The claim of the early church is one that the creative and saving power of God, embodied in the Lord Jesus, calls into being a community which is always trying to live out the implications of the divine refusal to accept cultural, ethnic, political, or other boundaries.

If one goes to the fountainhead of the Gospel accounts concerning women as witnesses to Christ's resurrection, one has good reason to posit the following: (a) that women were the first to hear the Easter message; (b) that women, in gathering Jesus' disciples together again, played a crucial role in the founding of the earliest Christian community; and (c) that Mary Magdalene deserves a place in the creedal formulas that cite the names of those to whom the risen Christ first (...) appeared. (shrink)

If one goes to the fountainhead of the Gospel accounts concerning women as witnesses to Christ's resurrection, one has good reason to posit the following: that women were the first to hear the Easter message; that women, in gathering Jesus' disciples together again, played a crucial role in the founding of the earliest Christian community; and that Mary Magdalene deserves a place in the creedal formulas that cite the names of those to whom the risen Christ first appeared.

Perhaps most fundamentally, consideration of Paul's ethical reflections can serve as a constant reminder to Christians of the power of the Spirit that is already operative in the Christian community.

Jesus' healing, preaching, and death are not about abstractions like “patriarchal system,” but seek to establish new patterns of personal relationship and human solidarity among all women and men, bringing liberation and healing even to those at the margins of society.