The resurrection of Jesus Christ is an invitation to
gloriously vulnerable living. Mary Magdalene, whose feast
day we celebrate, the first to receive it, found it so
unexpected that she struggled.
Three times she had used the same distressed lament, “They
have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we do not know
where they have laid him”, “They have taken away my Lord and
I do not know where they have laid him”, “Sir, lf you have
carried him away, tell me where you have laid him.” Each was
more personal – from “they have done it” to “if you have
done it”, from “the Lord” to “my Lord”. Finally, she
demanded to do the same thing, “I will take him away.”
Her repeated phrase echoes the similar lament for a lost
beloved in the Song of Songs where the beloved has not been
taken but has gone of his own accord: “I will seek him”, “I
sought him”, “Have you seen him?”
Mary had seen her Lord cruelly tortured and had bought and
prepared expensive spices for the burial rites precluded by
the rush to inter the body before the Sabbath. Now all she
could hope for, and she hoped for it passionately, was to
have the body and to remove it from danger. As a woman, she
knew what to do for a dead body; that was women’s work
because men wouldn’t make themselves ritually unclean by
touching a dead body; they let the women put up with that.
All her longing was expressed in that phrase "they have
taken away.”
She had been violated, deprived of her responsibility to
handle his broken body and wipe his blood, the right to
express her love. Then Jesus spoke. We overhear one of the
intimate moments in the Bible without knowing how it sounded
– what one Biblical scholar has described as one of the most
lovely recognition scenes in literature.
What tone of voice did Jesus use when he said that one word,
“Mary”, and she replied, “Teacher”? When reading in a
service it’s difficult to know how to inflect those two
names; it’s worth reading it aloud in private, trying
different modulations of voice to hear some of the possible
depths of meaning in that world-changing exchange of two
names.
In the first of today’s readings from the Song of Songs, in
the Song we heard of how the woman found her beloved, held
him and wouldn’t let him go until she brought him to her
mother’s house. In the Bible, this was the place where
marriages were arranged, where commitment was made. Like the
lover in the song, Mary’s instinctive reaction was to cling
to her beloved. Many artists portray Jesus pulling away to
stop her touching him at all, but it sounds more like his
attempt to break free from a long embrace. Taking him away
to safety wasn’t an option; she had work to do for her
teacher, a message to proclaim. So, unlike the lover in the
Song, Mary didn’t take her beloved to the safety of her
mother’s house; instead he sent her to his brothers’ house
to risk their disbelief and with a message to expand their
world. He was ascending to his Father and her Father. The
world needed to hear her voice, her testimony. She obeyed
and went, vulnerable to miracle.
She thought he was the gardener. Once before, God made and
cared for a garden and met humans there, enjoying their
company, until everything went wrong. Then Adam and Eve were
banished from the garden. Cruelly, centuries of tradition
had further punished women by maintaining that Eve’s naivety
in falling for the serpent’s deceit was evidence enough that
women were corruptible, incapable of understanding properly,
of bearing witness reliably, so their testimony was
considered inadmissible in court.
Now, in another garden and by entrusting Mary to tell the
men what she had seen and heard, Jesus destroyed the
tradition that silenced women. At Jesus’ birth, Mary was the
new life-giving Eve; at his resurrection, Mary Magdalene was
the new truth-telling witness-bearing Eve, freed from Eve’s
remaining bonds and given bask her voice.
At last men listened, believed and followed her leadership
in proclaiming the resurrection. Supposing him to be the
gardener … rong could she be, and yet how right could she
be.