To start with, I want us to try to put ourselves in Mary Magdalene’s sandals, er, shoes today. Over the last few days, your friend and teacher went ballistic in the temple, flipping over tables and driving out the money lenders with whips. Then during the Passover meal, he knelt down like a servant, washing everyone’s feet before saying something about the bread and the cup containing his body and blood. Then Judas, one of the Twelve, Jesus’ closest followers, led an armed mob into the garden while Jesus was praying and took him away. Jesus was put on trial, tortured, and executed. She was there until the end. She saw it all, watched as his body was pierced, watched as the blood poured out, watched the life leave his eyes.
What can all that mean for the new life he was teaching about? How can the world change if he is dead? What will we do without our teacher? He was our friend, and we loved him.
Mary didn’t come to the tomb with joy. She didn’t come to the tomb with thanksgiving. She came to say goodbye. She came to grieve. She came to the tomb in mourning. She was despondent and defeated. She had come to perform the ritual preparation of the body. She had come expecting to find a body. Imagine the confusion she must have felt when she discovered the body gone.
Who had taken the body? Had other believers come and moved the body without telling her? Where had they taken him? Had someone rolled the stone away so that his body could be taken by wild animals? Had the authorities sought to deny Jesus’ followers even this measure of comfort in his death by moving his body somewhere else? Perhaps some of you can picture this.
Mary can’t think of anything else to do but to go to the other disciples. Perhaps they know what has happened. But Peter and the other disciple that Jesus loved were just as confused as she was. They run back to the tomb to see it for themselves. Surely Mary is mistaken. Maybe she just went to the wrong tomb. But they soon see she was telling the truth. They do learn that the burial cloths that Jesus had been wrapped in were there, but they did not show signs of the body being taken by animals. The head cloth was even rolled neatly and placed to the side. Surely someone else removing the body would have taken the cloths with them. At the very least, they wouldn’t have folded them neatly to the side.
They saw the evidence and finally believed Mary’s story of the empty tomb, but they still did not understand what it meant. They left again to return to their lodging still not sure what to think. Mary remained behind crying in the garden. The story tells us that angels appeared to ask why she was crying. She doesn’t recognize them as divine messengers. She is too focused on her despair, on her grief.
Then Jesus is standing before her, but again she does not recognize who is there. She only knows that someone is there. She thinks perhaps he is a gardener, thinks that maybe he knows where the body had been moved. She is still looking for a body to mourn. She has no reason to expect anything else.
We could go into all sorts of directions with why she did not recognize Jesus standing there in front of her. Some have suggested that he appears as a ghost or specter and therefore his form is different. Others have suggested that his physical appearance had changed. Maybe he no longer had a beard or maybe he suddenly had blonde hair and blue eyes. Or maybe it was some sort of divine interference. Jesus was not ready to be recognized so she simply couldn’t tell who he was. Maybe he had some sort of small cloaking device that hid his identity. Or there could be any number of reasons.
But I think it is most likely due simply to her state of mind. Her friend and teacher is dead. She saw him die. She was there. She saw him placed in the tomb. She wasn’t expecting to see him now. Add to that the renewed grief of discovering the tomb open and his body missing. She was probably a hot mess at that point, eyes clouded by tears, hair hanging down in her face. No wonder she didn’t see him. She didn’t even recognize him when he first speaks to her, a voice she should have known.
As I read this story again this week, I was reminded of The Princess Bride. Now this next bit contains spoilers, so apologies to anyone that hasn’t seen it. Anyway, Buttercup’s love, Westley, was killed on a voyage. A few years later, she has been selected to marry the prince of their kingdom, and she is kidnapped while out on a ride one day. A man dressed in black and wearing a mask takes her from the kidnappers and leads her away himself. In her state, she becomes convinced that the man that has taken her is in fact the same pirate that killed the man she loved. But she is startled when she learns that it is in fact Westley that has taken her from the kidnappers.
She had seen him as he approached the kidnappers. She had heard him speak. But still she did not recognize him. It is only when he says, “as you wish,” a phrase he had spoken often to her before, that she recognized him for who he was.
In the same way, it is only when Jesus says her name that Mary finally recognizes him. She is overjoyed and, I imagine, overwhelmed when she realizes that the one she saw die is the self same one standing before her. In that moment there is no longer any doubt. We can imagine she went to him to embrace him as was common amongst the disciples.
His next words show us that this was not merely some sort of ghostly appearance. He tells Mary, “Don’t hold onto me.” If he has no body, how could she hold him? Instead, we get the sense that this is a real, physical appearance. Jesus is there, in the flesh, talking to her.
As long as his body was missing, people could say whatever they like. The Romans stole his body so that the disciples could not have it. The disciples stole the body to prove Jesus’ teachings about the Resurrection. The religious leaders desecrated his grave to deny his followers a place of devotion.
Instead, Jesus makes himself known. In doing so he removes any excuse to misunderstand who he is. Without that encounter with the physical body of Jesus, Mary would have continued to sit in her grief. She would have continued to mourn without understanding.
Instead, she finds joy in the risen Christ, joy in her encounter with Jesus in the garden that day. In appearing to her, Jesus restores that relationship that had been broken by his death, showing in the process that death cannot defeat that bond.
