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Female Preacher
Women were the first human eyewitnesses that testified to Jesus’ resurrection. This consistent feature of the Easter story in all four gospels has often been pointed to as evidence for the resurrection. No one trying to fabricate a believable story would center the testimony of women in a society that regarded females as unreliable and illegitimate witnesses to truth.1 But they were the first eyewitnesses, and their words are recorded for posterity. They were also the first preachers testifying to the resurrection.
Some Christians have believed that the task of preaching, meaning witnessing to the good news, was to be passed on by the women to the male disciples. Others see this new creation proclamation carried by women as an affirmation of women as preachers. I believe the second position is the more biblically faithful vision of preaching.
Let me begin by speaking of the angels.
Why do the angels appear to the women and tell them the meaning of the empty tomb? We must go a bit deeper than the surface level answer of “because they were the ones who were there.” Whatever familiarity we might have with the women at Jesus’ empty tomb, we must remember: their approach was far from normal. Yes, the women carried burial spices to honor what they believed would be Jesus’ dead body. But they risked consequences for associating themselves with an executed insurrectionist, just as they did when they mourned His death at the cross while almost all the male disciples hid. The women would have had to face the soldiers who guarded the tomb. They could have been accused of coming to steal the body—which is the very reason why sentries had been installed in the first place.2 They would have had to figure out how to remove the heavy stone from the cave’s entrance. For all they knew, they could have wept at the closed mouth of a cave before unrelenting guards. And for what? Because they loved the one who had been their leader, executed and buried there. The women were present because whatever fear they had of persecution did not stop them from trying to honour their lord and friend. They risked their lives, showing a greater love than their brother disciples who hid, afraid. They were faithful, even in the face of death.
This faithfulness might help us understand why the angels appeared only to the women, though both women and men approach the tomb. In Matthew 28 and Luke 24, the angels appear to the women, saying “He is not here, He is risen!” They reveal the truth of what Jesus predicted about His own death and resurrection. When the women—Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, and others—tell the apostles, the men don’t believe them. Peter runs to the tomb; he sees the strips of linen. But Luke tells us not that Peter believes, but that he wonders what happened. No angels appear to Peter. But they appear to the ones who dared to venture into unknown risk to love the One they knew as Lord. Similarly, if we consider John 20, where Mary Magdelene reports of the empty tomb, we learn that Peter and John race to confirm the news. Whatever John believed, he did not understand. Both men return back without encountering angels. But Mary stays, meeting angels and the risen Jesus himself.
Why do the angels not appear to the men? This is hardly the work of coordinated efforts to elevate the leaders of the early church; their world was suspicious of women and hostile to Christian faith. It is those considered illegitimate candidates, the women, to whom the task of sharing the good news about the risen Lord is given.
Why does John show the risen Jesus appearing to Mary and not the men at the empty tomb? It is Mary who lingers and weeps, searching for His body. And it is to Mary, not Peter or John, that Jesus says “I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God” (John 20:17).
For Luke, the appearance of angels sandwich both ends of the gospel. Luke begins with angels announcing to a faithful Zechariah and young engaged Mary news the content of which would cause them to be further discredited. An old and childless man becoming a father, and an unmarried virgin conceiving and bearing the Son of God? But Luke compares Zechariah’s disbelief and Mary’s response of faith, critiquing Zechariah’s cynicism and commending Mary’s willingness to step into something that has never happened before. It is Mary the mother of Jesus who believes the word given to her; and it is Mary Magdelene at the empty tomb, who believes and encounters the risen Lord.
At the end of Luke, the angels and the risen Jesus appear first to women and entrust them with sharing the word of good news, with their brothers. The instructions are not to temporarily share this until their brothers can pick up the task from them. But the male disciples are hard of hearing. In Luke 24:19-24, the two disciples on the Emmaus road have heard about the women’s testimony that Jesus is alive, but they are downcast—meaning, they don’t believe what the women have told them. And the risen Jesus’ response is critical: “How foolish you are, and how slow to believe all that the prophets have spoken!”
