She Stayed At The Tomb

Everyone else went home. Peter and John ran to the tomb, looked in, saw the linen cloths, and walked back to wherever they were staying. That was a reasonable thing to do. There was nothing left to see. And Mary Magdalene stood outside in the dark and cried, because the one place she had left to put her love was an empty hole in a rock.

Today the Church gives us Saint Mary Magdalene, and she gets a Gospel about failing to find. She looks in the tomb twice. She talks to angels and doesn’t seem to notice they’re angels. She talks to Jesus and thinks he’s the groundskeeper. Every attempt she makes to locate him misses. What she has going for her is that she won’t leave. Gregory the Great preached that holy desires grow stronger the longer they go unsatisfied, and that if they don’t grow, they weren’t really desires.[1] That’s the day’s question, and it isn’t comfortable. Most of us have prayed for something, gotten silence, and quietly stopped asking. Mary stayed in the garden, and the risen Christ said her name.

The stone is rolled away from the grave. Licensed via Adobe Stock, ID 326764509.

The Readings

First Reading: Song Of Songs 3:1–4b

Upon my bed by night I sought him whom my soul loves; I sought him, but found him not; I called him, but he gave no answer.

“I will rise now and go about the city, in the streets and in the squares; I will seek him whom my soul loves.” I sought him, but found him not.

The watchmen found me, as they went about in the city. “Have you seen him whom my soul loves?”

Scarcely had I passed them, when I found him whom my soul loves. I held him, and would not let him go until I had brought him into my mother’s house, and into the chamber of her that conceived me.

Gospel: John 20:1–2, 11–18

Now on the first day of the week Mary Magdalene came to the tomb early, while it was still dark, and saw that the stone had been taken away from the tomb. So she ran, and went to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one whom Jesus loved, and said to them, “They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we do not know where they have laid him.”

But Mary stood weeping outside the tomb, and as she wept she stooped to look into the tomb; and she saw two angels in white, sitting where the body of Jesus had lain, one at the head and one at the feet. They said to her, “Woman, why are you weeping?” She said to them, “Because they have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him.” Saying this, she turned round and saw Jesus standing, but she did not know that it was Jesus. Jesus said to her, “Woman, why are you weeping? Whom do you seek?” Supposing him to be the gardener, she said to him, “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away.” Jesus said to her, “Mary.” She turned and said to him in Hebrew, “Rabboni!” (which means Teacher). Jesus said to her, “Do not hold me, for I have not yet ascended to the Father; but go to my brethren and say to them, I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.” Mary Magdalene went and said to the disciples, “I have seen the Lord”; and she told them that he had said these things to her.

Scriptural Analysis

The Church picked the First Reading with a very specific ear. Song of Songs 3 is a bride awake at night, searching a sleeping city for a man who isn’t answering. She walks the streets and the squares. She interrogates the night watchmen, who have no idea who she’s talking about, and she doesn’t bother explaining, because when you love someone you assume everybody knows who you mean. Then she finds him, and the first thing she does is grab hold: “I held him, and would not let him go.”

Read that next to John 20, and the parallel is nearly line for line. Mary comes “while it was still dark.” She searches. She questions strangers, first the angels and then a man she takes for the gardener, and to that stranger she says, “if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him,” never once naming who “him” is. Gregory the Great caught exactly this: when you love a person, you never imagine anyone else could be ignorant of him.[2] And when she finds him, she grabs hold, and has to be told to let go.

The Navarre commentary reads the whole canto as one sustained trial: she searches and fails, searches again and fails, and only on the third attempt finds him, so the passage is built to teach perseverance.[3] That’s the shape of the Gospel scene too. Mary looks in the tomb, looks again, questions angels, questions a stranger, and only then hears her name.

So the Church is telling us how to read Mary Magdalene, and the Fathers got there long before the lectionary did. Ambrose, preaching on this very verse of the Song, tells his hearers to come to Mary Magdalene and consider how she sought Christ at night in the bed of his body where he lay dead.[4] Cyril of Alexandria is blunter still: the “chamber” of Song 3:1 is the Lord’s tomb, the watchmen she questions are the angels, and the “mother’s house” into which she brings him is the gathering of the apostles to whom she announced the resurrection.[5] She is the bride of the Song, and the Song is about the soul’s love for God. Origen set that reading in place in the third century, and the whole Latin tradition followed him, with Bernard of Clairvaux spending 86 sermons on it and never getting past chapter 3.[6] The love in this passage is real love, restless and specific and physical. That is the point. Christianity doesn’t get more spiritual by getting less passionate.

Now the Gospel itself. Mary arrives in the dark, sees the stone moved, and runs without looking inside. Chrysostom points out that she didn’t enter or even peer in; she ran to the disciples with all the speed of love, and she assumed the body had been stolen.[7] Gregory reads the darkness as a description of her soul, not just the hour: “it was yet dark when she came to the sepulcher,” and she was looking for the Creator of all things in a tomb.[8] Her love is running ahead of her theology. That gap is going to close, but it closes slowly.

