While there are quite a lot of women in the Biblical narrative, they aren’t usually front and centre and there can be a lot of confusion about who they are and what they did.
When it comes to women named “Mary”, in the Gospels it gets even more confusing. There are so many Marys, so little explanation or differentiation. Over the life of the Church, it has led to a lot of confusion.
Today we are considering Mary of Bethany.
In the Anglican calendar, Mary of Bethany shares a feast day with Martha and Lazarus.
She appears in John chapter 11, grieving with Martha as Jesus arrives too late to heal their brother. In this narrative we see Martha coming to meet Jesus as he arrives, while Mary stays at home (11:20). Martha tells Jesus that had he come their brother would not have died, and Jesus speaks with her of resurrection.
Mary appears in the narrative again in verse 28, at home, with people consoling her. She leaves the house to meet Jesus, making the same accusation that her sister had earlier made.
She is crying. Those who followed her from the house are crying with her, and Jesus is deeply moved and he also begins to cry. In Mary’s tears we see that Jesus is also moved, a Christ who is moved by the grief and distress of a friend. It is wonderful to have a God who shares with us in our sorrows.
Mary shares her feast day with Martha and Lazarus, but it is not the only time that we meet Mary in John’s Gospel. John introduces her by explaining that “Mary was the one who anointed the Lord with perfume and wiped his feet with her hair” (11:2).
Once again, we see that Mary is a woman of deep emotion.
There were tears and anger at the death of her brother, and love and extravagance in worship of Jesus.
She and Martha both have strong faith in Jesus (“Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died”). Yet, we know little else about Mary (or Martha and Lazarus). Recent scholarship suggests that the Mary and Martha in Luke 10 are a different pair of sisters to those in John’s Gospel. This again shows the conflation of the different women within the Scriptures – lots of women, but only little glimpses of them.
Their stories are not told in the same way that we hear the stories of David or Peter or Paul. It means that it is easy for them to be confused with one another – one Mary bleeding into another (until 1969 the Roman Catholic Church calendar considered Mary of Bethany and Mary Magdalene to be the same person).
Neither history, nor the Scriptures, tell us much about the stories of women. Yet, the presence of women in the Scriptures, as disciples of Jesus and leaders in the early church, is evidenced in small glimpses and easily missed.
But from the tears of Mary of Bethany caused Christ to cry, the perfume she poured caused Christ to uphold her.
Mary, it seems, was not only a disciple of Jesus, but also a friend. Both she and Martha would hold him to account – “if you had been here, my brother would not have died”.
A pair of strong women.
Although the women of Scripture may not have had quite so much time devoted to them in the Scriptures, they were there, they were present, they were following Jesus, and they were leading in the church – just like women today.
It would be great if we knew more about these women, if we knew more about Mary of Bethany, of Phoebe, of Junia, of Mary the mother of Jesus, of Mary Magdelene.
It would be wonderful to know their stories of faith and witness more fully, as we know those of Peter and Paul. But we see only glimpses of their great faithfulness, leadership, and witness in the Scriptures.
Let’s make sure that we don’t make the same mistake of skimming over the stories of those who aren’t “up front” in our lives and our churches today.