Mary Magdalene stayed outside the tomb weeping.
And as she wept, she bent over into the tomb

Proximity is so curious and so important.  Don’t we indeed know this these days?  Biological proximity in its most intimate form is the basis for regeneration of life – new life!  Physical and social closeness and interaction is foundational in our world.  The absence of close proximity seems unnatural and in its extreme it is confusing and even painful.  When something or someone that you are familiar with is taken away, it is very drastic.  It is painful.  We weep and grieve.  This is natural and to be expected.  However the way respond to absence can become distorted.  When we want to stay outside of situations, i.e., remain in the safety of our familiar expectations, without piercing the depth of what is being conveyed to us or the possibilities that are being offered to us in a strange newness, we can stagnate.  Like Mary Magdalene, we stay outside the tomb, looking in, crying but we won’t go into whatever could be awaiting us.

Mary is at the tomb today, not going in, crying and grieving, and then she is questioned by the angels, and then by Jesus himself, whom she mistakes as the gardener.

“Woman, why are you weeping?”
She said to them, “They have taken my Lord,
and I don’t know where they laid him.”
When she had said this, she turned around and saw Jesus there,
but did not know it was Jesus.
Jesus said to her, “Woman, why are you weeping?
Whom are you looking for?”
She thought it was the gardener and said to him,
“Sir, if you carried him away,
tell me where you laid him,
and I will take him.”

We are back to the garden and mirroring.  This is an amazing image.  Here is the person perhaps closest to Jesus during his earthly life, who cannot recognize or identify him. But it is curious that we never entertain the idea that perhaps he didn’t recognize her right away either.  This is a creative mirroring that reflects both ways.  In the garden, the Risen Jesus is almost dancing around her, not in a taunting way, but in a lovingly playful gesture drawing forth from her a revelation of a newness that he himself could not do on his own.  That may sound strange, but is it really?  Jesus’ whole life way had been one of relatedness to God, whom He called Father, and relatedness with others.  This was a constant field of movement that excluded none and in fact depended upon the energies of others to bloom (heal or cure if you like).  The Divine life always requires a human playing field to unfold and grow.

No wonder the garden is such a prominent image in John’s gospel.  A garden is a place of growth – through cultivation, nourishment, growth, death and new life.  This is the ultimate vision of relatedness and connection, in all its reality of dualities.  Here, we can already begin to see that resurrection or new life through pain and death, is not just about Jesus.  It can never be.  It has to be about the entire field of interaction and relatedness, intimacy and proximity, human and divine.  Jesus in all relatedness with others is the garden of death and new life.

Jesus said to her, “Mary!”
She turned and said to him in Hebrew, “Rabbouni,”
which means Teacher.
Jesus said to her, “Stop holding on to me,
for I have not yet ascended to the Father

She had heard that name before, and she knew that voice – a voice of communion that resounded within her very being drawing forth her own naming of him.  We can only imagine that this moment of mutual recognition was magnetic and explosive.  The passage of life into death and into new more life is never a path of an individual.  As the contemplative wisdom teacher, Cynthia Bourgeault, describes, it is a path of relatedness characterized by kenosis, abundance, and singleness.[i]

Kenosis is the Greek word that captures what is translated in today’s gospel as “stop holding on to me.”  This clinging and identification has to do with the past and not the present – familiarity and attachment.  Kenosis denotes non-clinging, non-attachment, ultimately life giving itself away, which itself is magnificent generosity. The dialogue between Jesus and Mary ending with this instruction is an address to how we can approach the radical newness of this relatedness of life rather than a reprimand to Mary.  It is a ‘stripping oneself and standing naked.’  This is a letting be that is a courageous surrender and trusting engagement of freedom.

Directly connected to this kenotic posture of surrender is the sense of abundance, meaning the outrageous excess that becomes immediately present when we allow something to simply be.   Again,  this is an  engagement based in relatedness where everything in life is an exchange of giving, and receiving, and in this exchange, the mercy of God is made more real.  Mercy here is not a particular action or even attitude, but rather a field of relatedness that creates and sustains intimate engagement and interaction.

And, finally singleness, not meaning alone or individual here, but rather singleness as a wholeness.  This is a single line of focus from wholeness and inclusion that lives in abundance.  As the Gospel of Thomas describes it, it is the capacity to make two become one – an alignment of the fragments into the whole, a simple coming into presence, which is always new and steeped for radical transformation.  Was this not everything about Jesus’ life?  Making each other whole – ‘saving’ and healing as a creative way of life!

Can we look at the Easter message as an invitation to come into closer proximity with what it is about our lives that is most important – letting whatever it is that confronts us in our lives simply be?  This letting be is not apathy, indifference or ignorance.  It is full on engagement with the communion of relatedness that hints at the divine element in all of our experiences.  It is recognizing the person of Christ that is always where two or more are gathered.  It is convergence and transcendence.  This is the garden message of growth and surprise – allowing that which seems the most familiar to knock us off our feet and into the field of abundant mercy that sustains and nourishes in the wholeness of God, even as we die into it.  We are the garden.

“I have seen the Lord”

[i] Cynthia Bourgeault, THE MEANING OF MARY MAGDALENE (Shambhala: 2010), 102-106.

[ii] Ibid., 105.