the women! - mixed their tears with the nard that they carried up to the rich guy’s tomb. If you’re wondering *which* women we’re talking about here, well, you are not alone. Women don’t get names in most of scripture, and Luke isn’t one to break with tradition. We don’t know how many women went up to the tomb with spices and oils. Just…the women.

He Qi, Women Arriving at the Tomb

When they got there, the tomb was open and empty, which was, to say the least, WEIRD. They’d been by the night before and everything was properly sealed up, Jesus’ yet-to-be-anointed body tucked safely inside. But this morning, the tomb is gaping open, and there’s nobody inside.

There are, however, some people OUTSIDE. Two dudes, in shiny clothes are there, and the shining men start talking to the women: “Why do you look for the living among the dead?” they ask. “Don’t you remember that Jesus TOLD you this was going to happen?” And then, all of a sudden, the women DO remember Jesus telling them that he would be crucified and buried and on the third day, rise again.

So they run down to the disciples, bursting with the mystery of it all, and tell everything to the eleven men. Luke comes to his senses here, recognizing that probably people will want to know the names of the first ever preachers of the resurrection, and lets us know that it was Mary Magdalene, Joanna and Mary the mother of James who did the telling. Still no word on if they were the only three at the tomb or if they were just the ones with enough wits left about them after that heart-shattering experience to tell about it.

Let’s pause right here to review: who went to the tomb to care for Jesus’ body even after he was dead? Who got up at the crack of dawn to do it? Who gathered the costly spices and oils for the work? Who refused to sit around weeping when there was care work to be done? Who were the first witnesses to the resurrection of Jesus? Who were the first preachers of the Good News ever to exist in the tradition of Christianity?

The. Women.

And if you have ever existed in the world of Christianity as a woman, if you have ever experienced the way our societies structure gendered power from the underside, if you have ever found yourself on the wrong side of a made-up, imposed and enforced gender binary, then you will not be at all surprised about how that preaching was received.

The 11 remaining disciples, the ones who had lived and worked and walked with Jesus for years, the ones who had heard him predict *exactly* this: crucified, buried, rising again on the third day, the ones who by all rights should have been LOOKING OUT for this exact thing to happen: those guys heard the women’s account and “dismissed it as an idle tale.”

The Greek word is “nonsense.”

I wonder a lot about how the women reacted to that, having their account of the truest thing imaginable dismissed as an idle tale, as nonsensical. I’m sure they were used to that kind of treatment. I suspect one reason they were so devoted to Jesus was that he was one of the few men in their lives who never condescended, dismissed or ignored them. But I wonder:

Were they unbothered, rolling their eyes at the clueless men and going on about the work of caring and loving and preaching and connecting?

Or were they furious, frustrated, demanding to be heard and understood, at least in this one, ultimately important instance?

Were Mary Magdalene and Joanna and Mary, the mother of James, and however many other women there were standing there with them worried about convincing the disciples of the truth? Or were they clear on what their calling was and determined to go on living it for the rest of their days whether or not the privilege-blind people in charge could ever understand it?

The answer to this question makes a difference to me.

I’ve spent a lot of my life trying to convince the privilege-blind people in charge of what I know to be true. It has rarely worked.

I suspect that the better path is to seek out the others, the people who already know what I am learning, who understand it better than I do, whose gospel truth I used to dismiss as “nonsense,” and learn from them. To spend less of my energy trying to convert other people and more of it allowing my own heart to be transformed.

One very powerful thing that those of us who find ourselves in categories of privilege imposed on us by a society bent on hierarchy and power can do is to choose to believe the people who get cast into categories of oppression. To actively decide to believe people that the powers-that-be tell us are not trustworthy, are not worthy of attention.

In Luke’s gospel, believing “the women” leads to a world-upending mystery of resurrection.

Today, who should we be listening to? Who should we be making an effort to believe?

Recently, someone argued with me about whether or not what Israel is doing in Palestine should be considered genocide. Israel has not yet killed enough Palestinians, this person argued, for that term to be invoked. But Palestinians themselves are telling us that Israel is out to destroy them entirely. This country is so desperate to convince us that Palestinians are lying that it is kidnapping people off the streets simply because they dared to suggest that maybe we should believe the people who are being systematically obliterated. Choosing to believe Palestinians instead of dismissing their witness as nonsense is an act of resurrection.

This year there has been more anti-trans legislation proposed and passed in the United States than ever before. It is an obvious, objectively cruel effort to convince the rest of us that trans and gender-nonconforming people are liars, not worthy of our time or attention. Choosing to believe trans people instead of ignoring their pleas and testimony as idle tales is an act of resurrection.

The current presidential administration is actively working to deport immigrants, both those who are here legally and those who are not. It is both an attempt to change the country’s demographics, avoiding a multiracial minority (that is already here) and a way of testing the limits of tyrannical power. Immigrants are a test case: how much cruelty can they get away with? Choosing to believe the accounts of our immigrant neighbors about who they are, who they are not and the absurdly violent tactics of ICE is an act of resurrection.

Who benefits from you dismissing someone’s story as nonsense? What are you choosing when you decide that someone is not worth listening to? How many systems of cruelty and violence are we enabling and extending when we categorize someone’s confession as nothing more than an idle tale?

Who are you choosing to believe? It’s a matter of life and death, and nothing less.