KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 16 May
Lifted up and set in motion
This week in Chapel we had the first of two different but interrelated stories of the Resurrection from the 20th Chapter of John’s Gospel. One concerns the encounter between Mary Magdalene and the Risen Christ (John 20. 11-18); the other, to Jesus appearing behind close doors to the disciples and then again to Thomas (John 20.19-29). The two stories speak to the question of epistemology, to the ways of knowing that belong to our humanity.
The first story is quite moving and touching (if you will pardon the irony since in the encounter between Jesus and Mary Magdalene, she is told, “Touch me not”!). Mary Magdalene comes seeking the body of Christ only to discover, first, the empty tomb, and then Jesus himself whom she doesn’t recognise because she assumes he is dead. She has come not just in perplexity and confusion but in grief and sorrow. Yet she has come with a holy and humane purpose: to honour and respect the body of the deceased. There is something universal and profoundly human about that sensibility. It already suggests that we are more though not less than our bodies, a sense that death does not completely define our humanity.
In ancient Greece, Anaxagoras argued that it was not the material elements of earth, water, air, and fire in various combinations, material causality, as it were, that provide an ultimate understanding of reality but mind, what he called nous. As Aristotle famously said about him, “he was like a sober man in the company of drunks.” I often think of that remark in relation to these stories of the Resurrection in John’s Gospel. How does Mary come to know the Risen Christ? It happens through her encounter seeking one thing and finding another and being changed by that encounter. She mistakes Jesus for the gardener and asks him where you have laid him so that she can take him away and do the burial honours. Jesus simply says her name: “Mary”.
She turns and says, “Rabboni”, meaning master or teacher. Jesus first says to her: “Touch me not for I am not yet ascended to my Father.” But then he bids her “go to my brethren, and say unto them, I am ascending to my Father, and your Father; and to my God, and your God.”
Theology consorts with images to bring us to understanding and life. Our challenge is always to attend thoughtfully to the images in order to enter into their meaning and understanding. We are being awakened to a deeper understanding of what it means to be human through our being opened out to the truth and life of God, even in the face of our uncertainties and sorrows. So what does Jesus mean? By telling her not to touch, he is really saying don’t cling to me, don’t hold onto the things of the past or just to the things of the body. He is lifting her up into a greater understanding of who he truly is: the Son of the Father. Here Resurrection is immediately connected to the Ascension, to what the Fathers of the early Church called “the exaltation of our humanity”.