The Women Around Jesus

Who Funded the Ministry, Who Got the First Sermon, and Who Saw Him First

“Jesus said, ‘Do not hold on to me... Go instead to my brothers and tell them.’ Mary Magdalene went to the disciples with the news: ‘I have seen the Lord!” John 20:17–18 (NIV); see also John 4:39; Luke 8:1–3; Luke 10:38–42

Watch Who Is in the Room

In any movement, you learn the most by watching who is in the room when it counts. Not the photos out front. The actual rooms, where the real things happen. Who gets trusted with the money. Who gets told first. Who is standing there when everything changes.

Walk through the life of Jesus and pay attention to those rooms, and you keep running into the same surprise. Women. Doing the very things the culture of that day said women had no business doing. Funding the work. Getting the first word. Carrying the biggest news in history before any of the men caught up.

Jesus never sat down and wrote out a position paper on women in ministry. He did something louder than a position paper. Watch what He actually did.

Who Paid for the Ministry

Start with the money, because money tells the truth about who matters in a movement. Luke says that as Jesus traveled and preached, a group of women traveled with Him and were helping to support the ministry out of their own means (Luke 8:1-3). He names some of them. Mary Magdalene. Joanna, whose husband managed Herod’s household. Susanna. The ministry of Jesus ran, in part, on the resources of women who believed in it. They were not on the edges holding coats. They were paying the bills.

Look closer at one of those names, because it is easy to miss what it cost her. Joanna was the wife of Chuza, the man who managed Herod’s household (Luke 8:3). That means she had a foot inside the palace, with access, comfort, and a great deal to lose. And she spent it on a traveling preacher from Nazareth that the powerful already considered a threat. Following Jesus was not a safe social move for a woman in her position. She made it anyway, with her own money, out in the open where everyone could see.

Who Got the First Sermon

Now the woman at the well, in John 4. Jesus, tired and thirsty, sits down at a well in Samaria and strikes up a conversation with a Samaritan woman. That is two strikes by the rules of His day. She was a Samaritan, and she was a woman, and a respectable Jewish teacher had no business in a deep conversation with either. It turns into the longest one on one conversation Jesus has with anybody in all four Gospels. And in the middle of it, He tells her plainly that He is the Messiah. She is the first person in John’s Gospel He says it to.

She does not keep it to herself. She leaves her water jar, runs back into her town, and tells everybody. And John says many of the people of that town believed in Jesus because of her testimony (John 4:39). The first effective evangelist in John’s Gospel is a woman with a complicated past, preaching from nothing but her own experience of meeting Jesus.

Who Sat at His Feet

Then there is Mary of Bethany. When Jesus visits, her sister Martha is busy serving, and Mary sits down at Jesus’s feet and listens (Luke 10:38-42). We read that as a sweet, quiet moment. In that culture it was anything but quiet. Sitting at a teacher’s feet was the posture of a disciple, a student in training, and that seat was understood to be for men. Martha complains. Jesus does not tell Mary to get up and get back to the kitchen. He says she has chosen what is better, and it will not be taken from her. He defended a woman’s right to sit in the learner’s seat.

And do not stop at Mary, because her sister Martha gets a moment most of us skip right over. When their brother Lazarus dies and Jesus says, I am the resurrection and the life, it is Martha who answers with one of the clearest confessions of faith in all four Gospels. Yes, Lord, I believe that you are the Messiah, the Son of God (John 11:27). That is the same great confession Peter is famous for making. A woman made it too, out loud, in the middle of her grief, and John set it right at the heart of the story.

And step back and feel how strange all of this was for its time. In that world, respected teachers did not take women as students, a woman’s word was not accepted in a court of law, and a Jewish man did not strike up a theological conversation with a Samaritan woman at a well. Jesus broke every one of those rules, on purpose, again and again, and never once acted like He had done something He needed to apologize for. He was not bending to the culture of His day. He was quietly overruling it.

Who Saw Him First

Before the morning, there was the worst day. When Jesus was arrested and nailed to a cross, most of the men who had followed Him scattered and hid. The women did not. Mark says they were there at the cross, watching, and there again when the body was carried to the tomb (Mark 15:40-47). They stayed when staying was dangerous and promised nothing but heartbreak. So when God had the best news in history to break on Sunday morning, He handed it first to the ones who never left.

And then the morning that changed everything. On Easter, the first person to see the risen Jesus was Mary Magdalene. He speaks her name. And He hands her an assignment. Go to my brothers and tell them (John 20:17). She runs to the disciples with the first words of the Christian faith ever spoken out loud. I have seen the Lord (John 20:18). The early church gave her a title for it. They called her the apostle to the apostles, the one sent to the ones who would be sent.

Do not miss how strange that is. In that world, a woman’s testimony did not even count in a court of law. If you were a man making up a story about a resurrection and you wanted people to believe it, the last witnesses you would ever invent are women. And yet all four Gospels say the women were first. That is not the kind of detail you make up to win an argument. It is the kind of detail you report because it is simply what happened.

The first person to proclaim the Resurrection was a woman whose word would not have held up in any court of her day. Jesus sent her anyway, and the church she announced is still standing.

What This Means for Where You Are

A reader who holds the church office for men will say, and honestly, that being a witness, an evangelist, or a financial supporter is not the same as holding the office of elder or pastor. That is a fair line to draw and I am not erasing it. But notice the pattern that runs through all of it. Again and again, when Jesus had a choice, He pushed past His culture’s rules to honor women, teach women, and trust women with the message. He did not behave like a man who was nervous about what a woman could carry.

If you have been told the Bible keeps women small, the rooms around Jesus tell a different story. He let them pay for the work, learn at His feet, preach to their towns, and announce His resurrection to the world before anybody else got the news.

The women who funded the ministry out of their own means would recognize the Black church in a heartbeat. The mothers and the missionary boards and the usher guilds and the women who sold plate dinners after service to keep the lights on. The work has always run on them. And the women at the empty tomb, sent running to tell the men what God had done, they would recognize them too.

REFLECT & RESPOND

• Jesus had His longest recorded conversation with a Samaritan woman at a well, breaking two of His culture’s rules to do it. What does that say to you?

• The women funded the ministry out of their own means. How does that change your picture of who made the work of Jesus possible?

• Mary Magdalene was the first to proclaim the Resurrection, in a world where her word would not hold up in court. Why do you think God chose her?

• Jesus defended Mary of Bethany’s right to sit and learn. Is there a seat you have been told is not for you? What would it take to sit in it anyway?

SOURCES

[1] “The Neglected History of Women in the Early Church.” Christian History Institute. https://christianhistoryinstitute.org/magazine/article/women-in-the-early-church. On Mary Magdalene as “apostle to the apostles.”

[2] Bauckham, Richard. Gospel Women: Studies of the Named Women in the Gospels. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2002.

[3] “What Mary Magdalene and the Samaritan Teach the Church.” National Catholic Reporter. https://www.ncronline.org/blogs/what-mary-magdalene-and-samaritan-teach-church.

[4] Weems, Renita J. Just a Sister Away: A Womanist Vision of Women’s Relationships in the Bible. San Diego: LuraMedia, 1988. See the chapters on the women who followed Jesus and on Martha and Mary.

[5] Cohick, Lynn H. Women in the World of the Earliest Christians: Illuminating Ancient Ways of Life. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2009.

[6] New International Version. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2011.