Sunday
Sunday
Mary Magdalene
“Woman,” he [Jesus] said, “why are you crying?” … Jesus said, “Do not hold on to me.”
John 20:15, 17
It is a marvelous providence of God that the first person to whom the risen Lord revealed himself was a woman and that a woman was also the first person he commissioned to proclaim the gospel of the resurrection to others. Is this not a deliberate affirmation of womanhood at a time when women were not regarded as reliable witnesses? This privileged woman was Mary Magdalene. The Gospels do not tell us much about her. But we do know that she stayed by the cross to the bitter end and that she followed the funeral cortège to the garden and saw Jesus buried. Some thirty-six hours later she and other women returned and found the tomb opened and the body gone. She ran back to alert Peter and John. They raced to the tomb, and she followed them at a more leisurely pace. By the time she arrived, they had gone and she was alone.
John paints two dramatic little cameos. In the first Mary was weeping, especially because she thought she had lost the only man who had ever treated her with dignity, love, and respect. The light had gone out of her life. But Jesus had not left her, as she thought. On the contrary, he was there at her side, risen, but she did not know it.
In the second cameo Mary was clinging to him. And Jesus said to her, “Do not hold on to me, because I have not yet ascended” (v. 17 NRSV). Many people ask why Jesus should have invited the apostles to handle him while forbidding Mary to hold on to him. The answer is that holding and handling are different actions. The apostles were invited to handle him in order to verify that he was not a ghost; the reason Mary was forbidden to hold on to him was that her gesture symbolized the wrong kind of relationship. The best translation would perhaps be, “Stop clinging on to me.” She had to learn that she could not resume the old familiar friendship she had previously enjoyed. Once he had ascended, a new relationship would become possible.
As we picture Mary weeping and Mary clinging, we see the contrasting mistakes that she made. She wept because she thought she had lost him altogether. She clung to him because she thought she had got him back just as he had been to her before.
For further reading: John 20:10–18