But it doesn’t end there. Not only does the appearance of Jesus restore the relationship that had been broken, but he gives Mary a new mission, a new vocation. He calls her to spread the Good News of his Resurrection. She does not go away to contemplate in silence. Unlike Peter and the other disciple, she doesn’t simply go home to ponder these things. Jesus sends her to tell the other apostles that she has seen Jesus, that he is risen, and that he is coming to see them.
And that would have been no easy task. Even as we know from the biblical texts that Mary Magdalene is a woman of means who helped support the ministry of Jesus and the apostles out of her wealth, there is still the reality of the place of women in much of the world at that time. And for some, still today. While women might be able to own their own property or business, they still were always considered second class to men. Even though Mary Magdalene is prominent in all four Gospels, even though she is mentioned more times than many of the male disciples, she is still relegated to second class status as if her own experiences of Jesus have no meaning and no relevance for anyone else. Consider the disbelief when she told them about the empty tomb.
And yet here is Jesus, telling Mary to go and share the news of his resurrection with the Twelve and others. Jesus’ first act after the resurrection is to send a woman out to share the Good News. Mary is the first to witness the resurrection and the first one tasked with sharing that with others.
Part of this is a continuation of Jesus’ teachings whereby he pushes against the norms and boundaries set by the authorities of his day, whereby he includes those that are commonly excluded. He taught a different way to think about neighbors, he included those on the margins, he sat and ate with outsiders and servants of the empire. He broke the rules when they got in the way of love. And so it is no surprise to us that he would send a woman out with the good news of the Resurrection.
But an equally important part of this is the healing of relationships. The story of Jesus raised from the dead is not for Mary alone - it is not just the relationship with her that needs to be restored. Jesus needs to reinstitute the relationship with the others as well. And so he doesn’t tell Mary to keep the news to herself. He tells her to go and spread the word. Go tell the rest of the followers that I am coming to them.
In her joy at seeing Jesus again face to face, she goes forth and does exactly what she was asked. She encountered the risen Jesus, and, after expressing her joy, she went out to share that news with others. It says she announced to the disciples, “I’ve seen the Lord” before telling them what Jesus had asked her to say. Death has lost its sting and relationship is restored.
Jesus may have told them over and over what was coming. He alluded to it. He talked in metaphor. He even came right out and said it more than once. But still, the disciples had failed to understand what was coming. But then again, do we? With our hindsight and our years of tradition, do we really understand any better than they did?
It took Mary’s encounter with the body of Christ for it to make any sort of sense. She went to the tomb still in mourning, still in grief, there to perform the rites that would help her say goodbye and perhaps begin to have some closure. The open tomb and the missing body simply had no meaning for her by itself, just as the cross a few days before had no meaning by itself other than death. None of it had any meaning until she encountered Christ in the garden.
And I think it remains the same for us today. We can hear about the pain of the cross, the grief of the sealed tomb, and even the amazing story of the empty tomb over and over without being affected. But when we encounter the risen Christ, when we experience the body of Christ, we are transformed like Mary was. When we encounter the body of Christ, we are empowered to do things we never thought possible. When we encounter the body of Christ, our relationships are restored.
Like Mary, we want to have that encounter with the living Christ that calls us by name. We want to have that encounter with the body of Jesus that changes our life, that turns our grief into hope, our pain into joy. Like Buttercup when she learns Westley is alive, we want to answer, “You’re alive. If you want, I could fly.”
It is that assurance of new life, that continuing relationship that the Resurrection allows, that is our joy in this season. It is our encounter with the body of Christ that gives us the strength to get through the day to day world in which we live.
When are you aware of the body of Christ in your life? Where are those places that you encounter the body - in the church? In the garden? On the table? Where have you met Jesus?
Perhaps just as importantly is the question of who is the body of Christ? And what do others see when they encounter that body?
I want to close with some words from a new commentary I have been using. I wanted to say something like this myself, but I realized I couldn’t say it any better.
Like Mary returning to the tomb when others went back home, many people come to church...not sure what they are looking for. They come weighed down with grief and disappointment, hungry for hope. Even those who come to church confident and joyful are still learning what it means to believe in Jesus’ name and claim their identity as children of God (John 1:12). We are all, like Mary, somewhere between grief and joy, somewhere between despair and faith. John’s Gospel is a story of encounters, from Nicodemus and the Samaritan woman to Mary and Thomas. The good news of Easter is that these encounters continue. Because of the resurrection, Christ’s presence now knows no geographic or temporal boundaries. Christ is risen indeed, and so we come to church hoping to say with Mary, “I have seen the Lord” (John 20:18).Mary went to the tomb that morning expecting to find a body. Instead she had an encounter with the body of the living Christ that completely changed the world.
[Amy Plantinga Pauw, “Easter Day John 20:1-18 - Commentary 2: Connecting the Reading with the World,” in Connections: A Lectionary Commentary for Preaching and Worship: Year C, Volume 2, ed. Joel Green, Thomas G. Long, Luke A. Powery, and Cynthia Rigby, 190-191 (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2018), 191. https://wjkbooks.com/Pages/Default.aspx?ContentID=59349&Title=Connections]
Death is not the final answer.
God’s love is still available to us.
Christ is risen! Christ is risen indeed! Alleluia!