I recently reviewed Jordan J. Ryan’s From the Passion to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre: Memories of Jesus in Place, Pilgrimage, and Early Holy Sites Over the First Three Centuries for the Irish Theological Quarterly (those interested can read the review here).
The book is worth reading on many levels, but one particular liturgical practice stuck out for me. Ryan mentioned the theory that Jerusalem had a particular liturgical practice whereby women were the ones who incensed the Aedicule (or Tomb of Jesus). This is in memory of the spices that the women brought to the tomb on Easter morning to prepare the Body of Jesus. Ryan suggests that a reading of the Gospel also took place at the tomb and suggests that “the use of incense at the tomb I thus best understood as a performative reception and a commemoration of the gospel narrative of the discovery of the empty tomb, which accompanied the public reading of that very tradition (p. 94).
Ryan is basing this on a reading of Egeria proposed by Ally Kateusz, in her 2019 work Mary and Early Christian Women: Hidden Leadership. The full text of this is in the public domain. While I do not agree with everything that Kateusz proposes, her views on the use of incense by women in a liturgical context is interesting.
Obviously, the debate on the use of the censer in the Roman Rite by a female altar server or acolyte is now fully settled, and in most parishes I know female altar serves outnumber male ones. Also I would think that in most places the very idea of introducing elements to the liturgy that are limited to a particular gender would be seen as problematic. However, as a thought exercise, I think that it might be interesting to imagine a particular ministry for women -incensing the Gospel book as it is proclaimed – as a performative memory of the women who visited the tomb on that first Easter morning. Even though I know that it probably wouldn’t work, it might provide food for thought during this Easter season.