Today we are celebrating mass with our grade school children. That is why the Gospel we are using is different from the one scheduled in the Roman lectionary.
If I were planning the resurrection, I think I would plan fireworks, trumpets, and big crowds. Something like Independence Day. Maybe I would add in one of those buzzing alters on all the cell phones in the world. And to top it off, a supernova explosion of a star in the sky. After all this is the recreation of the whole universe.
Today we see the risen Christ planned out the manifestation of the resurrection in a different way. Mary Magdalene is overcome with sorrow and confusion after Jesus’ Pasion and death. Despite that, she goes to the tomb to do what she imagined would be her last service for Jesus – a proper preparation for his burial. But, at first, all her human thoughts and preparations impede her encounter with the risen Christ. Her grief becomes wholehearted despair when she thinks that Jesus’ body was stolen. She gets stuck in her grief and despair. So much so, that she does not recognize the risen Christ when he comes to her. She thinks he is a gardener or a tomb robber.
God created each of us and gave each of us a personal history: a family, a place, a time, feelings, hopes, experiences, and plans. God loves each of us amid that personal story and forms a relationship with us in that personal history. We see today that the risen Christ calls Mary by her individual name. It is the name Jesus used to relate to her and with that name she recognizes him. She suddenly discovers that one and only relationship of love and forgiveness that she had with Jesus continues in the risen Christ – beyond all time and death in the resurrection. Sin, death, despair, and grief are defeated in God’s love for each one of us. God writes a personal love story with each of us through the resurrection of Christ.
The resurrection was and is a cosmic event, a recreation of the entire universe. But God loves us so much that he manifests the resurrection personally in the lives of each one of us – one by one. Mary Magdalene is called into the resurrection. It was not an explosion that happened around her or in spite of her.
Look at the attitudes in Mary Magdalene that helped her be open to her new life with the risen Christ: service, love, and listening to the Word of God (the risen Christ). All that made her the first evangelizer. She ran back to the disciples proclaiming her new relationship with Jesus.
Mary went and announced to the disciples,
“I have seen the Lord,”
and then reported what he had told her.