Easter Evening 2015
The encounter between Mary
and the Jesus in the garden where he was raised from death is one of the most
famous of all Jesus’ resurrection experiences, and one of the most beautiful.
Mary comes to the garden to
find that the stone has been rolled away and the tomb is empty. She breaks down
in tears. Bad enough that Jesus is dead, but to find his body stolen is too
much. Angry and bewildered she begs the man she takes for the gardener to tell
her where the body is.
But the man calls her by
name, and suddenly she knows it is Jesus.
We don’t know much about Mary
Magdalene, and much of what we think we know is really just speculation. The
Gospels simply say that Jesus cast seven demons out of her and that she then
followed him right up to his death and, as we see here, beyond it. We also know
that Jesus trusted her to take the news of his resurrection back to the other
disciples, who were still in hiding after his crucifixion. That’s why she’s
sometimes called the Apostle to the Apostles, the one who is sent to those who
will themselves be sent out to carry the news of the resurrection to the world.
But that is about all we know.
We don’t know how old she
was. Painters always paint her as young, but she could have been old enough to
be Jesus’ grandma. Nor do we know what she looked like though every painter
depicts her as beautiful. We don’t know that she was a prostitute either; the
assumption of generations of Christians that this was so probably says more
about them than about her! Then there are all the wilder speculations of the conspiracy
theorists – that she and Jesus were secretly married and that she bore his
child for example. Needless to say there is even less evidence for these than
there is for any of those other guesses – no evidence at all actually. What is obvious, though, is that Jesus
mattered to her, and that she mattered to him too.
So we might wonder why, if
Jesus is so important to her, she doesn’t recognise him straight away when she
meets him in the garden. Of course,
she’s not expecting to see him, but isn’t this a face she would know anywhere?
Apparently not, and she’s not
alone. Other disciples fail to recognise Jesus too. He walks seven miles to the
village of Emmaus with a pair of them before they twig who he is. Either they
were blinded by their assumption that it couldn’t be him, or he somehow,
subtly, looked different.
But eventually Mary catches
on, and it is the moment when he calls her name that breaks through whatever it
is that is clouding her sight.
He calls her name. He knows
who she is. And that is what convinces her.
This is a story all about
knowing and being known. She recognises Jesus because he has recognised her not
just superficially, but deep down.
Malcolm
Guite’s poem assumes that she is the unnamed sinner who anoints Jesus with
oil from an alabaster jar when he is at dinner in the house of a prominent
Pharisee (Luke 7.36-50).
Everyone else there is scandalised. Surely Jesus should know what sort of woman
she is. But that doesn’t matter to him. What does matter is that she is there,
and that she wants his help. “One man knew and loved you to the core” he
says, while all the others “burden [her] with their own weight of sin”.
Whether Mary Magdalene was that woman or not, in that society any woman who
stepped out of her allotted role was likely to find herself treated like a
loose woman “no better than she ought to
be”, so it is quite reasonable to assume that Mary Magdalene had carried the
same sort of stigma. Being treated like that is likely to leave you feeling
grubby and devalued, even if your life is actually beyond reproach. If enough
people tell you that you are worthless, you’ll eventually feel that way. But
Jesus had proclaimed the opposite, not just to Mary, but to all who came to
him. He had seen beneath the surface of people’s lives, and it changed them
forever.
When this stranger in the garden
calls her by name, it all comes flooding back. This is a man who knows her, and
knowing her, loves her too. It doesn’t matter what his face looks like, any
more than it matters what hers was like – young or old, beautiful or scarred by
the life she’d led. There is a knowledge we can all have of one another that is
far more than skin deep, and it is very precious when we find it. It is
especially precious when we discover that God knows and loves us like that. As
St Paul put it in our first reading, “now we see in a mirror, dimly, but
then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part, but then I will know
fully, even as I have been fully known.”
That kind of love, love born
of true and deep knowledge, can’t die. It can’t be lost. And it can change the
world.
This is the love we celebrate
on this Easter Day, the love of God which knows us through and through, and can
raise us to new life, just as it raised Jesus.
Amen
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