The choosing of women to speak life-giving truth about the good news is a dramatic reversal of Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden. But in their actions, as they honor the death of Jesus, the women are blessed and commissioned to share about His resurrection life.
Such is the task of preaching. It does not shy away from speaking of the death of Christ nor from risking disbelief because of the preacher’s “legitimacy.” We see this in the Samaritan woman in John 4, to whom Jesus speaks the most plainly about His identity as Messiah: “I who speak to you am he.” Her response after this revelation is to run into the town that represented her likely place of social ostracization, of the social death of wagging fingers and knowing glances because of her many partners. And she, the most unlikely candidate for sharing the gospel, invites them to encounter the Messiah. If God were after pragmatic efficiency, it would have been imprudent to make the first preacher of the good news to Samaria a woman with a complex relational past. But He picks this unlikely candidate, and she responds with faith and courage. She believes him, and her desire to share this news is greater than her desire to hide and stick to the shadows. Because of her preaching, Samaria will not be the same.
It is the unlikely candidates whom Jesus chooses to be preachers of the word, the word that He is the Messiah and that He is the risen Lord. The world has rules about who is believable and acceptable as a bearer of truth. For Jesus, it is to the women, the Samaritan other, those who are most likely to be disbelieved, that the task of witness and preaching is given.
Unbeknownst to most Protestants, there was a brief time early on in the Reformation where Reformers such as Luther and Zwingli pointed to the scriptures to affirm women as prophets—meaning, those who could hear from the Spirit, interpret the Scriptures and speak its meaning to the community. Against what they believed was the problematic exclusiveness of the Roman Catholic priesthood, the Reformers radically emphasized the priesthood of all believers and included women in this priesthood.3 Luther declared that “all Christians are priests, all women are priests, be they young or old, lords or servants, married or single, learned or lay.”4 For a brief period, concurrent with the advent of the Western print press and as pamphlets exponentially proliferated, women writers passionately defended the cause of the Reformation and of Luther himself, using scripture and theological reasoning.5 But this time period was short-lived, as the radicals amongst the Anabaptists and Spiritualists—and their refusal to bear arms and their questionable claims—posed dangers to Protestant and European existence. Their apocalyptic declaration about Jesus’ immediate return, about Münster or Strasbourg as the New Jerusalem, proved to be incorrect. Some Anabaptist leaders even claimed that a man could have multiple wives. To counter this chaos, the Reformers quickly re-tightened the circle of who could “prophesy”, meaning who would preach the word through the inspiration of the Spirit, back to the tight circle of educated male clergy. Women were to remain silent in public, and to learn and preach in the home only under the instruction of a husband.
What might have happened had the Reformers been able to resist radical heresies while keeping to their original affirmation of women prophets and preachers? In reaching for existing biblical and theological learning as a safeguard against heretical and unbiblical belief and practice, the prophetic preaching of women, which briefly flowered during the early days of the Reformation, was cut short—and remains contested, even today.
When the Reformers fleetingly affirmed women preachers as full participants in the priesthood of all believers, they recognized that the Easter message is first revealed to women.6 The message is not that Jesus’ body is missing; it is that he is risen. The meaning of the empty tomb is given to the women by the angel and in John by the risen Jesus himself. The women sent out, before the crucifixion and after the resurrection, are unlikely candidates in society’s eyes—but they are the chosen messengers of the good news.
The choosing of unlikely candidates, whether it is the women at the tomb or the Samaritan woman to her village, or of the former demoniac through the Decapolis, tells us that preaching was never about being acceptable by the world’s norms or asserting respectable status. (Our times reveal again and again: beware of the status-loving preacher!) Preaching, bearing witness to the good news of Jesus through the power of the Spirit, is an act of faith, of faithful witness to both the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. It is a vulnerable act that risks rejection; it is foolishness in the eyes of a scoffing and skeptical world. There can be no faithful preaching and witness if the preacher has not shared in the death of Jesus—as well as His resurrected life. The task of preaching is given to women and men alike, with the first preachers being the women who were faithful to Jesus, identifying with Him in His death and then being invited to share in His resurrection life. While the gospel of grace re-invites the men to preach the word, it does not disinvite the women who were commissioned at the tomb.
