Today, we go to back to Easter morning, to that garden with Mary, distraught and bereft at reports that Jesus’ body has been taken from the tomb in which she saw him laid on Friday. …She turned round and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not know that it was Jesus. Jesus said to her, “Woman, why are you weeping? For whom are you looking?” Supposing him to be the gardener, she said to him, “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away.”
We tend to see what we expect to see. Blind is blind. Over is over. Dead is dead. And a man in a garden is likely to be a gardener, right? The man in this garden is solicitous, asking Mary why she weeps. In reply, she speaks her urgent need to locate Jesus’ body, which she assumes to have been stolen, as had been threatened. Answering the angels a few moments earlier, she articulated her deeper pain in these poignant words, “They have taken away my Lord, and I don’t know where they have laid him.” Someone she loved deeply, and depended on, and centered her life around has been taken from her; she does not know how she will endure a loss of that magnitude.
Most of us have experienced that feeling, or will. Loss is inevitable when we love; I remember where I was sitting the moment that little insight hit me. But something happened for Mary in this moment where she made herself vulnerable to a stranger, crying out her pain. Jesus revealed himself. And once he spoke her name, she knew without any doubt that it was him, that he was alive.
Could it be that Jesus is with us in our moments of deepest loss and despair, and we don’t know? We can, in prayer, bring to mind some of those times and ask Jesus to show us where he was, even if we couldn’t see him or recognize him. It is a way of praying healing into those wounds.
Some years ago, I wrote a song exploring several of the encounters people had with the resurrected Jesus, in many of which they did not recognize him until he did or said something familiar. You can listen to the first verse, about Mary here; I will share other verses through this week (the last is about us). The whole song is here.
Ran into a gardener, my eyes were blind with tears
Pretty hard to see straight when you’re living your worst fears.
The one I loved the most, gone without a trace -
Then he said my name, I knew that voice… my heart began to race:
Was that you standing next to me when all my hopes were done?
Was that you, alive and breathing, when it looked like death had won?
Was that you loving me more than I could ever understand?
Don’t know why it always takes a while for me to open up my eyes and see:
That was you, standing next to me.
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