There’s a grammatical detail here that most English readers walk past. The stone “had been taken away,” and later the face cloth “had been rolled up,” both in the passive voice with no agent named. Moloney reads these as divine passives, the Evangelist’s quiet way of saying that God has acted.[9] And the cloths themselves preach. Grave robbers don’t unwrap a corpse before stealing it, so the linens lying there demolish the theft theory the moment anyone looks at them.[10] More than that: when Lazarus came out of his tomb, he was still bound hand and foot and had to be unwrapped (John 11:44). Lazarus was resuscitated and would die again. Christ leaves the cloths behind, raised into a glorified life; death has no further claim on him (Romans 6:9; CCC 640, 647).

Peter and John come, look, and go home. Then verse 11, which Augustine sums up in one sentence: though the men returned, the stronger love of the woman fixed her to the spot.[11] She stoops to look in a second time. Gregory notices the detail most of us read past: she had already looked once, and the disciples had already looked, and she looks again. “To have looked once is not enough for love. Love makes one desire to look over and over again.”[12]

And this time there are angels. Chrysostom’s reading is pastoral: Mary couldn’t reason her way from folded burial cloths to a resurrection, so she is given something her grief can absorb, two figures in white who speak to her gently before anything overwhelming happens.[13] Gregory hears the two testaments in their posture, the Old sitting at the head and the New at the feet, both proclaiming the same incarnation and the same resurrection.[14]

Then “Woman, why are you weeping?” Gregory reads the question as a kindness with a purpose: she is asked why she grieves so that her desire will be drawn out, because naming who you are looking for makes you love him more.[15] The angels are not gathering information. They’re stoking a fire.

And her answer shifts by one word. To Peter and John she had said: “they have taken the Lord… we do not know where they have laid him.” To the angels she says “my Lord… I do not know.” Ignace de la Potterie flagged that pronoun change, and the commentators have followed him: Mary has stopped reporting a community’s problem and started speaking out of her own relationship with Jesus.[16] She is alone with her love now, which is exactly the position the bride in the Song occupies. She even asks the angelic watchmen the bride’s question in substance: have you seen him whom my soul loves (Song 3:3)?

And she turns around. Chrysostom offers a piece of stagecraft that has always struck me as obviously right: she turns because the angels’ faces change. They are looking at someone behind her.[17] Gregory reads the same turning morally. She was facing the tomb, which means she had her back to the living Christ, and the reason is that she still doubted. “She loved and doubted: she saw, and did not recognize him.”[18] That sentence describes a great many practicing Catholics, and it is not written as an insult. Love can be ahead of certainty. It usually is.

His two questions to her are loaded. “Woman” is the address he used at Cana, at the well, and from the cross, and every one of those scenes redefined a relationship.[19] “Whom are you looking for?” is word for word what he asked the first two disciples who ever followed him (John 1:38). Something is starting over in that garden.

She takes him for the gardener. Gregory refuses to call this a simple mistake. Was he not the spiritual gardener, the one who by the power of his love had planted the seeds of virtue in her heart?[20] The error is truer than the woman knows. And then one word: “Mary.” Gregory’s gloss on it is the best line in the whole patristic tradition on this passage. Jesus calls her by name as if to say, recognize me as I recognize you; I do not know you as I know others; I know you as yourself.[21] The good shepherd calls his own sheep by name, and they know his voice (John 10:3–4). She had been calling him “him,” a pronoun, a body, a thing to be located. He answers with her proper name, and the whole thing turns. Augustine notes that she had turned her body earlier, but now she turns in heart.[22] The one she was seeking outwardly was the one teaching her inwardly to keep seeking.[23]

Then the hard verse. “Do not hold me, for I have not yet ascended to the Father.” Mary is doing exactly what the bride in the Song does, holding on and refusing to let go, and Christ stops her. Augustine handles the objection head-on: within days Christ tells Thomas to put his hand in his side, and Matthew records women taking hold of his feet, so this can’t be a rule about physical contact.[24] His answer is that faith is the real touching, and Jesus cannot be truly touched except as one with the Father. He ascends in the mind of anyone who comes to confess him equal to the Father, and Mary, who had just been weeping over him as a dead man, was not there yet.[25] Chrysostom says she wanted to enjoy his presence exactly as before, and that Christ raised her thoughts so she would treat him with reverence instead of the old familiarity.[26] The command is about her notion of discipleship. She may no longer relate to him as the rabbi she walked beside in Galilee, because he is the risen Lord, and the way to him now runs through his ascension, the sending of the Spirit, and the sacramental life of his Church (CCC 659–664).

