And then let us ask what she does with that grief.
IX
Several women push together to roll back the entrance stone, unsealing the mouth of the tomb. Big rounded stones like this one are essential: they stop jackals and hyenas from finding their way in and ripping the bodies apart. One woman wedges a rock under the stone to keep it in place, then two others stoop down and slip through the narrow entrance to the tomb. Those outside hand the body through to them.
They work well together; they've done this before, many times. Burial is women's work. The women who bring others into life, also escort them into death.
Inside, the dry smell of disintegrating bones mixes with the fusty dankness of decomposing flesh. The women pull their shawls over their mouths and noses. The flames of their oil lamps flicker in the close, dense air, giving just enough light to scan the deep niches carved into the rock walls, seeking out an empty one.
This is how burial is done in an arid land. Soil is too precious to waste on the dead. Bodies are placed in the coffin-sized niches for the first year, until the flesh has dried to dust. Then the bones are removed from the niches—or if the family is wealthy, placed in a small stone box—leaving the spaces free for the next occupants.
Bones are stacked high against the far wall, where they glimmer whitely in the faint light. They have been neatly sorted and arranged, like to like, the better to save space. Piled arm bones and leg bones and skulls each make their own separate patterns, as though order can be retrieved in the vast disorder of death.
The women have already prepared the body. They have sponged away the blood and the dirt, straightened the arms and legs, combed the hair. They have anointed him with herbal balms and spices—anointed him in death as they anointed him in life, with myrrh and aloe and the purest olive oil—then wrapped him in a linen shroud, leaving only his head bare. They have intoned psalms, and wept, and keened. Now there are no tears left.
Working in silence, they lift the body feet first onto the stone slab of an empty niche, then push it slowly in. As she watches them, it seems to Maryam that they are returning her son to the womb, only now the womb is made not of her own live flesh, but of unforgiving, unyielding stone.
The other women stand back. They take shallow breaths, as one does in tombs, fearful of breathing in the dust of others. But not Maryam. She breathes deep, closes her eyes a moment, prepares herself. Then steps forward.
Slowly, deliberately, she places her hands on her son's head: palms either side, thumbs towards the crown, fingers spread over his temples, his ears, the base of his skull. She cradles his head. And staring straight ahead into the blank darkness of rock, she lets the weight of her hands press down into him.
She feels the warmth and pulse of her own blood against his skull, and presses harder. Her whole world is in this moment, her whole being flowing down into her palms and her fingers. The flesh beneath her hands seems to drain the warmth out of them, soaking it up. If she can just press hard enough, surely the life in her can cross the seemingly impermeable barrier of death. She gave him life once; surely she can give him life again.
The veins jump in her arms. Her muscles tremble with the effort. Holding him like this, the weight of his head in her hands, it is as though she can be the midwife to her own son—as though with one deft twist of the wrists at just the right moment she can pull him out of this rock womb and back into the world. Her palms seem to vibrate with the power of it. Her whole body leans into its work. She closes her eyes and feels breath surging through him, blood flowing, life returning . . .
She feels a hand in the small of her back, the presence of the Magdalene behind her. Time to let go now, the hand says. She takes one more deep breath, and on the exhalation, lets go.
Christianity begins with these women. Not with Paul or with Peter or with any of the coming succession of saints and popes, but with these women in the tomb. They are the founding core of Christianity: the last to see the body of Jesus and the first to see him resurrected.
That they were even able to bury him is unusual. Burial of a crucified man was so rare that the only physical remnant is that one skeletal ankle of a crucified man found in Jerusalem, with the bent nail stuck in the bone. And this lack of burial was deliberate; it was part of the continuing horror of such a death.
The bodies were left to hang for days, even weeks. They rotted on the crossbeams, where anyone who entered or left the city could see them. If the wind turned to come from the west, those inside the city walls could smell them too. Even unseen, they were a constant presence.
The soldiers who had to take them down must have loathed the job. Up close, the stench was abominable, the sight truly ghastly. Eyes pecked out by vultures and buzzards, the bodies were crawling with maggots. Disposing of them was the lowest of duties, a means of disciplining the soldiers assigned to the task. They turned their resentment against the dead, mutilating them and urinating on them before finally tossing them into a nearby ravine for the jackals and hyenas to rip at. Anyone who tried to recover the corpses would themselves be crucified.
Once the bones were picked clean, they bleached in the summer sun and eroded in the winter wind and rain, and eventually, in the ancient biblical recognition of the fate of all life, disintegrated into dust.
This made no difference to the dead, of course, but it did to the living. It was believed that a body left unburied would doom the soul to wander restlessly for eternity. Throughout the Hebrew bible, a corpse eaten by birds and beasts of prey was a thing of horror—the fate of the faithless and of idolators. Even if all that remained was bones, they were carefully buried, as the bones of Joseph brought home from Egypt to Canaan. The king of Moab burned the bones of his enemy to drive home his vengeance, just as Josiah would exhume and burn the bones of idolators. Even today, small pebbles are still placed on Jewish graves so as to keep the spirit in and prevent it from wandering.
