• Do You Believe This?

    Do You Believe This?

    Jeremiah calls God a dry creek bed. Martha tells Jesus he showed up too late. Same accusation, different centuries.

    That accusation belongs to devout people. You only complain about a friend’s absence if you expected him to come. Jeremiah had eaten God’s words and found them sweet (Jeremiah 15:16), and then he sat alone under the weight of God’s hand, wondering why the wound refused to close. Martha had fed Jesus in her own kitchen, and she buried her brother anyway.

    What the complaint exposes is a quiet arithmetic most of us run without admitting it. We measure God’s love by his punctuality. If he arrives on time, he loves us. If he waits four days, something has broken in the relationship. Both readings today take that arithmetic apart. God answers Jeremiah with a command and a promise. Jesus answers Martha with a claim about himself, and then with a question that has never stopped being asked.

    Today the Church celebrates Saints Martha, Mary, and Lazarus, three friends of Jesus who watched him arrive late and loved him anyway. So read the last line of the Gospel as spoken to you, because it is.

    The Tomb of Lazarus in Bethany, beside the church built on the site of the home of Martha, Mary, and Lazarus
    The Tomb of Lazarus in Bethany, adjacent to the church on the traditional site of the home of Martha, Mary, and Lazarus. Licensed via Adobe Stock, ID 332863166.

    The Readings

    First Reading: Jeremiah 15:10, 16-21

    Woe is me, my mother, that you bore me, a man of strife and contention to the whole land! I have not lent, nor have I borrowed, yet all of them curse me.

    Thy words were found, and I ate them, and thy words became to me a joy and the delight of my heart; for I am called by thy name, O Lord, God of hosts. I did not sit in the company of merrymakers, nor did I rejoice; I sat alone, because thy hand was upon me, for thou hadst filled me with indignation. Why is my pain unceasing, my wound incurable, refusing to be healed? Wilt thou be to me like a deceitful brook, like waters that fail?

    Therefore thus says the Lord: “If you return, I will restore you, and you shall stand before me. If you utter what is precious, and not what is worthless, you shall be as my mouth. They shall turn to you, but you shall not turn to them. And I will make you to this people a fortified wall of bronze; they will fight against you, but they shall not prevail over you, for I am with you to save you and deliver you, says the Lord. I will deliver you out of the hand of the wicked, and redeem you from the grasp of the ruthless.”

    Gospel: John 11:19-27

    And many of the Jews had come to Martha and Mary to console them concerning their brother. When Martha heard that Jesus was coming, she went and met him, while Mary sat in the house. Martha said to Jesus, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died. And even now I know that whatever you ask from God, God will give you.” Jesus said to her, “Your brother will rise again.” Martha said to him, “I know that he will rise again in the resurrection at the last day.” Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life; he who believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, and whoever lives and believes in me shall never die. Do you believe this?” She said to him, “Yes, Lord; I believe that you are the Christ, the Son of God, he who is coming into the world.”

    Scriptural Analysis

    Jeremiah’s Second Confession

    Scholars call Jeremiah 15:10-21 the prophet’s second “confession,” one of those passages where he stops preaching and starts arguing with God. He opens his heart in verses 10 and 11 as though he were speaking to his mother, to himself, and to God all at once, and then in verses 15 through 21 he lodges a formal complaint, which God answers by telling him exactly what he must do next.[1] The Church skips verses 12 through 14 today for a good reason: they break the thread of the passage and turn up again almost word for word at Jeremiah 17:3-4.[1]

    “A man of strife and contention to the whole land” is courtroom language in Hebrew. The two nouns, rib and madon, both come from the vocabulary of legal proceedings. Jeremiah is describing himself as a man perpetually at law with his own people.[2] And notice his defense: “I have not lent, nor have I borrowed.” He is not owed money and he owes none. Nobody in Judah has a financial grievance against him. They curse him purely for the message, which is the loneliest kind of hatred there is.

