The following three blog posts will delve into the story of the resurrection as told in John’s Gospel. Read John 20:1-18 slowly, and then enter into the story as we see John as the patron saint of the contemplative mind, Peter as the patron saint of right action, and Mary Magdalene as the patron saint of the affectionate heart.
So far we have explored the story of John as the patron saint of the mind, contemplating the new possibilities of the risen Christ, and Peter as our patron saint of action, learning to slow down and consider what it means to pivot from frantic activity to right action. Yet one aspect of our humanity is still missing, so we turn to Mary Magdalene to embrace the place of the heart in loving God, and a wholistic vision of the resurrection life.
Who was Mary Magdalene?
History has not been kind to our saint of the heart. Pope Gregory I preached a sermon in 591 AD that equated her to Mary of Bethany, the sister of Martha and Lazarus, and the “sinful woman” who anointed Jesus’ feet before his arrest. This conflation of women in the Gospels into one archetype has unfortunately painted a portrait of a “prostitute with a heart of gold” that does little justice to any of the women the writers speak of.
It is much more likely that Mary Magdalene was a woman of decent wealth. What is considered her last name is an allusion to her hometown of Magdala, on the Sea of Galilee. Luke tells us in his Gospel that Jesus had cast seven demons out of her, which may either be taken literally, or symbolically to denote how completely overcome she was by evil. After her deliverance she and other women traveled with Jesus as his disciples, supporting his ministry financially. Even at the crucifixion when the male disciples had all abandoned Jesus, Mary stayed close, witnessing the torture of her Lord.
Mary loved Jesus. Her devotion to him is evident as she is the only friend of Jesus to approach the empty tomb while it was still dark, most likely to continue her mourning process. She does not find things as she expected, and her disorientation sees her scramble to find a logical explanation for the absence of Jesus’ body. She runs to find the other disciples, and tells them someone has stolen the body. When we pick up the narrative after John and Peter witness the empty tomb, we find Mary is still there, weeping (John 20:11).
I have spent a considerable amount of time with her story in recent times because I know there is something to her that pulls at my heart. In her I see someone I want to become.
Just as we noted that John bends over in a sign of humility to contemplate the possibility of resurrection, so Mary stands in the threshold and summons the courage to look inward. Her tears become a veil through which she looks once more for the body of her Beloved. We can perceive these tears as clarifying tears, washing away despair and disillusionment as she connects with the whole experience in her heart. The tomb yet again becomes a symbol of the inner world, the place we look for God.
We might say that right action and contemplative thinking are important, but it is the love in our hearts for Jesus that prepares us to see him as he truly is. While Peter and John witness the Absence so that they believe and return home, Mary’s affection for Jesus does not permit her to move on just yet. It is our emotional fortitude that attaches us to the present moment, not our understanding. We may be able to accurately describe an event in our lives, but until we feel our way into it, we cannot find real hope or healing.
Mary’s reticence to leave even the Absence of Jesus offers her a miraculous vision these other two did not receive. As she gazes upon the death bed through a veil of tears, she witnesses two angels sitting there at either end. This is a profound symbolical revelation, for these two angels’ positions echo the arrangement of the mercy seat, the lid that adorned the Ark of the Covenant. In the distant past Mary’s ancestors would have considered this mercy seat to be the place where YHWH’s divine presence would rest and hand out judgement for the Israelites. It was the holiest place for God’s people, one that could only be witnessed by the high priest as he made the atoning sacrifice for the people’s sins by sprinkling the blood of a spotless bull upon it. These two angels in the tomb show us this is the new mercy seat, where the risen Jesus is revealed simultaneously as the Divine Presence of YHWH, the high priest making the final sacrifice, and the sacrifice itself whose blood brings forgiveness and new life.
The angels ask her why she is crying, which is to say, why she is deeply present in her heart to this moment. Her response reveals that Mary too has reached the end of her logical rope, yet her love cannot convince her to move on. She is in many ways finally to receive back her Beloved in this new world washing over her. As she becomes aware of another person on the scene she turns and encounters a Stranger who asks her the same question - what is it that is binding you to this moment? Where does your heart take you?
