The Resurrection Of Christ: Mary Magdalene Meets Supreme Court Plaintiffs

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For Lent this year I created a special Stations of the Cross series for Believe Out Loud chronicling the history of the LGBT movement. By incorporating images depicting the struggle for LGBT equality through the 20th and 21st century, these stations serve as a devotion for LGBT Christians and allies to enter into the story of Christ’s suffering and experience a relationship with a God who suffers with us.

The LGBT Stations of the Cross were shared widely online and in congregations throughout the Lenten season.

In March, the Stations were on display during the Interfaith Prayer Service in Washington, D.C., preceding the Supreme Court’s oral arguments on the Defense of Marriage Act and Proposition 8.

Traditionally, the Stations end with Christ being laid in the tomb, but in recent years, artists have added a fifteenth station depicting the Resurrection of Christ. When Kittredge Cherry, a curator of LGBT Christian art, interviewed me about this project, she asked why I had not included a resurrection image in the series. She rightly pointed out that the absence of images of the resurrection is deeply felt in the LGBT community.

In response, I promised to create a fifteenth station after the Supreme Court ruled on marriage equality.

I felt confident that Prop 8 and DOMA would be ruled unconstitutional, an anomaly for me as I don’t exactly have a reputation as an optimist among my friends, and that the final station would be celebratory.

However, even if the ruling had gone the other way, it is clear that we are living through a sea change on the issue of LGBT rights. The demonstrations at the Supreme Court during Holy Week were their own testimony to the paradigmatic shift in American views on marriage equality.

From the start, then, there were two images of resurrection floating in my head—one featuring joyful activists at the Supreme Court in the spring, and another with those same activists celebrating the defeat of Prop 8 and DOMA.

Happily, the final station is celebratory. In it, Mary Magdalene becomes the first of the apostles to be a witness to the resurrection. Her encounter is framed by drawings of Kris Perry and Sandy Stier at their wedding ceremony and another of Edie Windsor and Thea Spyer.  

The grouping of Perry, Stier, Windsor and Spier with Mary Magdalene carries with it a deep theological significance.

Mary Magdalene was a trusted disciple and an essential figure in Jesus’ ministry. She joined John and Mary at the foot of the cross, then laid Christ in his tomb. Yet, her history has been revised and re-written, casting her in the role of the harlot with no evidence to support this claim.

History has stigmatized Mary Magdalene, ignoring her deep inner truth in favor of reckless speculation about possible sexual relationships with Christ and John the Baptist.

To me, Mary Magdalene embodies the resurrection as much as the risen Christ. Her meeting with the resurrected Christ is testament itself to the reality, in Augustine’s words, that she was an “apostle to the apostles.”

It is only fitting that Mary Magdalene would accompany the women in this painting, who together challenged systematic discrimination against LGBT people in our nation’s highest court.

With faith, I pray that this image will signify a greater shift in public opinion as we move beyond baseless stigmatization of the LGBT community to embrace our diversity as a blessed gift from God. 

Image via Mary Button; View the entire series on Believe Out Loud’s flickr page