Mary in the garden

A word for the week

She stayed. That is the first thing to notice about Mary Magdalene. The others had come to the empty tomb, seen it, and gone home. Mary stayed, standing outside it, weeping, because the one she loved was dead and now even his body was gone, and grief has nowhere to go when you cannot even tend the grave. So she lingers in the one place left, crying, and it is to this woman, undone and red-eyed and refusing to leave, that the risen Lord shows himself first. Not to the powerful. Not to the eleven. To a weeping woman who would not go away.

She stoops and looks into the tomb and sees two angels, and they ask why she is weeping, and she is so deep in her grief she is not even startled by angels. They have taken away my Lord, she says, and I do not know where they have laid him. Then she turns and there is a man standing there, and she does not know it is Jesus. Grief does that; it narrows the world to the size of your loss, and she is looking right at the answer to her tears and sees only, she supposes, the gardener. Sir, she says, if you have carried him off, tell me where, and I will take him. She is still trying to care for a dead body. She does not yet know she is talking to the living one.

And then comes one of the most beautiful moments in all of scripture, and it is a single word. Jesus says to her: Mary. Her own name. And that is all it takes. She turns and says, Rabboni, teacher. He did not give her an argument for the resurrection. He did not lay out evidence. He said her name, the way he must have said it a hundred times before, and she knew him instantly, because you know the voice of the one who loves you when it says your name. That is how he still comes to people. Not usually in a blaze of proof, but in the quiet moment when you realize you are known, personally, by name, and it is him.

Then a strange line: do not hold on to me, he says, for I have not yet ascended. She wants to grab him and keep him, to freeze this moment and never let the grief back in. And he gently tells her no, it cannot be held like that. He is not going to be the same kind of presence she is reaching for. Something new is beginning, and it cannot be clutched and kept in a garden. This is the same lesson the whole of faith keeps teaching: the moments when he is near are real, and they are also not to be gripped and hoarded. You cannot install him in one bright morning and stop there.

And so he gives her the first job of the new world. Go to my brothers, he says, and tell them. Mary Magdalene, whom that world would not have trusted to testify to anything, becomes the first person ever to carry the news that he is risen. The first preacher of the resurrection was a grieving woman in a garden who had simply refused to leave. She goes and tells the others: I have seen the Lord. That is the whole shape of it. She stayed, he spoke her name, and she went and told. He still works in exactly that order.