When I was little, my mom used to act out Bible stories with me. My favorite, always, was Mary Magdelene finding Jesus in the garden. I would be Mary, kneeling in front of the tomb (our wood stove) in the little flannel bathrobe my mom had sewn for me, pretending to cry. My mom would be Jesus.

“Mary,” she would say gently, a smile on her lips and in her voice. I would look up and gasp.

“Jesus!” I would cry in wonder, and hug her legs with all the fierceness my three-year-old frame could muster.

As I got older, though, the story began to bother me. What was with Jesus telling Mary not to hold on to him? I mean, Mary had just been through some serious trauma, and my mother never pushed me away. It seemed so distant and cold, more like the King’s English Jesus in bad evangelistic movies than the warm, loving Savior in the Honeytree songs my mother sang over me. I tried to make excuses for Jesus, to recast the narrative to sound more like the scenario I played out with my mother, Jesus’ voice full of laughter and love as he tried to disentangle himself from a woman whose grip was threatening to topple him over.

It never really worked, though. Not until last week, when a thought shot out of the sky and into my spirit, fully-formed, and I found myself Having Church in a rusty GMC pickup while trying to order coffee and an Egg McMuffin. Hallelujah! Thank you Jesus! No, I take it black!

Let me back up for a minute.

It was only recently that I learned the name “Mary” means “rebellion.” It surprised me–maybe because Mary of Nazareth is so often portrayed as a calm, passive thing, maybe because the word “rebellion” isn’t typically applied to women the church calls godly–but it shouldn’t have. Because, hoo boy, do the biblical Marys engage in some hard-core rebellion.

There was the prophet Miriam, the first of the Marys, who even as a little girl defied the most powerful man in the world, colluding in a scheme with several other rebellious women to save her baby brother. She was the one who waded out into the Nile with the contraband baby, risking her neck to save his, and when the pharaoh’s daughter showed up, she didn’t shrink back in fear–instead, she charged out of the reeds, met the princess eye-to-eye, brought her into the conspiracy, and carried her brother home under royal protection. Miriam was a force to be reckoned with. Sure, she could be cantankerous at times (like when God gave her five minutes of leprosy for talking smack about her brother’s marriage), but Miriam had enough chutzpa for all three of her siblings. And God knew they needed it.

Then there was Mary of Nazareth, whose radical submission to God required wholesale rebellion against her culture’s expectations. She risked her social standing, her marriage, and her very life by saying “yes,” in a culture where women’s vows could be invalidated by her husband or father. The Magnificat reads more like a radical’s manifesto than a Nice Christian Hymn, and the Mary we encounter later in the gospels doesn’t seem to have any problem speaking her mind, contemplative nature or no.

Mary of Bethany was another rebel, who scandalized her sister and the other disciples by daring to sit at Jesus’ feet as his disciple, a role women weren’t allowed to fill. When Martha asked Jesus to send her back to the kitchen where she belonged, Jesus told her that Mary had chosen the better thing, and it wouldn’t be taken from her. And that wasn’t the only time Mary B.’s immodest, improper, unable-to-stay-in-her-place behavior left people gasping in shock. Mary B. seemed to have a knack for scandalizing people, and Jesus always stood up for her, even tying her story inextricably to the gospel. Mary’s no-holds-barred love for Jesus pushed her beyond what was socially-acceptable in her culture, especially for women. And this, Jesus said, was a better, beautiful thing.

And of course, there was Mary Magdelene, who traveled with Jesus and the disciples, supported the ministry out of her own means, and was chosen by Jesus to be the apostle to the apostles, the first human being to proclaim the gospel: He is risen! He is risen indeed!

So rebellion isn’t all bad. Sometimes, in this broken world, submission to God sometimes requires rebellion against the powers-that-be, the legal, religious, and social realities that keep people from being who God wants them to be, doing what God wants them to do.

Usually, when we think of women and rebellion, it’s not the Marys who come to mind, but Eve. Eve, who chose her own counsel over God’s. Eve, whose appetite for enlightenment plunged the world into darkness. Eve, whose grab for self-sufficiency resulted in her subjugation.

“Your desire shall be for your husband,” God predicted, “and he will rule over you.”

The Hebrew word for “desire” in this passage is a strange one, only used three times in the Old Testament. It has connotations of reaching toward, of grasping, of greedily clinging on to. Like a tick on a dog, women would pathetically try to draw their life, their substance, their everything from their relationship with men, and this emotional dependence would put them at risk of being treated like parasites and lesser beings. Women would tolerate whatever men dished out, too needy and terrified to let go.

Which brings us back to the garden, and the rusty old pick-up in the McDonalds drive through.

Scholars have often paralleled Mary’s encounter with Jesus in the garden with the creation of Adam and Eve, which is perhaps where those silly mythologies about Mary and Jesus being romantically involved got started. A man, the Second Adam, and a woman, standing in a garden, at the dawn of a New Creation.

Here’s what hit me in the pick-up:

When Mary recognized Jesus, she flung herself at his feet, clutching him, desiring him in the Hebrew sense of the word, greedily looking to find her everything in this man standing before her.

And never mind the fact that this was the one man who actually could and would provide everything she needed for wholeness. He is having none of it.

He tells the woman to stop clinging to him.

He makes the woman get up.

And he tells the woman to go forth and shout the words that would birth life in everyone who would accept it: “He is risen!”

And the first people she is to instruct in this matter, to teach and proclaim it to, are Jesus’ male followers. (The women had already been there looking for him, and already knew.) Never mind that the men won’t believe her, that they’ll discount her words because she is a woman. Jesus sends her to proclaim the Good News, and she rises up and goes.

It wasn’t an accident. God didn’t choose her because there were no men willing or able to do the job. No, it was a very intentional choice.

Do you see what is happening here? Do you see the statement that is being made.

Jesus not only killed death; he reversed the curse, freeing us to live in the glory of his victory, instead of in bondage to the shadow of our failure.

The shackles are off. And instead of laying in an emotionally-dependent heap on the ground, clutching at men’s feet, it’s time to rise up in strength and stand beside them, to call them forward as they call us forward, as Jesus calls us all.

So pick up your tambourine and sing a victory song, Miriam! Rise up and lead your people into battle, Deborah! Submit yourself so completely to God, Mary, that you don’t care what anyone else thinks of you or does to you–that, in fact, you delight when you meet opposition and persecution, because you know that God has hand-picked you for a perilous task, that you have been identified with Him. Shout out the words that bring life to the whole world, even when people try to make you sit down and shut up, insisting in their jealousy and fear-fueled arrogance that you are an emotional, irrational, hysterical woman who has no call to tell a man what’s what. Your job is to do your master’s bidding, and your master is God, not man.

Eshet Chayil, Women of Valor! The king has come, and called you to his service! No more hiding in the shadows, cowering in fear and shame–death is dead, the curse is broken, and it’s time for all Eve’s daughters to stand up and proclaim freedom: Jesus is alive!