Mary Magdalene went to the tomb of Jesus expecting only death. She went full of overpowering grief and sadness. All of her hopes about a savior and messiah were destroyed by death. She arrives at the tomb and finds it empty. Everything in her life experience leads her to assume that someone had stolen Jesus body. That was the only logical explanation based on her personal experience of life up to that point. Her overpowering grief was now compounded by the horror of the desecration of Jesus’ burial plot and the disappearance of his body. She can only fall deeper into grief and sit sobbing at the grave side. She was crushed. Her despair does not allow her to reorder her life based on all that Jesus had said. She cannot even remember Jesus’ words about the resurrection.
The two angels are at her side ask: Woman, why are you weeping? She does not recognize them as angels and replies with her complicated explanation based on human logic – tomb robbers. Then Jesus appears to her with the same question: Woman, why are you weeping? Her logic leads her to see only a gardener and to respond again: tomb robbers. How often do we block out the presence of the risen Christ as we seek to repeat the same old story of sadness and grief in our lives? We build a life of sadness, grief, fear, disunity, loneliness, violence, vengeance, and separation. The reality of the resurrection was completely beyond Mary’s expectations, hopes, experience, and plans. The whole time Mary was there, she was surrounded by angels and even the risen Lord. He reached out to her, called her by name and established a personal relationship with her. She had a new life in his resurrection – no more grief and sadness.
She got up and ran back to the apostles to proclaim her experience, to evangelize, to share, to announce the Good News. That is the Christian response to the resurrection. The unexpected victory of Jesus over sin and death in our lives produces an explosion of profound joy that must be shared. Conversion and proclamation are at the heart of Christian life as we see in Mary Magdalene and Peter’s first proclamations of faith in the reading from the Acts of the Apostles. So let us all get up and run with Mary Magdalene and the first apostles to announce the joy of the resurrection.
“What are we to do, my brothers?”
Peter said to them,
“Repent and be baptized, every one of you,
Save yourselves from this corrupt generation.”