Then the commission. “Go to my brethren and say to them, I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.” Augustine will not let us blur those possessives: he does not say “our Father,” he says “my Father and your Father,” his by nature and ours by grace, and “my God” because under him Christ is man, and “your God” because between him and us Christ is Mediator.[27] Hilary of Poitiers pressed the same verse against the Arians, who wanted “my God” to prove Christ is not God. Hilary answers that Christ speaks here in the form of a servant, and the giveaway is the word “brethren,” since the Only-Begotten has brothers only according to the flesh.[28] One sentence carries both natures. And this is the first time in the whole Gospel that Jesus calls the disciples his brothers, because only now do they share his sonship by grace (John 1:12–13; Romans 8:14–17). Bede put it plainly: the only Son of God by nature became “the firstborn among many brothers and sisters” by grace.[29]

And Mary goes. She is the first person in history to preach the resurrection, and she preaches it to the apostles. John even changes his verb tense to mark it, putting her declaration “I have seen the Lord” in the perfect, the same form he uses for full Easter faith, so the Evangelist is telling us her transformation is complete.[30] Gregory saw the shape of salvation history in the moment: in the garden of Eden a woman handed a man the fruit that killed him, and from a garden tomb a woman announced life to men, so that the sin of the human race is buried in the very place it came from.[31] Bede adds that everyone charged with preaching should learn from her.[32] Rome made the point liturgically in 2016 when Pope Francis raised her July 22 memorial to a feast, putting her on the same footing as the apostles and confirming the ancient Latin title, apostola apostolorum, apostle to the apostles.[33]

Daily Application

Start with the thing the readings actually put in front of us: unanswered searching. “I sought him, but found him not; I called him, but he gave no answer.” That is in the Bible, on a feast day, in the Church’s own choice of reading. Whatever else is true about the Christian life, God is not embarrassed by your dry stretches. He printed one in the lectionary.

So the real question today is what you do when you hit a season where prayer feels like talking to furniture. Peter and John went home, and Scripture doesn’t condemn them for it. Mary stayed. And what Gregory says about her is worth taking personally: desires that go unsatisfied either grow or reveal that they were never desires.[34] If you have stopped asking God for the conversion of your son, or for relief from the thing you’ve been carrying for 6 years, the honest diagnosis is usually that the asking cost something and you set it down. Pick it up. Ask again tonight, in the same words, and understand that the repetition is the point. The bride in the Song fails twice before the third search finds him. Delay is how God enlarges the container before he fills it.

And notice that Mary is looking in the right place with the wrong expectation. She is at the tomb, which is exactly where Jesus is, and she is looking for a corpse. She sees him standing in front of her and files him as landscaping. This is where most of our disappointment with prayer actually lives. We tell God the form the answer has to take, and then we grieve at the empty tomb because he didn’t take it. You are probably being answered in a way you have already dismissed as a coincidence, a stray line in a homily, a friend who called on the wrong day.

Then the name. Everything turns on one word: “Mary.” What consoles her is being known. Aquinas taught that God knows creatures as their cause, knowing them in the very act by which he holds them in existence, which means his knowledge of you is not a report he read.[35] Put that next to Gregory’s gloss, “I know you as yourself,” and you have the reason confession works and the reason self-hatred is a lie. The Lord who says your name knows the whole file, the part you have confessed and the part you are still hiding, and he says the name anyway. Balthasar described how a mother smiles at her infant for weeks before the child smiles back, and that God interprets himself to us the same way, radiating a love that kindles the light by which we finally recognize him.[36] Mary in the garden is that moment. She could not reason her way to Easter. She was smiled at first, by name, and then she saw.

And she had a past. Luke tells us seven demons came out of her (Luke 8:2), and the Church names her patron of penitents. For centuries the West also confused her with the anonymous sinful woman who anointed Jesus’ feet in Luke 7, a misidentification Catholic exegesis has quietly corrected.[37] She has been slandered for 20 centuries, and it changed nothing about her standing with Christ. If the first witness of the resurrection can be a woman the Church spent that long misnaming, your history is not a disqualification either.

And then he sends her out before she’s had time to process any of it. She goes from “they have taken my Lord” to preaching the resurrection to the Twelve inside a single conversation. There’s no preparation, no credentials, no time to get her theology in order. That’s a fair description of most Catholic witness. You will be asked to say something true about Christ to a coworker or a grown child while you are still working out half of it yourself. Say it anyway. Mary’s whole sermon was four words: “I have seen the Lord.”

Say them tonight, out loud, and then go stand at the tomb you’d rather walk away from.

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Notes

Books Cited

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• Daniel J. Harrington, SJ, The Gospel of Matthew, Sacra Pagina 1 (Liturgical Press)
• St. Thomas Aquinas, Catena Aurea: Commentary on the Four Gospels, 4-volume set (Baronius Press)
• University of Navarre, The Navarre Bible: Wisdom Books, Scepter Publishers