Companions of the Sacred Flame,
Now Mary stood outside the tomb crying. As she wept, she bent over to look into the tomb and saw two angels in white, seated where Jesus’ body had been, one at the head and the other at the foot. They asked her, “Woman, why are you crying?”
“They have taken my Lord away,” she said, “and I don’t know where they have put him.” At this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not realize that it was Jesus. He asked her, “Woman, why are you crying? Who is it you are looking for?”
Thinking he was the gardener, she said, “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have put him, and I will get him.” Jesus said to her, “Mary.”
She turned toward him and cried out in Aramaic,“Rabboni!”
I have a deep love for this encounter with Mary in the canonical gospels, because it is a vessel for so many different insights and perspectives meaningful to the spiritual path.
All spirituality is a matter of relation and relationship. We have all been in one-sided conversations, one-sided encounters, one-sided arrangements- whose context determine their value or difficulty, but a mutual encounter creates something lacking in them- the third space, presence or thing that exists in the space between one and another, between two perspectives, between self and other, between human and Divine. Magic happens in that space. Indeed, even Jesus himself says that wherever two or more are gathered, there I am also.
There are lots of things that we seek out, that grab our attention, that occupy our time, but it is the encounters that we not only call out to, but call us out in return, that create a space for depth. Vocation is like this, love is like this, companionship is like this
Second, the story also conveys a bit of the nature of the Gnostic reality- Gnosis, the quest to see things as they are, and not merely as we are. When Mary encounters Jesus in the garden, in that moment, two things are true at the same time – he is the gardener and at the same time, the Risen Lord.
The first is the appearance, the Relative reality, the functional reality- reality at the level of the human. The second is the Absolute, reality at the level of the Divine. When he calls her name, the space between them becomes the reality at the level of the transcendent and is an opportunity for transformation, This intimacy of the real, also travels in both directions- the relative can lead us to the Absolute, and the Absolute can lead us into penetration into the Relative. The space that is occupied with one foot in each, is both liminal and alchemical – it is often where transformation occurs.
Third, Jesus as the Gardener recalls that original gardener of the spiritual journey in mainstream ‘salvation history’- Adam, the first human dwelling in the Garden of Eden, whose failure was not repaired with his exile, but with the return of the Gardener to the Garden in a transformed context. As I often quote from Proust, the voyage of discovery is not about seeing new lands but about having new eyes.
Fourth and lastly, all love bears the relational mark of a trinity – the one who loves, the one who is beloved and Love itself. We often hear in Christian tradition of John as the Beloved Disciple, the disciple whom Jesus loved- but in tradition, the Magdalene is associated with the woman with the alabaster jar, whose sins are forgiven ‘because she loved much’. This story is an expression of that same transformative love – both in her weeping at the tomb, and in her joyful encounter of Jesus. Being loved can show forth the Divine, but us loving another truly, can help create that encounter for each other.
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