Jesus was saved from such a fate by one of the wealthiest of his followers—another Joseph stepping in to the rescue. It is unlikely that Joseph of Arimathea simply asked Pilate to give him the body, as the gospel accounts maintain. More likely, money worked two thousand years ago as it still does today; it made otherwise impossible things possible. The soldiers on crucifixion duty were as badly paid and as bribable as such guards anywhere, at any time. The right sum could ensure turned backs as the body was brought down from the cross, blind eyes as it was handed over to the women.
The women performed their traditional tasks, washing the body and rubbing it with olive oil from the tree that lived thousands of years, the tree they thought of as immortal. They called the perfumed oil mishcha, "anointing oil," for it was also used to anoint kings. The anointed man was thus the mashiach, the messiah, "he who is anointed." When translated into Greek, the term would retain its original meaning: Christos refers to the chrism, the oil used for anointing.
Once they'd prepared the body, the women wrapped it in a shroud and brought it to the tomb. Yet did they really want this soul to rest? They were wise, these women, as versed in matters of death as they were in matters of birth. They were surely aware of the paradox that a restless soul is one that lives on. They grieved over the body as Isis had done for Osiris, Ishtar for Tammuz, Anath for Baal, Cybele for Attis, knowing that in each of those instances, the dead had been resurrected by the power of a woman's grief.
At their center was Maryam. How not? That is only as it should be, for a grieving mother exerts a moral authority that even a grieving widow does not. She has known this child longer than any other person. She delivered him in pain, nursed and raised and loved him in steadfastness. Her own flesh and blood has died, and the tie of the womb is nearly always stronger than chosen ties of love when it comes to the status of grief. For there is indeed status in grief. It is the hardest won status of all, and any mother would give her own life to be free of it. But once the burden of it has been placed on her, if she is strong, she will find out how to use it for the best. She will fight for he
r child, even in death.
For her own sake, she has to do this, as well as for her child's. The alternative is to be reduced to grief and nightmares for the rest of her life. Maryam could not save her son. She could not offer herself up in his place. But she could still act. She could break free of the passive role of the witness, and make it into an active one.
"Do not let this pass unnoticed," she must have urged herself. "Do not be the quietly suffering one. Do not, above all, be silent."
And then, having determined what she would not do, decided on what she would: "Make your voice heard. Make this sacrifice count. Make it matter in the world."
In our own time, this is what the Mothers of the Disappeared did—those mothers who banded together during the "dirty war" waged by the Argentine junta against its own civilians from 1976 to 1983. Refusing to be cowed, defying the violent imperative to silence, they marched and demonstrated, demanding that the government be held to account for the disappearance of their children into torture cells and unmarked graves. They persisted, week after week, year after year. And though they couldn't bring their children back, they helped bring about what their children had died for: the downfall of the junta.
Such action takes strength, courage, and determination. It must seem easier by far to be passive—to retire into grief, hide from the public role of bereaved mother, and leave it to the comforters to go about their work. And there are certainly times when any activist mother may wish that is exactly what she had done, when the struggle seems too hard and long and even hopeless. Yet at the same time, she knows that to abandon the public role granted her at such a price would be to betray everything her child had stood for—and died for.
Maryam could not prevent her son's execution, but once it had happened, she would at least ensure that it not be in vain. She would accept the authority of her grief. She would help transform her loss. Through her son's death, she would give renewed meaning to life. In her own way, she would ensure his resurrection.
This is how we know it was, in our bones. Yet the gospels do not confirm it. Amazingly—shockingly—neither Matthew nor Mark nor Luke even places Maryam at the crucifixion, let alone at the burial or the resurrection. Instead, they show us what Marina Warner has aptly called "a muddle of Marys."
There is the Magdalene, of course, the only one who is given the honorific surname of the town she comes from, Magdala. Then there is Mary the mother of James and Joses, as well as Mary the wife of Cleopas, and finally the mysterious and utterly intriguing figure who appears in Matthew: "the other Mary."
The casualness of that phrase is stunning, and yet also somehow real. No fiction-writer would ever let it go at that; no editor would let it pass. A good story-teller would be sure to pin her down, even as a minor character. But not the Matthew author. It's as though we have tuned in to the story halfway through the narrative, and everyone already knows who "the other Mary" is. The author has forgotten that people will read this centuries on, in other languages and in other parts of the world—or rather, he is completely unaware of it—so he doesn't bother to say exactly which Mary he's referring to. The result is that she's been lost. Slipping through the mesh of history without any identifying mark, she's a poor relation, in a way, of Maryam herself.
She is certainly not the Magdalene Mary, for the Magdalene is already there, fully named. She could be the sister of Lazarus—the Mary, that is, of Mary and Martha—but then why not say so? She might be a Mary whose existence was gradually edited out of the gospels except for this one remaining reference in passing. Or perhaps "the other Mary" is a term of sexual significance, as in "the other woman." Or a term of insignificance, as in "that other one—you know, what's-her-name."
"The other Mary" couldn't, surely, be the Matthew author's way of referring to Maryam, to the mother of the man hanging on the cross? Surely she couldn't have been merely one of the "many women which came up with him into Jerusalem" in Mark? Yet what are we to think when she appears at the crucifixion only in John, the last of the four canonical gospels to be written and the one most removed from her in both time and place?
