As I have mentioned before, I wander off and have done so from a very early age on. As entertaining as the stories of my wandering escapades are to hear, they also serve for good reflection as an adult. One of my favorite stories is when I was at my grandparents’ house with my family at a party. It was an all day affair, and in the afternoon, I wandered off for whatever reason. I was probably around 6 or 7 years old. When it was noticed that I was missing, everyone began searching for me. They looked everywhere for me in the house and the yard but could not find me. After an hour or so, fear and panic began to set in for my family and they were getting ready to call the police, when finally I was found. Apparently my grandparents had washed a big bedspread and hung it across two clothes lines in their backyard, such that the fabric dipped down in between the two lines, which for a sleepy child looked like a wonderful place to crawl into for a nice nap.
Today’s feast of St Mary Magdalene is also a story of lost and found. We hear many parables and stories of being lost and found in the Gospels – the woman who swept her apartment to find a list coin, the shepherd who leaves the herd of sheep to find one lost sheep, and the story of the lost (prodigal) child and his loving and longing parent, just to name a few. In today’s story from John’s Gospel (JN 20: 1-2, 11-18), however, it is Jesus who seems to be lost and found.
On the first day of the week, Mary Magdalene cannot find the body of Jesus in the empty tomb. This upsets her greatly and she begins to weep in her feeling of loss and fear. The angels in the tomb ask Mary why she is weeping. Mary’s reply is that…”they have taken my Lord, and I don’t know where they laid him.” Then outside the tomb, Mary actually encounters Jesus, though mistakes Him for the gardener.” When asked by Jesus, “…why are you weeping,” Mary replies “sir, if you carried him away, tell me where you laid him, and I will take him.” Finally, Jesus says her name in greeting, “Mary,” and she recognizes him.
In this experience, Mary is searching desperately for something she considers very precious and for this reason her inability to find what she is looking for results in the feeling of tremendous loss. In fact it is a person, and even God, that she has fallen in love with and now feels she has lost. The first reading from the Song of Songs (SGS 3:1-4b) describes this so well.
“I sought him but I did not find him. I will rise then and go about the city; in the streets and crossings I will seek Him whom my heart loves. I sought him but I did not find him. The watchmen came upon me, as they made their rounds of the city: Have you seen him whom my heart loves? I had hardly left them when I found him whom my heart loves.”
In her panic and determination Mary is somehow unable to recognize what or Who she is seeking? Then, when she thinks she has found him, what does she do? She grabs hold of him. She grasps at this precious Person who has shown her so much by simply loving her unconditionally. And then, surprisingly, we hear Jesus say to her…
“Stop holding onto me…but go to my brothers and tell them ‘I am going to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God’ .”
I wonder if John may be telling us something about how we should go about seeking Christ. I know in my life I have had unsettling experiences wherein “my Jesus” has seemed to turn into someone or something else – something unrecognizable. The reality of the mystery of Christ suddenly fails to match my “image” of Him. I have “grasped” onto an image of Jesus that is consoling to me, or so it seems, but it doesn’t go anywhere, or actually disappears. This image sometimes holds me back in a seducing comfort that ends up being more about me than anything or anyone else. In my own desperate attempts to hold onto THIS image of Jesus, the Christ, i.e., MY image of Jesus, I am blinded, cannot recognize Jesus, and feeling lost. Ultimately, if I am honest with myself, the image is gone or at least changed…perhaps transformed. “Whom am I looking for?”
I have found that my image of Jesus cannot remain just Mine! As Jesus tells Mary, “go tell my brothers…” Somehow our ability to recognize Jesus in our midst is intrinsically tied to each other. The Episcopalian priest, Cynthia Bourgeault, notes that this encounter of Mary with Jesus is saying something very profound about human love and divine love. In Jesus’ directive for Mary to not hold onto him, He is indicating that human love is the touchstone for divine love We find God’s Love only in our love for each other, and in each encounter, the space for love gets ever wider, bringing others in.
Mary went to the disciples and told them of her encounter and as we know, Jesus appears to the disciples as well, in the upper room, on the beach, while they were fishing, and at Emmaus while dining. In almost all of these stories the awareness and recognition of Jesus occurs in a community setting. It takes all of us together to “see” Jesus, to see the Christ in our midst and to spread Christ out further by inviting others in.
It is a painful, but I believe, necessary realization. It does involve a certain amount of “weeping” over our images of Jesus that can never fully live up to the reality of Christ, because the reality of the Risen Christ is Transformation! And this transformation invites us closer and closer to each other. It’s not that our own individual images of Jesus are wrong, it’s just that they need to be “open,” to transformation, i.e., to being enhanced by other’s images of Christ! Jesus the gardener, the teacher, the lover, the consoler, the challenger… The list goes on and on and we are invited to continuously find it and live it together.
I pray for a loosened grasp or grip on “my hold” on Jesus, not so that I lose anything at all, but that I find the deep treasure of transformation in my heart and in the hearts of others.
“Tell me where you laid him, and I will take him.”
He is laid here with us – the Body of Christ all around us. And the only way we can “take him” anywhere is to receive him – by sharing and listening and growing together as Children of God.
Peace
Thomas