Loving popular culture as I do, I am always somewhere between amused and shocked by the ways biblical figures are depicted in movies and shows. Jesus and his companions were first century Palestinian Jews, but on TV they all look like members of the Norwegian luge team. I’m just glad I’m not famous enough for a biopic. I shudder to think of whom they might cast to portray me. Probably one of those K-Pop kids with a grey wig and glasses.
No one has suffered more from this kind of misrepresentation than Mary Magdalene, portrayed almost everywhere in our culture as what they used to call a “fallen woman”, a tradition that started erroneously in the Middle Ages and for which the Roman Catholic church has repeatedly apologized. Nothing, alas, could be further from the truth. There is no evidence that Mary Magdalene was a woman of the evening. In fact, Mary was a woman of substance who was one of the most generous and faithful of Jesus’s followers. She witnessed the crucifixion and was the first of all Jesus’s companions to see him risen. She was a moving force in the early church. She was a woman of faith and action. It is not by accident that she got to the empty tomb ahead of everybody else.
The reading we just heard from John’s Gospel has always been one of my favorites, especially the line about Mary mistaking Jesus for the gardener. Fra Angelico’s great Renaissance fresco of this scene depicts Jesus carrying a mysterious implement that might at once be a rake, a hoe, a trident, or a shovel hidden behind his halo. A contemporary artist might well depict him carrying a leaf blower or a chain saw.
In today’s Gospel, Mary goes through a spiritual process that feels familiar to those of us who seek to take in Jesus’s resurrection. Her first response to the empty tomb is to weep. She then fails to recognize Jesus until he calls her by name. When she does recognize him her confusion turns to joy. And at Jesus’s instruction to go tell the other disciples, her joy turns to action. Grief, confusion, joy, action: the path taken by Mary, our exemplary believer. Let’s follow her and she where she takes us.
The grief Mary feels after Good Friday is all too familiar. Jesus was brought to the cross by powerful people who found his manner of living and teaching dangerous. The power structures of the Roman Empire did not take kindly to the kind of “open commensality” Jesus embodied in his life and ministry. The empire was neither just nor compassionate, and the witness of one who lived a free, loving, and generous life was a threat to those in power’s hold on the populace. So Jesus died not because God wanted him to but because the system couldn’t tolerate him. Who wouldn’t weep to see perfect love trampled to death by rage and fear?
When she stops crying and sees the one she thinks is the gardener, Mary is confused. The idea of the one she saw murdered on a cross now alive in a garden is too much to take in all at once. Gardens are significant in our biblical story. Our relationship with God began in a garden from which our selfishness got us expelled. And now in Mary’s meeting with Jesus we have the garden back. Easter is about many important theological things, but at its core it is about the healing and restoration of our relationships with God and the world. We were at home in our first garden. We lost it. And now, through the love and faithfulness of God and Jesus, we have it back. The world and we are renewed.
And getting back something you loved and lost is perhaps the greatest cause there is for real joy. Jesus was dead and now he lives. We were exiled and now we are home. Mary Magdalene’s joy is the believer’s expression of gratitude for a blessing that exceeds her capacity for wonder. My favorite Prayer Book collects puts it this way:
O God, you have prepared for those who love you such good
things as surpass our understanding . . .your promises . . . exceed all that we
can desire . . .
In her garden encounter with the risen Jesus, Mary Magdalene has seen a good thing that surpasses her understanding. This answer to her prayer exceeds all that she can even hope for.
And that, to me, is the central point of Easter. We modern or post-modern people tend to think that the point of these stories is about whether we believe them or not, what kind of risen body Jesus might have had, or the literal date and time of the resurrection itself. The point of Easter lies not in its quantifiable answers. The point of Easter lives in the astounding nature of the transaction of which we are witnesses. God has restored Jesus to life, and from the earliest days Christians understood that in doing so God has promised new life to us, too. This event which transforms Mary from weeping friend to apostolic witness holds within it the promise of new life for her and you and me. She came to the tomb hoping at best to give Jesus a decent burial. She leaves the garden understanding that she and the world have been reborn, that our future holds blessings that surpass our understanding. There is more going on here than we can even hope for.
If we think about our story with God, a story that begins and now culminates in a garden, we can’t help wondering at God’s persistence in seeking us out. Time and again in both the Old and New Testaments, God reaches out for us and we consistently refuse the offer. The story of Jesus, his death and resurrection, is the whole Bible story in miniature. God comes among us. We reject God. God comes back. Again, and again, and again.
It seems, therefore, that God will not be stopped in the divine quest to love and save us. Do what we can to say “No”, God always responds with “Yes”, what Seamus Heaney called the “aye [A-Y-E] of God”. God would not be stopped in the search for us. God would not be stopped in loving us, often in spite of ourselves. God will not be stopped in bringing us, sometimes kicking and screaming, into that new horizon of risen life that exceeds all that we can imagine, hope for, or desire.
The final step in Mary Magdalene’s process took her from grief, confusion, and joy to action, perhaps the most important of all. Mary did not passively hold the good news of the risen Jesus and our hopeful future to herself. She immediately told her companions and then the world. On this beautiful Easter day, in a world filled with confusion and grief, let us, like Mary, become witnesses of joy, liberation, forgiveness, and hope. God will not be stopped, and neither it seems would Mary. Now is the time for each and all of us to get on the Easter road with Mary and her brothers and do all we can to love and serve each other. Mary mistook Jesus for the gardener, and perhaps he was. His tools are in our hands now. It is our job to love and tend the world. Amen.
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