Recognizing Angels and Jesus
“But Mary stood weeping outside the tomb. As she wept, she bent over to look into the tomb; and she saw two angels in white, sitting where the body of Jesus had been lying, one at the head and the other at the feet. They said to her, “Woman, why are you weeping?” She said to them, “They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him.” When she had said this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not know that it was Jesus. Jesus said to her, “Woman, why are you weeping? Whom are you looking for?” 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.” Jesus said to her, “Mary!” She turned and said to him in Hebrew, “Rabbouni!” (which means Teacher).”—John 20: 11-17.
noli me tangere fresco fra angelico Florence
My mind and heart are flooded with thoughts about this Easter, as I am reading others’ works and have new images from this familiar story about the appearance of Jesus to Mary Magdalene.
Bishop Jake Owensby of Western Louisiana suggests in an Easter blog “that Mary Magdalene did not recognize Jesus because she is looking right at the risen Christ.. and yet she sees nobody. For Mary Magdalene, the gardener is a nobody.” Owensby’s theme is that our vocation as people of the resurrection is to “find the risen Christ in everybody, no matter their physical appearance.” Christ is no longer in one body, but in every one of us. No exceptions.
Frederick Buechner also speaks to this theme in The Faces of Jesus. Buechner writes that “it hardly matters how the body of Jesus came to be missing, because in the last analysis, what convinced the people he had risen from the dead was not the absence of his corpse, but his living presence.” 2
One more insight into Mary Magdalene’s visit to the tomb. Angels speak to her. There is no recognition that this is an awe-filled moment. Perhaps she sees and talks to angels all the time, but if we try to put ourselves into the scene, we may have been more like the other Mary at the annunciation, full of fear, astonishment, or wonder. If we stay in the scene with Mary Magdalene, my best guess is she may not recognize them as angels. We are reminded one more time about the difficulty in identifying the Christ in our neighbor and seeing the angels who guide us during these challenging times.
Mary Magdalene must have recognized all this later, as is often our case. Otherwise, we would not know her story.
Angels and the Christ, in others, were very present during the pandemic and this war in Ukraine. They may be wearing masks, driving a truck, putting up stock in our pharmacy and grocery stores, at the check-out counter, making take-out dinners, giving us vaccines, caring for refugees, treating the wounded, and especially the women of our Daughters of the King, who pray for us every day.
1Jake Owensby, “Every Body is Somebody,” Looking for God in Messy Places, Jakeowensby.com, April 19, 2019.
2 Frederick Buechner “The Cross as the crossroads of eternity and time,” in The Faces of Jesus (Paraclete, 2005), p. 87.
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