    Then comes the line that should stop us. “Thy words were found, and I ate them.” Jeremiah swallowed the word of God, the way Ezekiel would later be handed a scroll and told to eat it (Ezekiel 2:8-3:3). And the taste was joy. The delight of his heart. Which makes the next verse harder: the same prophet who ate God’s word like honey now sits alone, excluded from every party in town, because God’s hand is on him. That exclusion was not a mood. God had forbidden him to attend wakes or feasts, and forbidden him to marry, so that his own life would become an argument the people could not ignore (Jeremiah 16:1-9).[1] He is celibate, unwelcome, and cursed, and he is these things on purpose.

    So he asks God a question so blunt it barely survives translation into piety: “Wilt thou be to me like a deceitful brook, like waters that fail?” The Hebrew describes a wadi, a desert stream bed that runs full in the rainy season and goes bone dry exactly when you need it in summer. You cannot build a life around it.[3] And here is the knife. Thirteen chapters earlier, Jeremiah had indicted Israel for abandoning “the fountain of living waters” and digging out “broken cisterns that can hold no water” (Jeremiah 2:13). The word he used for God then, he now takes back. He is accusing God of being the broken cistern.

    God’s answer arrives in verse 19 and it does not sound like comfort. “If you return, I will restore you.” The Hebrew turns on a single verb, shub, to turn: if you turn, I will turn you.[4] The prophet whose entire job is preaching repentance to Judah is told to repent himself. Origen saw the reach of this: “This is meant for everyone, for God is always calling on us to return to him.”[5] Before Jeremiah can be God’s mouth again he has to stop putting worthless words in it, which is what “if you utter what is precious, and not what is worthless” means. Talking the way he has just talked, he cannot be a mouthpiece.[4]

    And then, having asked for repentance, God renews the original call almost verbatim. “A fortified wall of bronze,” “I am with you,” “they shall not prevail over you.” Compare Jeremiah 1:18-19 and you are reading the same sentences.[6] God never promises there will be no fight. He promises the fight will not finish him, and he promises presence. That is the whole answer to the dry-brook accusation: not an explanation of the drought, but a person standing there.

    Martha At The Edge Of Bethany

    Now put Martha’s sentence next to Jeremiah’s. “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.”

    The setting matters. Lazarus has been in the tomb four days, and John says so deliberately. There was a rabbinic opinion that the soul lingered near the body for three days; by the fourth, hope of resuscitation was finished.[7] Bethany sits about two miles from Jerusalem, close enough for mourners from the city to walk out, and close enough that Jesus is standing within arm’s reach of the place where they had already tried twice to stone him (John 8:59; 10:31). Proximity to Jerusalem is proximity to his own passion.[8]

    Aquinas reads the geography as a lesson. Bethany means “house of obedience,” Jerusalem means “vision of peace,” and so whoever lives in the state of obedience is already within walking distance of the peace of eternal life.[9]

    Martha hears that Jesus is coming and runs; Mary stays in the house. They are in exactly the same postures as in Luke 10:38-42. Aquinas suggests the practical reason Martha heard first: she was the one moving around the house, anxious about everything, so she met the messenger. Mary was sitting farther from the door with the visitors from Jerusalem.[9]

    Her greeting is faith, and it is also flawed faith. Aquinas puts his finger precisely on the flaw: Martha believed Christ had less power absent than present. That can be said of a limited, created power. It cannot be said of God, “because God is equally related to things both present and absent; indeed, all things are present to him.” And to make the point he reaches for Jeremiah: “Am I a God at hand, says the Lord, and not a God afar off?” (Jeremiah 23:23).[10] Aquinas has just handed us the link between today’s two readings. Jeremiah’s dry brook and Martha’s “if you had been here” are the same mistake wearing different clothes. Both assume God’s power runs on proximity, and both are answered by a God who is never actually absent.

    Her second sentence has the same limp. “Whatever you ask from God, God will give you” is true, and it is also small. It treats Jesus as a holy man whose prayers get results, the way Elisha’s prayer once raised a dead boy.[10] So when Jesus says, “Your brother will rise again,” Martha files it under the general resurrection at the last day, standard Pharisaic teaching rooted in Daniel 12:2-3 and 2 Maccabees 7.[7] She has the doctrine correct. She has not yet noticed who is standing in front of her.