In dramatic irony, sweet Mary considers the risen Jesus to be the gardener, which he is in ways she cannot fathom. In Rembrandt’s depiction of the scene Jesus stands behind Mary, floppy gardener’s hat on and trowel in hand. In other representations he is kneeled down, tilling the soil and causing flowers to grow. The truth is that Jesus is the gardener, the first gardener, the New Adam of the new world. The King of the Universe is also the tender of soil who brings forth life by his humility and care. Yet Mary, still disoriented by the trauma of the empty tomb and the vision of the new mercy seat, does not see her friend in this cosmic way until he calls her name.
“Mary” was by far the most common name amongst the Hebrew people in the first century, leading to Pope Gregory’s merging of several different women into one sad stereotype. Of the many possible etymologies of the name, the predominant conclusion is that it best translates to “beloved”. I consider this the pivotal moment in our heroine’s story, more so than her deliverance or the vision of the angels in the tomb. It was not until she heard her savior call her by name, “beloved”, a name that would apply to any number of young women in her day, that she recognized him for who he truly is. It was not simply the hearing of her name, but the tone by which Jesus spoke that she knew it was him. This beautiful scene drips with familiarity and tenderness as she hears in him the Voice that had called her out of darkness and into light. We can imagine a special fondness in his tone enabled Mary to move past disorientation to reorient in the new resurrection world with the elated claim, “teacher!”
Now, it would be conventional wisdom to read this as some sort of romance novel where the two lovers go hand-in-hand into their happily-ever-after. Of course this is not the intention of John’s writing; he is trying to show us the path we all must take in our hearts to binding to Jesus in a new way. At first, his admonition that she should not cling to him feels heartless and cruel. After the emotional whirlwind she has just experienced, is she to lose him a second time?
Mary must understand that there is a new way to be united to Christ in the resurrected world. No longer will he walk with her in earthly form, at least not in how she has known him. The next stage in Jesus’ journey is to ascend to the right hand of God, returning to the Father. Paul tells us the Christ descended to the very depths so that he might ascend again, taking us with him to union with God (Eph. 4:8-10). More fantastically still Paul claims Jesus ascends “in order to fill the whole universe”, fulfilling his destiny as the Word which binds and redeems every iota of creation - through him all things were created, and in him all things are reconciled (Col. 1:15-20). This is a marvelous vision, one we too often do not slow down enough to contemplate. Far from Jesus abandoning us, he ascends to the heart of All Things to bind together matter and spirit, humanity and divinity. The Cosmic Christ, if we can use that phrase without too much new age baggage, is now repairing the world from the inside-out. The risen Christ who tenderly calls out “beloved” to each of our hearts is present in all things on this plane of existence - suffering, pain, war, and famine included - even if our limited perspective cannot see it.
The great Cistercian monk of the 20th century Thomas Keating put it like this:
“This faith finds Christ not only in the beauty of nature, art, human friendship and the service of others, but also in the malice and injustice of people or institutions, and in the inexplicable suffering of the innocent. Even there it finds the same infinite love expressing the hunger of God for humanity, a hunger that he intends to satisfy.
Thus, in Colossians, Paul does not hesitate to cry out with his triumphant faith in the Ascension: ‘Christ is all and in all' — meaning now, not just in the future. At this very moment we too have the grace to see Christ's light shining in our hearts, to feel his absorbing Presence within us, and to perceive in every created thing - even in the most disconcerting - the presence of his light, love and glory.”
Jesus sends Mary to the brothers to tell them what she has witnessed, making her the first evangelist in the new world. Even the fact that a woman’s testimony in the first century held little weight shows us this new reality is already upending our assumptions about how life is supposed to work. Mary preaches the Gospel to the disciples, Peter and John among them, and thus brings the witness of the heart into reconciliation with the mind and the body.
Right action and contemplative thinking are important, but it is the love in our hearts for Jesus that keeps us close to him. To love God with our whole self is to pay careful attention to how each of our faculties are being redeemed by the word spoken to our souls, calling us Beloved. Contemplative thinking opens us up to possibilities beyond the conventional, right action helps us embody the truth, and emotional attachment binds us in the heart so devotion can sustain the journey.
I am slowly entering a space in my ministry where I feel like I might have something to offer those who are just beginning to answer the call. If there is one thing I have learned it is that affection, for Jesus and for our people, is what sustains. A minister can string together the most eloquent words, have vision that would rival any mastermind of history, learn all the methodology for spiritual direction and therapeutic processes, yet if we do not have affection we are one a path to burn out. I consider this true not just for those of you in “professional” ministry, but for all Christ-followers who have any hope for nourishing a life-long faith.