It seems an incredible omission. Almost an insult. And it becomes all the more incredible when you realize that the only named woman who appears at the crucifixion in all four canonical gospels is the Magdalene. Not the virgin, but the sinner.
This seems patently unjust. Maryam should be right there, at the center of the scene. She should have been there all along, instead of having to wait for John to place her there nearly seventy years later. How could this have happened? All those paintings of the Piety, all the images of the grieving mother cradling her dead son in her lap, do they show the wrong Maryam? Have we all, through the centuries, indulged in an act of collective unconscious wish fulfillment, and replaced what actually was with what we think should have been?
"Jezebel, Jezebel, fornicating under the walls of God's holy city!"
To be accosted this way by an irate stranger on an otherwise beautiful Jerusalem morning was not the best way to start the day. This middle-aged man seemed determined to denounce my imagined sins to both heaven and earth. He trailed me, ranting and raving all the while, as far as the walls of the Old City, when he finally gave up and turned back, doubtless to find another sinner.
He was mad, to be sure, but in a way that was entirely within the tradition of the place. What he saw was a woman with no shawl, no wig, no form of head-covering such as religious women wear: a secular woman walking alone. That could only mean that I was another Jezebel out to pollute holiness.
He might, however, have studied his bible a little closer. Fornication was not Jezebel's sin. She was neither an adulteress nor a prostitute, but a queen—an Israelite queen who had been devoted to pagan worship some twenty-seven centuries earlier, and for that reason was opposed and cursed by the prophet Elijah. Her sin was religious, not sexual. She had prostituted herself to false gods.
In the Middle East, calling someone a whore is a favored insult, whether they are male or female. It is a long tradition. The Hebrew prophets consistently use the harlot as the paradigm of unfaithfulness to Yahweh, accusing Israelites of "whoredom" with other gods. "Fornication," "harlotry," and "adultery" are all used interchangeably with "pagan worship," to the degree that if you read too literally, you might think of life at the time as one giant sexual orgy.
Using sexual metaphor as a means of denigration is a tradition that has persisted through the centuries. Accusations of being a whore—or the son or the daughter of one—are common slurs in today's Middle East, cast about with the same ease and relish as four-letter words in an American gang neighborhood. The difference is that in the Middle East, now as two thousand years ago, they also have strong political overtones. In the West Bank and Gaza, the radical Islamic group Hamas calls any woman who dares criticize its policies a prostitute. Her real crime is the same as it would have been in biblical times. It is a conceptual whoredom, as it were—a straying from the single path of righteous faith. It is the crime of possessing an independent mind in a world where politics is determined by claims of divine dictate.
The Magdalene is such a woman, the only one among Jesus' followers who is not identified by her relationship to a man. She is no man's mother or sister or wife or daughter. As Susan Haskins has pointed out in her biography of her, she was probably a woman of some means—one of Jesus' less impoverished followers, that is, and a model for the many women Paul would later single out for honorable mention in his letters.
Yet three of the New Testament gospels first mention her only at the crucifixion. She makes no appearance until then, and there is no indication of how or why she would assume such a central role at this critical point in time. Only Luke identifies her earlier on as the woman "from whom seven demons had gone out." Exorcized by Jesus? Luke does not say, though if it were so, he would presumably have shown the scene.
This is the only hint in the gospels of a troubled past for the Magdalene, and it is, to say the least, an
ambiguous one. What were these demons? Had she been mad, or physically sick? Or perhaps heartbroken? The eastern Orthodox tradition reflected in Khiyr's retelling of her story over the stone wall of Magdala has her driven to despair when her fiance leaves her to follow Jesus. It sees the Magdalene not as a woman of abandon, but as an abandoned woman, sinned against as much as sinning.
Indeed, why would anyone assume from the meager gospel evidence that she had been a prostitute at all? The gospel writers were quite open about adultery and menstruation; there was no reason not to say that the Magdalene was a prostitute if it were so. On the contrary, it would be worth emphasizing as part of the message that the shunned would be welcomed and included, the sinful made pure.
In fact, the Magdalene's presumed sinfulness only developed as the church itself developed. True to Paul's dictum that "in Christ there is neither male nor female," early Christian women preached, prophe-sized, baptized, and officiated as priests and bishops alongside men, free from any "stain" of sinful sexuality. They did so in a wide variety of Christian movements throughout the eastern Mediterranean. But as orthodoxy was established, gaining both official recognition and political clout after the conversion of the emperor Constantine, the role of women was severely curtailed. Religion might be a sphere for both men and women, but politics was strictly for men.
In what theologian Harvey Cox calls "the most successful attempt by any religious hierarchy in history to channel, defuse, and control female religious symbolism," strong female images were cut down to size. Latin theologians began to identify the Magdalene first with the unnamed sinner who anointed Jesus' feet in Luke, then with the adulteress in John, and finally with the many-husbanded Samaritan woman in John. She became a kind of repository of sinful sexuality—the mirror image of the Nazarene Maryam. As the one was restricted to the now familiar image of the Madonna, so the other was straitjacketed into the equally familiar one of the whore.
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