Mary Magdalene came to the tomb
1 Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene came to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed from the tomb.
Peter and John came, checked, and left the tomb
10 Then the disciples returned to their homes.
Jesus Appears to Mary Magdalene
11 But Mary stood weeping outside the tomb… [John 20:1, 10, 11, NRSV]
[L] Early in the morning, Mary Magdalene came to the tomb. [R] She stood there weeping.
In raising Jesus from the dead, God confirmed His continued blessing for this madly violent world with hope and peace not through power but through powerlessness. Holy Scriptures say so, but we need to seriously meditate the Word of God to know what Scriptures really say, away from what the insanely belligerent powers of the world portray as normal.
Jesus came to teach God’s Word of love and peace, but his detractors were bent on extinguishing his voice. In love and compassion, he came to feed the hungry, to heal, to take away human burdens, but was himself wounded and given the burden of sin through the cross. In mercy he came to give life-giving water, but was thirsty on the cross. He came to bring joy, to set captives free, but was pinioned on the cross and suffered excruciating pain and sorrow. He came to bring justice, but was met with injustice and meaningless killing. He came to give life, and life in abundance, but his own life was ruthlessly taken away from him. Though divine, yet he was truly human. Though he came from on high, yet he was caught down on earth with us. Though mighty, yet he was weak. Though powerful, he chose to be powerless. Beyond all imagination at first, Jesus’ powerlessness was soon understood to have overshadowed the human power and won souls for the kingdom of God. His powerlessness saved the world. Those accustomed to the power of brute force, are mystified by Jesus’ power in powerlessness.
There are myriad ways to approach the mystery of power in powerlessness. For a convenient entry point, turn with me if you will, to the story of Mary Magdalene’s encounter with the Risen Lord at the tomb.
It was Easter Sunday morning in Jerusalem.
It has been three days since Jesus was tortured, crucified, and entombed.
The reality was stark. Despite all that power he had manifested, he was tortured, crucified in the cruelest Roman fashion, died and was buried. His story, however glorious and uplifting, had come to an end. Mary Magdalene well knew there was nothing the Lord could do for her now. But she could still do something for him, whatever that something might be. And she was interiorly driven to do it.
St John’s artistic genius must not be squandered by speed-reading. Slowly, meditatively, one sees deeper into the piercing details in chapter 20, verse 1 of John’s Gospel:
- It was “early” morning, when it was “still dark” (20:1), with nobody around, Mary Magdalene came, alone.
When John says “still dark”, he means to indicate how early it was, even before dawn has broken. Early morning in Jerusalem can be rather chilly. Picture on above left by Gian Girolamo Savoldo (c. 1530-1548) shows her wrapped in a satin cloak, with the dark mass of the empty tomb behind her right shoulder. The story line further reveals that she was alone.
And where did she go? She came to Golgotha – Hebrew for the place of a skull – next to the place of crucifixion.
- She had to be in a state of fear.
Imagine. A woman, alone, in semi-darkness, in a place like that? She must be in a state of fear. Yet, despite the inevitable fear, she came. Despite her powerlessness, she behaved boldly. Lonely and fearful, the power of love for the Lord conquered this saintly woman’s powerlessness and emboldened her.
- What on earth was a woman doing at the place of a skull, alone, early morning, while it was chilly and still dark?
Grief is the price of love; she came to the tomb to grieve, to be grateful for Jesus’ love for sinful humanity to the very end (John 13:1).
He was fatally wounded for the love of humanity. She came to stay with his wounds, to continue to keep company with the Lord in his time of need, even after the event of crucifixion, to be of service to him, somehow.
So she came to keep watch, to feel the presence of the Lord still, to continue to pay respect, to honour him, to follow him even to the tomb.
Above all, she came to embrace his voluntary powerlessness even though at that point in time, before resurrection (and Pentecost), she lacked a full comprehension of the theological import of the power in his chosen posture of powerlessness for the advancement of the kingdom of God.
Here is where we are reminded of the vision-changing words of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, that great German Lutheran pastor-theologian and anti-Nazi dissident whom the Nazis hanged shortly before the landing of Allied soldiers. Modern people, Bonhoeffer lamented, think they are “religious” when they turn to God in time of distress. All that they are doing really is to turn God into a slot machine. God has all but become a “stop gap” God, a place of last resort, when their own power in science and technology, in wealth, and in modern comfort and self-sufficiency, has met with some temporary setback, weakness or inadequacy. In good times, however, God is largely superfluous.
From his letters from Tegel prison dated 16 July 1944, Bonhoeffer wrote:
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Here is the decisive difference between Christianity and all religions. Man’s religiosity makes him look in distress to the power of God in the world: God is the dues ex machina. The Bible directs man to God’s powerlessness and suffering; only the suffering God can help.
