THE RISEN JESUS
Mark
16:9-14 When Jesus rose early on the first day of
the week, he appeared first to Mary Magdalene, out of whom he had driven seven
demons. She went and told those who had been with him and who were mourning and
weeping. When they heard that Jesus was alive and that she had seen him, they
did not believe it.
One of the curious things about the Gospel accounts of
the risen Jesus is that when people who knew him before his crucifixion see him
after his Resurrection, they do not recognize him. They don’t seem to be
afraid; they don’t react as so many people in Jewish Scriptures do when they
encounter an angel of the Lord, expecting to drop dead. They recognize Jesus as
a human being, they just don’t recognize him as Jesus.
We could come up with all kinds of theories as to why
Mary Magdalene doesn’t recognize Jesus as he stands before her in the garden as
told in John’s Gospel. She is obviously deeply upset, her eyes full of tears,
and her imagination full of fears of death and grave-robbers. She is so
single-minded in her search for the dead body of her Lord, that even a meeting
with a pair of angels becomes uninteresting unless they can give her the one
piece of information she wants.
But none of these seem convincing explanations of why she
doesn’t recognize Jesus. This is a woman whose whole mind is full of the man
who is standing right in front of her, and yet she does not know him. The
simple explanation must be the true one – that real life is something we don’t
understand very well without divine aid. Jesus gives Mary the ability to see by
using a word. He says her name and allows her to see who he is, and to connect
the old life she used to know with the new life that now stands before her.
Life is not natural. Life is God’s free gift. God loves
us into existence. We need the reminder of the risen Lord to help us recognize
God’s life when it appears in our own lives. The Lord’s voice calls us by name,
so that, like Mary Magdalene, we suddenly look up and recognize the Lord of
life standing in front of us. Our life is then profoundly changed by the
resurrected life of our Lord. Like Mary Magdalene, we are told by Jesus to go
tell others what we have experienced and know as fact that the transforming
love of God is made visible in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Easter, By Prior Aelred, The Abbey Newsletter.