There she was, at the tomb before sunrise. The tomb already empty, angels blathering about the living one among the dead and asking (can you imagine, at a gravesite?) why she was weeping. Nothing was making any sense. Then the same question again: "Woman, why do you weep?"Clearly, not an angel this time. It was a man's voice. He was standing somewhat behind her. And he wasn't finished talking.
"Who are you looking for?"
Mary Magdalene, Mary "the Tower," rose to her full height and turned a withering stare toward the gardener. "If you took him away, tell me where, and I will take him." It was an implicit question: "Where is the body?" In other words, "Where is the 'one thing necessary' in life?"
How often the answer to our prayers is looking us right in the eye.
And then he said her name. "Mary!"
For Mary Magdalene, the resurrection took place at that moment: finding herself known and called by name in the most unlikely place, and then sent out with the unheard of message of death undone.
On this Feast (with a capital F) of Mary Magdalene, Apostle to the Apostles, the Church gives us the option of reading from the exotic Song of Songs (rarely read outside of wedding liturgies!). In it, the Bride searches through the city, even in the pre-dawn darkness, for her Beloved. "Have you seen him?" she asks. It's a perfect match for the Gospel of Easter Sunday morning, when the Beloved himself quietly approaches, unseen, unrecognized until he pronounces her name. But the question he had asked before revealing himself is an important one. It brings us back to the search in the first reading, and also to a passage at the beginning of John's Gospel (from which this Easter scene is taken).
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| John the Baptist workshop of Botticelli Walters Museum of Art |
At the very beginning of the Gospel, while John the Baptist is still at work in the River Jordan, Jesus walked by. And John pointed him out. "Look, there is the Lamb of God!" Two of John's disciples (Andrew was one of them; the other may have been John the son of Zebedee) caught the significance of the expression and began following the man John had indicated. And that man turned to them and asked, "What are you looking for?" And they answered with a question of their own: "Rabbi, where do you abide?" ("Where is the 'one thing necessary'?")
The question that brackets the Gospel of John is:
What [or Who] are you looking for?
What drives you?
What wakes you up inside?
What do you pursue doggedly?
What do you keep going back to when all else fails?
What is there about it that keeps promising you something?
Within and behind it, what the 'one thing necessary'?
St Ignatius discovered the core of his "rules for the discernment of spirits" when, as a convalescent with little to do but read the same books over and over, he noticed the effect that his pleasant daydreams had once they had ended. Short-term goods (like Ignatius' early dreams of chivalric glory) have a very short shelf-life. Even when attained, once the experience was over, it was over. But when Ignatius envisioned something more, something greater than himself, the effect remained long after. In his mature years, he could recommend that people on retreat return again and again to the same themes of prayer, the same Scriptural scenes, drawing fresh treasures from them.
Sometimes we can get lost looking for entertainment, stimulation, approval, comfort. These are not bad things. At times they can be necessary. Sometimes, though, we seek all these things on our phone! (No wonder we can't put them down.)
Mary Magdalene certainly didn't come to the tomb that morning expecting to actually meet Jesus: She just expected to find some consolation in carrying out the missing funeral rites. (She found much more than she was looking for! Rather, she herself was found.) And then she was sent off, carrying a message for the Apostles. Try to spend some time today with Mary Magdalene, letting her help you recognize which desires mark out a path of real life for you and for those you love: the path of the 'one thing necessary'; the grace that will never fail you in this life or the next.
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