Two days later, on 18 July 1944, he again wrote:
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“Christians stand by God in his hour of grieving”; that is what distinguishes Christians from pagans. Jesus asked in Gethsemane, “could you not watch with me for one hour?” That is a reversal of what the religious man expects from God. Man is summoned to share in God’s sufferings at the hands of a godless world.
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It is not the religious act that makes the Christian, but participation in the sufferings of God in the secular life. That is metanoia: not in the first place thinking about one’s own needs, problems, sins, and fears, but allowing one-self to be caught up into the way of Jesus Christ, into the messianic event, thus fulfilling Isaiah 53.
Bonhoeffer shakes our false ‘religious’ pretensions. In his critique, people think and present themselves as “religious” – defined today as conspicuously prayerful, properly garmented, boisterously rule-based, ostentatiously Mass-attending, and visually ‘holy’ – when they look in times of distress to the power of God. But, and here Bonhoeffer incisively leaves no room for duplicity or hypocrisy, he insists that the Bible directs Christians to God’s powerlessness and suffering and asks whether they would stand by Christ in his hour of suffering and powerlessness – his hour of need.
Mary Magdalene did precisely that. She stood by Christ in his hour of need. She stayed at a place where Jesus was most wounded, fatally. She had stayed with the Lord in his time of power and fame; now, she chose to stay with the Lord in times of his utter powerlessness and disgrace. She truly loved much.
This met with approval from the Risen Christ who saw to it that a woman would be blessed with his first resurrection appearance, making her the very first Easter witness, that she would be the first to announce the good news of his resurrection to the world, making her the first Easter evangelist, and furthermore, that she was sent to evangelise the male disciples, thus making her an apostle to the apostles. At the crack of dawn on Easter Sunday, Mary Magdalene was blessed with much, because she loved much.
Love is the key. She was love-driven, even though she as yet had not understood the full impact of that love. John’s Gospel is the Gospel of Love which made the stunning declaration that “God loved the world so much that he gave his only son” (John 3:16). To love is to give. Here, John uses agape for love – a word Peter either did not understand or, more likely, chose to avoid at the seashore of Tiberias as John’s Gospel draws to a close in chapter 21. That was when the Risen Lord twice demanded an agape (sacrificial)-love promise from him and not getting it, but finally accepted only the phileo (friendly)-love that Peter was able and willing to offer at that stage of his faith (John 21:15-17). It would seem that Peter was conscious and deeply humbled by his earlier mindless-boast to the Lord – “I will lay down my life for you” (John 13:37). His triple denials of the Lord at Caiaphas’s courtyard would come back to haunt him at the seashore.
With the resurrection, however, which was most incisively proclaimed by the now Spirit-filled Peter on the Day of the Pentecost in powerful sin-convicting and soul-saving terms,
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“This Jesus whom you crucified, God has raised him up and made him both Lord and Christ” (Acts 2:36),
one may safely assume that Mary Magdalene, together with the key male disciples of the time, would grow in their understanding of Jesus’ choice of powerlessness. They grew well into the vision that in his mission of salvation for the world, Jesus absorbed humiliation and in loving to the end (John 13:1), he embraced the cross.
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They understood that Jesus chose to be powerless throughout his passion and tortured-death, to show humanity that God’s kingdom-values of which he preached and lived, was humanly achievable.
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Testifying to the power of powerlessness, John’s Gospel insists that the glorification of the Son begins with the cross – the humiliation and the scandal of the cross – not with the resurrection or ascension.
It was for the sake of glorifying God for His steadfast love and mercy, and for purposes of the conviction of human sin, conversion and salvation. St Paul too, beautifully traces the path from suffering to hope in Romans 5:3-5.
Our calling is to live God’s kingdom-values, to run our own resurrection-practice in truthful Christian living. St Paul knew and lived the truth: Christ died in weakness but rose in power (2 Cor 13:4), and we too are weak in him – “For when I am weak, then I am strong,” wrote Paul (2 Cor 12:10). St Paul understood that being weak in Christ shows the power of God through us. Because it is not about us. It is not about heroism, but about God working in and through our weakness to shame the powerful things of the world. And sometimes that looks just like this: “But we urge you, brothers, to do this more and more, and to aspire to live quietly, and to mind your own affairs, and to work with your hands, as we instructed you, so that you may walk properly before outsiders and be dependent on no one” (1 Thess 4:10–11). The early disciples had shown us the way, the way of Christ’s power in powerlessness through persistent love and service “to the end” (John 13:1).
Copyright © Dr. Jeffrey & Angie Goh, July 2024. All rights reserved.
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