Women First

As I write, Easter is still several hours away — officially it begins at sundown today.  Happily, my friend the deacon will preach the Great Vigil tonight, and I'll preach on Easter Morning.  My preaching burden is considerably lightened.

But what to preach about?!  The story speaks for itself; preaching is largely a decorative exercise, and often not all that decorative.

However, my homily's focus this Easter has been determined by the recent anti-abortion legislation passed in North Dakota and Arkansas.  This has highlighted the legal difficulties so many women face in dealing with their health care.  Along with voter suppression, challenges to Roe v. Wade are the new legislative fad for conservatives.  This week North Dakota outlawed abortion if a fetal heartbeat can be detected.  That puts the limit at six weeks or less, often before a woman knows she is pregnant.  Arkansas imposes a 12-week limit.  Pro Life folks are dancing in the end zone.

They are also imposing on women limits in the area of health care that no man would tolerate.  Why?  Because, for all their huffing and puffing about the sanctity of life, the authors of these laws believe that a woman, left to her own devices, is incompetent to make her own health care decisions.  "We know better," say the guys in power.  "Just be quiet and do as we say."

At the Tomb on Easter Morning.

How interesting for a preacher, then, to recognize that when the big news of Easter was proclaimed, it was proclaimed first to women, not men.  Some might pass that off as happenstance.  The women were there to anoint Jesus' body.  In that day and culture, contact with a dead body rendered a person ritually unclean.  It made sense for men to assign this task to women, whose uncleanness was... well, not their problem.

How like God to prefer "the least" over "the most."  How like God to declare good news to those that the powerful, well-connected males of society considered to be of little worth, save for their ability to have babies.  And note the parallelism.  When Jesus was born, the breaking news was delivered to shepherds, who were at the bottom of the socio-economic ladder.  When Jesus rose from death to life, the breaking news was delivered to his female disciples.  How like God to favor the least favored. •••