During my twenties I would often tell myself that I am simply not a very emotional person. There are a myriad of reasons for this, not least my cultural orientation, my family of origin, and my personality type. My desire to foment a peaceful life often meant that I would tuck away my feelings in order to go along with the flow. In fact, when I reflect upon moments from my childhood, I struggle sometimes to remember the emotional context of my memories. In early adulthood, I had a hard time connecting with others in my heart or entering into others’ feelings with tenderness and attunement to bond. Even now I notice moments of feeling overwhelmed by another’s feelings, or reading about tragic events in the news, and how I tend to resort to an intellectual or theological treatise that would protect me from emotional vulnerability.
There are many reasons for why we struggle with attachment to God or others, but I strongly believe one of the most common barriers is our insistence upon self-sufficiency. We grow up in a world that tells us the highest call on any of our lives is to not have to rely upon anyone, to put on the armor of adulthood so that we are invulnerable. To be an adult is to be in control of our feelings and attachments.
One might hear it often in what I consider to be the quintessential American testimony that goes something like this:
I was a mess before I met Jesus. I was into the worst possible things - motorcycles, drugs, voting Democrat. Then I met Jesus and I was healed overnight and now I move from strength to strength, glory to glory. The trajectory is my life is up, up, up!
The problem with this vision of the Christian life is that it sees Jesus as the solution to a problem, a function of my desire to live a better life. This may take a variety of forms, but the evangelistic posture generally poses an existential problem - your sin means you are marked out for death, or God is angry at you and you deserve God’s wrath - and then smuggles Jesus in to fix your life. Then, thanks to Jesus, you can now pursue the American dream of self-sufficiency, success, and happiness. This “me-centered” reading of the Gospel fails many because we find that life on the other side of our baptism is not a constant project of winning.
Do I mean to say that Jesus does not save us from our sin? Certainly not, I think he does and will continue to do so. I do not, however, believe that Jesus saves us from God, for to do so is to tear a hole right through the middle of the Trinity. Jesus does many things for us because he loves us, offering hope and healing. The problem with the “me-centered” Gospel is how reductive it is of Jesus, seeing him as a means to an end, the sort of fantastical vision of heaven we perceive as the goal of history.
I think a more honest and faithful testimony would say that I am more aware of my need for Jesus than ever before. As I have continued to embrace my humanity, and the humanity of others, I see more clearly how dependence upon God is not the weakness the cult of self-sufficiency would have us believe, but rather a strength borne of humility.
Not only do I perceive my constant need for Jesus, however; but the more I come to know him the more I desire him. Desire is quite another thing than need. Need tends to our basic functions, but desire casts a trajectory of growth in intimate relationship over time. We move from, “what do I need to survive?” to “what do I want?”.
We we only perceive relationships, not least of which our relationship with God, as fulfilling our needs, we never bond to the degree we were created to. Attachment theory has been an incredible way for myself and others to understand our connections to God in this way. When we are avoidantly attached to God, we choose to go it alone rather than to offer our needs and feelings to our Abba. We internalize this message that our feelings are a nuisance, and we try to deny the dark emotions or work it out by ourselves before we enter into communion, with God or with those who love us. This often leads us to trusting more in a belief system than to risk intimacy, hence the prioritization of left-brained spirituality in our culture.
Neuroscience teaches us that shutting down our emotions dismisses input from the insular cortex, a deep part of our brain that interprets bodily sensations as feelings, and helps us interpret others’ bodily language. Over time it becomes increasingly difficult to connect to our emotions, develop compassion for others and bond in meaningful interpersonal relationships. This is why you may actually have a hard time sharing your feelings with others, because you yourself do not know what is happening inside you. In terms of our spiritual journey, we may end up fostering a Christian life that is far more about doing lots of things for God, rather than desiring to be with God. We spiritually bypass our feelings with banal platitudes like, “God is in control” or “too blessed to be stressed”, or we use Bible verses to plaster over the cracks in the facade. Over time we not only hide our hearts from God, we lose the capacity to articulate our honest feelings to God, and intimacy withers.
The abundant life we are created for, the one Jesus offers us (John 10:10) invites growth in every part of who we are. The work of the Spirit of Jesus within us quite literally rehumanizes us, drawing us up into the vision we see in Jesus of what it means to be a whole, free human being as God created us to be. All throughout scripture we see God wooing God’s people, inviting them to leave behind the illusion of self-sufficiency and risk genuine vulnerability and intimacy.
