Easter Tuesday, April 1, 2024

John 20, 11–18

Mary Magdalene stayed outside the tomb weeping. And as she wept, she bent over into the tomb and saw two angels in white sitting there, one at the head and one at the feet where the Body of Jesus had been. And they said to her, “Woman, why are you weeping?” She said to them, “They have taken my Lord, and I don’t know where they laid him.” When she had said this, she turned around and saw Jesus there, but did not know it was Jesus. Jesus said to her, “Woman, why are you weeping? Whom are you looking for?” She thought it was the gardener and said to him, “Sir, if you carried him away, tell me where you laid him, and I will take him.” Jesus said to her, “Mary!” She turned and said to him in Hebrew, “Rabbouni,” which means Teacher. Jesus said to her, “Stop holding on to me, for I have not yet ascended to the Father. But go to my brothers and tell them, ‘I am going to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’” Mary went and announced to the disciples, “I have seen the Lord,” and then reported what he had told her.

The details St. John gives us of the Lord’s tomb are absolutely consistent with the archaeological evidence of the tombs of wealthy Jewish families of that time period.  Here, for instance, John speaks of the two angels “sitting there, one at the head and one at the feet where the Body of Jesus had been.”  Inside the tomb complex, niches would have lined the walls where the bodies of the deceased would be placed.  A bench carved out of the stone would have served to set the body of the deceased so that it could be properly prepared for entombment with various oils and spices, as well as the careful wrapping of the linen cloths around the body.  The fact that Mary Magdalene and the Apostles had to “bend down” to see inside the tomb is also consistent with the evidence, for the entrances to these tombs were low, certainly not the height of the average person.

“Mary Magdalene stayed outside the tomb weeping. And as she wept, she bent over into the tomb and saw two angels in white sitting there.”  Neither Peter nor John had seen angels.  They saw the burial cloths, and then left, presumably to return to the house where they had been staying in order to tell the other Apostles.  But Mary stayed, as though now she had nowhere else to go.  And indeed, she wept both for her Master’s Death and for his missing Body.

“Woman, why are you weeping?”  The angels, of course, know why she weeps.  They ask her this question not for their benefit but for ours.  “They have taken my Lord, and I don’t know where they laid him.”  She does not seem surprised at their appearance, nor does she demand to know who they were.  All she can think of in her grief is her Lord.  “When she had said this, she turned around and saw Jesus there.”  Now, she was not in the tomb, but she was bent over looking into it.  Perhaps she heard a noise behind her, or she had an intuition of another’s presence.  At any rate, she turned around.  Possibly she glanced back first, then seeing that a man was standing several feet away she stood up and turned to face him fully.  “But did not know it was Jesus.”  Neither would the disciples going to Emmaus recognize him, nor the Apostles when they later went fishing.  This has been explained as that the Risen Lord’s Body was now glorified, but it may be too that it was so fixed in their minds that Jesus had died that even face to face with him, they did not know it was him.  This difficulty in knowing him makes the fact of his having risen even more convincing, and more astounding.

“Woman, why are you weeping?”  Jesus repeats the question the angels had posed.  Perhaps after a pause, the Lord asked a very revealing question: “Whom are you looking for?”  There was no hint in Mary’s conduct that she was “looking” for anyone.  She was a woman mourning at a place of burial, to anyone who saw her.  But this is a question that brought Mary’s response, because she in fact was looking for Someone.  “She thought it was the gardener.”  This gives us some indication of how the Lord appeared to her, that he seemed very ordinary, a working man in his working clothes.  “Sir, if you carried him away, tell me where you laid him, and I will take him.”  In this interesting sentence, Mary addresses the man she took for a gardener as Kyrie, that is, “Lord”.  The word could also mean “sir” or “master”, but this was how Mary customarily had addressed Jesus.  It is an odd choice of word to address a gardener.  “And I will take him.”  The Greek word here translated as “I will take” actually means “I will raise up”, or, “I will lift up.”  So, Mary saw a “gardener” who worked among the tomb complexes, and she suspected that somehow and for some unknown reason he had moved Christ’s Body; she addresses this gardener as “Lord”, and then proposes to raise up the Body of her Lord.  However, this was not a Lord of the dead but of the living, and he would one day raise up her body.

“Mary!”  This one word in this one place is perhaps the most moving moment in all the Scriptures.  A woman in the greatest distress, alone and heart-broken, and her name called by the One who was the love of her life, who was presenting himself to her as alive after all.  “She turned and said to him in Hebrew, ‘Rabbouni,’ which means Teacher.”  For Mary, Jesus was both Lord and Teacher.  Since John was evidently writing to Jewish Christians living in Judea, we might wonder why he feels the need to translate Hebrew or Aramaic words, but it is also clear from the fact that John quotes from the Septuagint as a matter of course that these Jewish Christians spoke Greek as their first language.  We ought to try to imagine Mary Magdalene at the moment she realized the truth.  She would have frozen suddenly at the sound of her name in the exact way the Lord had always pronounced it when speaking with her.  She would not have spoken at all for an instant.  She may have trembled in shock.  And then her face would be filled with powerful, new emotions.  

In the very next sentence, John relates, “Jesus said to her, ‘Stop holding on to me.’ ”  John does not tell us that Mary ran to him and threw her arms onto him.  John does not tell us how Mary held him.  Traditionally it is thought that she lay before him on the ground, embracing his feet, but it is not too much to think that in her rapture she held him in her arms without a thought to propriety.

“Stop holding on to me, for I have not yet ascended to the Father. But go to my brothers.”  We do not know if this is all the Lord said to her.  His words certainly impress us as very matter-of-fact and void of emotion, but we should think of the Lord as telling her this with emotion in his voice, possibly even whispering.  Perhaps Mary never told anyone, not even John, what the Lord said to her on that early Sunday morning when the whole universe held its breath at the wondrous rising of its Maker.