Why does Mary not immediately recognize Jesus in the garden on the first Easter day? She assumes the person she is looking at is a gardener which I suppose is a logical thing to think – who else would be likely to be in a garden that early in the morning? Another thing that’s odd about this scene is the question which Mary is asked twice: the two figures in the tomb and the ‘gardener’ both ask why she is weeping? It seems a silly question – what could be more natural for someone standing outside a tomb in the early morning, especially if the body seems to have been stolen? And yet when Mary is asked why she is weeping, we are being given a hint I think that this is not after all the place for tears. The place of death is after all going to be the place of new life, so we have to ask what did Mary really see which at first she thought was the gardener?
It will always be as difficult for us as it was for the gospel writers to find the right words, but CS Lewis might help us to find one way of putting it. It will be interesting to see whether films are made of all the Narnia stories because the last one presents serious problems for a film maker. It is called ‘The Last Battle’ and in it Narnia dies, its world comes to an end. But that is not the end of the story – because at the climax of the last battle the main characters go through a door into another world. As they move about in this new world they begin unexpectedly to recognize it. It is like the Narnia they have known but not like it. As one of them says, ‘It is more like the real thing.’ It is as though the Narnia they had been used to was only a shadow or a copy of the real Narnia. The real Narnia ‘was a deeper country; every rock and flower and blade of grass looked as though it meant more’. Another of the characters says, ‘This is the land I have been looking for all my life, though I never knew it till now. I have come home at last. The reason why we loved the old Narnia is that it sometimes looked a little like this.’
What Lewis is trying to describe is of course ‘resurrection.’ He is also trying to describe the relationship between the Kingdom and this present world. Heaven or the Kingdom is not a different place but the real world, not the shadow of it that we currently live in – which is a shadow because of our moral and spiritual distance from God. When we come home to God we shall know and inhabit this world as it really is. Of course there are connections between the shadow and the reality. When William Blake spoke of seeing ‘heaven in a wild flower and holding infinity in the palm of your hand’ he is describing those moments of complete attentiveness when we look at something,as it were for the first time, and sense a connection with it as though the wild of flower is as much a part of the world as we are. We sense the same life, the same power pulsing through both of us. We glimpse in a wild flower, or a loved face, or the taste of a grape or the melody of a song, or the grace of a building, or a deep and thoughtful act of kindness, something of the world as it is meant to be, something which we can only describe as somehow more real than we are used to, something we long to go home to.
And so the best we can say about what Mary saw on that first Easter morning is that she saw Jesus as he really is in that real world of which the garden was only a shadow. That was why she didn’t recognize him – she had never seen him properly before. And what she heard for the first time was his real voice speaking her name, Mary, as she had never heard it spoken before so that she felt herself truly addressed for the first time – spoken to at the deepest level of herself. It is not surprising therefore that she clings to Jesus, wanting to be part of that stronger reality and not to have to go back into her shadow world.
And yet she is sent back – she has as it were taken on the role of an angel – a messenger from that real world to the world of the other disciples. She has to tell them that she has seen the Lord. Or as we might now say, she had seen the real Jesus, the one they never understood, the one who remained a mystery to them even though they felt deeply drawn to him and at moments, just for a moment thought they could understand. But letting go of Jesus at that moment must have been the most painful thing Mary ever had to do – going back into the world of shadows when you have glimpsed the real world must be like dying, And yet that is what it is all about as Jesus had said to all the disciples, ‘Whoever would save his life shall lose it; and whoever loses his life for my sake shall find it.’
Mary has to let go of what she wants – to stay in this real place with Jesus – she has to do something for Jesus and for his disciples. She has to tell them something that she can’t adequately put into words. She knows they may not believe her, but she has to tell them. She has to die to her fears of being doubted and laughed at and not understood. She has to say with all her being, all her real self, Christ is risen – he is risen indeed. Amen