“Questions resolved, questions answered”
By Rev. Michael Stonhouse
Meditation – Tuesday, April 2, 2024 John 20:11-18 (Forward, p. 64) CEV p. 1129
Sometimes the Scriptures seem to ‘specialize’ in what I initially consider to be ‘dumb questions’. For instance, Jesus, with the paralysed man at the Pool of Bethsaida in Jerusalem, said to him, “Do you want to be healed?” (John 5:6). And likewise, with the blind beggar in Jericho, He asked him, “What do you want me to do for you?” (Luke 18:40). Wouldn’t anyone think that this was ‘painfully obvious’ for everyone to see? I would think so.
We see something of this kind of thing in today’s passage, twice in fact. Firstly, the two angels ask Mary Magdalene, “why are you crying” (verse 13) and then again, Jesus asks her the same question in verse 15. But in this latter case, He adds, “Who are you looking for?”
But maybe there is a bit of psychology here. Maybe the speaker, usually Jesus, wants to draw out from the respondent what he or she considers to be their real need and give it a name, as it were. The Scriptures repeatedly call upon us to give voice to our prayers, to name them out loud, rather than to just hold them willy nilly somewhere in our unfiltered imaginations. Speaking them out loud has a way of giving them substance and thereby putting our faith on the line.
So then, what happens here with Mary Magdalene. In the first instance, she says to the angels, “They have taken away my Lord’s body! I don’t know where they have put him.” Here she is acknowledging that Jesus’ body has somehow disappeared from the tomb and is expressing her opinion that the only option in her mind is that some unknown persons—the ‘they’ of her response—have ‘carted’ it off somehow. And there is total bewilderment as to where it might have been taken. There is absolutely no suspicion on her part that the body could have walked away on its own, which is what has actually happened, seeing as Jesus was alive. So, her response is a rather accurate expression of the state of her beliefs at that point in time. She most surely was not expecting a risen Jesus.
Mary’s response to Jesus most surely gives further evidence of this. Not only is she still thinking that someone has taken Jesus’ body, but she also thinks that this unknown stranger, a ‘gardener’ in her thinking, might know something about it. And surely, this idea makes sense: an employee of the
garden, one of the few people up and about at this early morning hour, would know something of the earlier ‘goings on’ in that garden. And we see something both of her belief that Jesus is dead and her devotion to Him, that she offers to go and fetch Jesus’ body. As if she could have actually done that, with such a ‘dead weight’!
But then Jesus meets her face to face and all her grief and sorrow, all her questions, all her muddled and incomplete thinking, are done away with. And isn’t that what so frequently happens when we meet Jesus: sometimes our questions are answered or resolved, and sometimes they don’t seem to matter quite as much. And the great news is that He is available to us, with us in person, just as He was for Mary Magdalene way back then. Thanks be to God.
Forward notes: “Jesus said to her, ‘Mary!’” (verse 16a).
“Recently I made a presentation at our public library about the importance of setting. Some stories are so dependent upon a particular place or landscape or geography that they cannot be told anywhere else. Such is the case with John’s telling of the first Easter morning.
“Mary Magdalene stands outside the tomb in the dark, weeping and in deep grief. Bending to look inside the tomb, she encounters two angels, then turns and sees a man she assumes is the gardener. Mary asks the man if he has taken the body away. It is Jesus who responds, calling her by name: ‘Mary!’ Jesus calls Mary by name at a time when she is in the dark, overwhelmed by fear and sadness. This powerful meeting can occur only because Mary is fully present at the tomb, open to possibility.
“Like Mary, we have dark times when we are overwhelmed by fear and sadness. Her Easter story is our story, which can only be told at Jesus’s tomb. In the darkness and the light, God invites us to dramatic connection and calls us by name.”
Moving Forward: “When have you heard God call you by name?”