The story of Israel is one of a chosen people who, in their desire to be strong and independent and protected, continuously reject the closeness God invites them to. We see it in their insistence on having a king “such as all the other nations have” (1 Sam. 8:5). God, deeply grieved by this rejection (for this God feels so deeply for God’s creation) relents and allows the people to get what they want. In a mere handful of generations the regal project collapses and the people find themselves oppressed by their own leaders, denied the kind of restorative justice God offered that would lift them all up together. God then sends the prophets, who use poetic language to touch the calloused hearts of the people so they might turn back and respond to God. Through one of the greatest prophets, Ezekiel, God promises to chase away the “bad shepherds” and become the Good Shepherd, promising rescue, gathering together, healing, abundant provision, and rest. Two chapters later Ezekiel offers a promise, not only of deliverance from oppression, but of rehumanization:
"For I will take you out of the nations; I will gather you from all the countries and bring you back into your own land. I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you will be clean; I will cleanse you from all your impurities and from all your idols. I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit in you and move you to follow my decrees and be careful to keep my laws. Then you will live in the land I gave your ancestors; you will be my people, and I will be your God.” (Ez. 36:24-28)
What is a heart of stone but one calloused by the illusion of self-sufficiency and over-protection? The heart of one who has made interior covenants to never rely on anyone else, to go it alone, to never risk tenderness for fear of being taken advantage of? The Spirit ministers to our stony hearts, massaging them back to ones of flesh - tender, warmed to desire and affection, and, yes, capable of being hurt. But that is the risk of the tender heart.
From the time I began sensing the Lord’s invitation to reconsider the claim I made about myself, that I am simply not an emotional person, I have seen my thirties marked by this softening of heart. Life has become more vivid for it, more abundant. The highs are higher and the lows lower, because life matters more to me now than ever before. My heart has bound me to the triumphs and tragedies of my own story, and it has expanded in a way that I am more affected by the stories of those around me.
I have experienced a handful of times what my spiritual father called “the baptism of tears”. In these moments I have become so overwhelmed by the heart of God for a specific person that I cannot hold back from weeping. They are not tears of sadness so much as of being deeply moved by love. In those moments I have rarely been able to speak, as if trying to utter words to frame the experience of love would somehow lessen the message itself.
I feel myself moving from merely needing Jesus as a one-time fix, to needing Jesus as a daily healer and deliverer, to desiring Jesus as a friend. It is a process of healing and restoration I imagine will take the rest of my life, but every once-in-a-while I have moment where I am caught up in holy tears that remind me, “ah, yes, I really do love him!”
And so we begin to learn to love God with our whole hearts, desiring God and developing affection for God, because we come to understand how God love us with God’s whole heart. The Christian Century magazine regularly asks theologians and scholars to try and sum up the Gospel in seven words. Here is what William Willimon, a theologian and bishop in the Methodist tradition, wrote:
God refuses
to be God without us.
Before we hear his expansion of that phrase, let those seven words sit with you. How does it align with your summation of the Gospel? What does it speak as to God’s heart?
Willimon continued:
“We asked God to say something definite and God, getting personal, sent Jesus Christ. We were surprised. God was other than we imagined. We can't make God into whatever we please. Jesus demonstrated that God is better than omnipotent, omniscient or any other high-sounding abstraction. God is love embodied: nonviolent, relentlessly seeking, convening, suffering love. Human happiness is life lived in response to the God we've got. It's good news: Because God really was in Jesus Christ, reconciling the world to God, we can be with God.”
The massive shift in perception that Willimon invites us to is from a lens that identifies God as rigid and abstract in the “omni’s” that owe more to Greek philosophy, to one of unyielding, constant Love. How does it make you feel to know that God yearns for you? That God doesn’t want to be without you? God’s whole motivation in this cosmic play is closeness, steadfast with-ness.
Mary’s tears minister to our hearts of stone. Her devotion to Jesus, her affection for him as not only deliverer but friend, offers us a vision of what can be ours if we open up to the softening work of the Spirit within. Slowly, we learn to recognize the Voice that calls us Beloved, calls us by our true names. We encounter the beauty of Christ, and our hearts begin to burn for him.