Inventing Anna and the women of Easter
If you haven’t seen Inventing Anna on Netflix, you can get the gist of the series by reading the real-life article that inspired it by journalist Jessica Pressler. The plot seems so unrealistic that, if it weren’t true, you can’t imagine it would ever work as a TV drama.
Anna claims to be a German heiress waiting to receive a multimillion dollar trust fund from her wealthy father. When we first meet her in the show, she’s living a lavish lifestyle in New York and planning her first business endeavour. She’s a very convincing socialite: she wears the right clothes and knows all the right people. But it’s all a façade – she’s a normal 25 year old, estranged from her family, with no money to her name.
Each episode of the series focuses on one person who encountered Anna, showing how they were drawn in by her story. The characters all bring their own complexities to the relationship, which, at some level, seems to obscure their judgment of the truth. Anna’s constant “credit cards issues” and missing bank transfers seem a minor blip in an otherwise convincing act. As her defence lawyer argued in court, the people she encountered wanted to believe she was a millionaire because there was something in it for them. Did her friends get so caught up in her act because it gave them hope?
As a Christian, I’ve often asked similar questions of the Easter story. Jesus’ resurrection from the dead is at the heart of the Christian hope, but it’s caused some of the biggest embarrassment to the church across the centuries. One 20th century theologian seeks to explain away the resurrection as a metaphor about Jesus living on in the disciples’ hearts. Is it something that first century Christians just wanted to be true? .
It’s an interesting thought, but just not what the gospels say. Enter the women of Easter – Mary, Joanna, and the famous “other women” (sorry gals). The gospel accounts tell us that they are the first people to witness the empty tomb and the resurrected Jesus. Luke puts it like this:
“On the first day of the week, very early in the morning, the women took the spices they had prepared and went to the tomb. 2 They found the stone rolled away from the tomb, 3 but when they entered, they did not find the body of the Lord Jesus.”
In first century Israel, having women as the witnesses to a seemingly impossible event is very peculiar choice. A woman’s testimony wasn’t admissible in court of law, so surely it would be dismissed as delusion. And when the women first return to the disciples, that’s exactly what they think, too.
9 When they came back from the tomb, they told all these things to the Eleven and to all the others. 10 It was Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, and the others with them who told this to the apostles. 11 But they did not believe the women, because their words seemed to them like nonsense.”
This might have seemed like a good place for a respectable doctor like Luke to end his account of Jesus’ life. But he doesn’t. The other disciples run to the tomb, and they, too, come to the conclusion that Jesus has in fact risen from the dead. Their steadfast belief in the hope Jesus offered led them to risk everything to share it with it others.
Easter hope is a lovely idea, but it’s only meaningful if it’s true. And this odd narrative choice is one of the things that convinces me that it is.
He is not here; he has risen! - Luke 24:6
By, Jo Brown.