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her whole body.” That’s a miracle. Healing powers are revealed as primary in the priesthood of Jesus. We also read that Jesus is so powerfully moved by her touch that he was “conscious at once that healing power had gone out from him.” Healers often speak of experiencing drastic drains of energy, much like that of a power surge. Jesus is described as feeling faint, “wheeling about in the crowd” and asking, “Who touched my clothing?” Somehow Jesus knows it’s a woman and he goes looking for her in the crowd. Terrified, the woman throws herself in front of Jesus and confesses that she did it. It was she who touched him. Jesus tells her, “It’s your faith that has cured you. Go in peace and be free of this illness.” The moral of the story, Mark tells us, is that “All who touched him got well” (6:56). And what touched Jesus mostpowerfully was the extraordinarily moving faith of women; sometimes it even made him faint.
    The New Testament is full of stories revealing how closely women were associated with Jesus, so close that women alone remained with him through his passion, death, and resurrection. The women did not run in fear for their lives and hide as the other apostles did, but stayed with Jesus publicly every step of the agonizing way to end at the foot of the cross. It was the women—Mary Magdalene, “the other Mary,” Joanna, and Salome—who cleansed, anointed, and prepared the body of Christ for burial, and the women who were at the tomb first on Easter morning. Some believe they never left, but every Gospel tells the same story. Among all the apostles, the women alone remained faithful to the end, and ever after.
    While the other male apostles were still locked up in hiding, the women knew for sure that Jesus would rise on the third day because the women knew that Jesus was God. Mary Magdalene was the first person Jesus went to see at sunrise on Easter. While we’ve been taught to think of Mary Magdalene as the world’s most famous prostitute, nothing could be further from the truth. Biblical scholars found that Mary was an independently wealthy woman who supported financially the ministry of Jesus and was a close personal friend. 5 It’s only through the sexist eyes of history that Mary Magdalene’s “many sins” were interpreted as sexual because she was beautiful, unmarried, and wealthy. In the eyes of the biblical world, what else could she be but a prostitute? In the eyes of Jesus, she was the one who loved him most.
    Mary Magdalene was first among the apostles to receive a vision of the Risen Christ, the first “priest” of the early church. Not recognizing Jesus clearly at first, Mary Magdalene, Saint John’s gospel reveals, thought Jesus was the gardener, one who may have seen the body of Christ removed from the tomb andknew where they may have taken him. With her vision clouded by grief, it wasn’t until Jesus calls her by name, “Mary!” that she knew instantly it was him. “Unable to cling to him as she wanted,” she runs instead to tell the other apostles that Jesus is risen, just as Jesus asks of all the women to whom he appears. Mary Magdalene was the first priest of the early church to proclaim the Risen Christ, and Mary his Mother was the first priest of all, the first to give us literally the Body and Blood of Christ.
    At first, the apostles refused to believe Mary Magdalene or the other women. They probably couldn’t believe Jesus would appear to the women first. And they couldn’t believe Jesus would ask these now hysterical women to deliver the news to them, The (fearful and trembling) Twelve. It was not until the Risen Christ passed through the locked doors of their hiding place in the upper room and appeared before them that the apostles began to believe. And only after they literally put their fingers into Jesus’ wounds do they really believe without a doubt that he is risen and that he is God. This is the story’s way of telling us how the literal