We must remember: the gospel stories about the angels and the risen Lord at the tomb are the women’s accounts of those events. There is no invisible male narrator watching it happen and providing an account from a male gaze. These are the women’s words, transcribed for us to hear. By including the women’s encounters, the gospel writers each are stating: ‘I share the women’s accounts, because I believe their witness to the good news. I believe their preaching.’
A seminary professor of mine, a senior pastor, told me a story about interviewing an associate pastor candidate. This professor was quiet and reserved, while the candidate was young and brash. The candidate took no pains to hide his opinions about women preachers: he saw no place in the church for it. Women could perhaps give the announcements, but since Scripture was written by men, it should be preached only by men.
The next words out of my professor’s mouth stunned me: “then I guess you must have a problem with the parts of the Bible authored by women.”
Now, look, I have preached more sermons than I can count. By that point, I’d read the Bible many times over and was well into my theological studies. I was stunned—what was I missing?
Likewise, this candidate was stumped. He stared at my New Testament professor. Stammered. What was he talking about?
After this silence, the pastor-professor answered: Mary’s song, Hannah’s prayer, Miriam’s song. Their words were not authored by men— these women created the words of prayers and songs which were transcribed by male writers.
The candidate was silent, unable to say anything in response.
Then, the professor retorted, “Man, what do you think Jesus said to the Samaritan woman? ‘Go home and make a bunch of cookies?’”
I might have been less-than-silent in my expressed appreciation about this response.
We know about the resurrection because the women witnessed the angels and the risen Lord, and they preached not merely an empty tomb, but a risen Lord. The writers of the gospels believed and transcribed their words. We are called to be a body that affirms the preaching and witness of women and men. May the world and the church be all the better for it, as it has been since the beginning of new creation.
Footnotes
1. See Richard Bauckham’s discussion male society’s attitude towards the credibility of women’s testimonies in Richard Bauckham, Gospel Women (Eerdmans, 2002).
2. See Matthew 27:62-66.
3. G. Sujin Pak provides an excellent history of this time period. See G. Sujin Pak, The Reformation of Prophecy: Early Modern Interpretations of the Prophet & Old Testament Prophecy in Oxford Studies in Historical Theology (Oxford Academic, 2018), chapters 1-2.
4. Luther, Weimarer Ausgabe 6:370. See also Pak, Reformation of Prophecy, 54-61. See also Zwingli, Corpus Reformatorum, 88:321.
5. Including Argula von Grumbach, Ursula Weyda, and Katharina Schütz Zell.
6. See Martin Luther, “Sermons on John 18–20 (1528–1529)”, in Weimarer Ausgabe, 28:448–57, translated in Luther’s Works, 69:298–305. See also John A. Maxfield, Luther’s Lectures on Genesis and the Formation of Evangelical Identity, Sixteenth Century Essays and Studies 80 (Truman State University Press, 2008), 155.
About Sarah
Sarah is a Korean American theologian who loves helping the church share Jesus’s story. She is a lecturer at Westminster Theological Centre and formerly served as the Associate National Director for Evangelism for InterVarsity Christian Fellowship (USA). Sarah earned her PhD in systematic theology at the University of Aberdeen and master’s degrees in theology from Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary and the University of St. Andrews. She is the author of ‘Beyond Colorblind’ (IVPress, 2017) and children’s books ‘The Deliverer Has Come’ and ‘The Great Waking Up’ (Penguin Random House, 2024 & 2026). She, her husband, and daughter live in Aberdeen and are part of Catalyst Vineyard Church.