    So Jesus makes his fifth “I am” declaration with a predicate: “I am the resurrection and the life.”[7] Aquinas insists this is causal language. “I am the cause of the resurrection.” Christ is the whole cause of our rising, of souls and of bodies, “for as by a man came death, by a man has come also the resurrection of the dead” (1 Corinthians 15:21). And he adds a second move: the reason Jesus can be the resurrection is that he is the life, the way a fire is the reason a snuffed candle can be relit.[11] The two titles answer two needs. Some of us have lost life and must have it restored. The rest of us have it and must have it kept.

    How does a person get connected to that cause? Aquinas answers in one clause: “because by believing he has me within himself,” citing Paul, “that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith” (Ephesians 3:17). Whoever has Christ has the cause of the resurrection inside him.[11] This is no metaphor about attitude. Jesus has already said in this same Gospel that he will raise up on the last day everyone who believes in him and eats his flesh and drinks his blood (John 6:40, 44, 54), and that a man must be born of water and the Spirit (John 3:5). The Catechism follows the same line: the Eucharist is the pledge of the resurrection of our bodies (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 994, 1000-1004).

    One more thing about those four days. Augustine, and Aquinas after him, read them as four deaths: the sin of the heart, the sin of the mouth, the sin of the deed, and finally sin hardened into habit, which is Jeremiah again: “you can do good who are accustomed to do evil” (Jeremiah 13:23). Aquinas refuses to let the reading close on a technicality. “However it is explained, the Lord cleanses those having been dead four days.”[12] And he notices that the three people Christ raised were found in three different places: the little girl still in her house, the young man already being carried out the city gate, and Lazarus sealed in a tomb. Sin consented to in the heart, sin acted out in public, sin cemented by long habit. “Yet, our Lord raises all of them.”[13]

    Then the question: “Do you believe this?” Aquinas notes that Jesus is not fishing for information. He knew her faith, having poured it into her himself. He asks so that the faith in her heart will come out of her mouth, “for man believes with his heart and so is justified, and he confesses with his lips and so is saved” (Romans 10:10). And what comes out of her mouth is complete. She names his office, Christ, the anointed, which in Israel means king and priest. She names his nature, Son of God. She names his mission, “he who is coming into the world.” It is Peter’s confession at Caesarea Philippi in a woman’s voice, at a graveside (Matthew 16:16).[14]

    Daily Application

    Something is asked of you in both readings, and it is the same thing twice.

    Jeremiah wanted an explanation. He had earned one, by any reasonable accounting: obedient, celibate, hated, wounded, and God had gone quiet on him like a summer wadi. What God gives him instead is the word turn. That looks harsh until you read what turning gets him. “You shall stand before me.” “I am with you.” His complaint had opened a distance, and the turning closes it. He never receives a reason for the drought. He receives God.

    So when you are in the middle of the thing God has not lifted, the diagnosis that hasn’t improved, the child who still isn’t speaking to you, the marriage you have prayed over for eleven years, the movement asked of you is repentance rather than argument. That sounds almost cruel until you try it. Stop demanding the reason and ask to be restored. Concretely: get to Confession, and when you go, bring the resentment itself as matter. Say out loud that you have been treating God as unreliable. Then pray the Rosary that night badly, at 11:40, with no feeling in it whatsoever. That is what turning looks like on a Wednesday. It is not an emotional event. It is a direction.

    The second thing is Martha’s, and it is louder. Aquinas says Jesus asked her the question so that what she held in her heart would come out of her mouth. Faith wants to be said. Most Catholics I know have never once, out loud, in daylight, to another human being, said what they believe about the resurrection of the body. We recite it in the Creed at Mass on Sunday in the same tone we use for a phone menu. So this week, mean it. Say the Creed on purpose, one clause at a time, and slow down at “I believe in the resurrection of the dead.” Then tell somebody. Tell your children what you believe happens to their grandmother’s body, before there is a funeral to explain rather than after. Aquinas noticed that Martha professes her faith standing outside a tomb that still smells. That is the only place a profession of faith ever costs anything.

    And if you are reading this convinced you are the four-day case, the one whose sin has calcified into habit and who has quietly stopped believing he can change, then Aquinas has already answered you. The Lord cleanses those who have been dead four days. He raises the girl in the house, the young man at the gate, and the man in the tomb. He does not sort us by how far gone we are. He came to Bethany, he wept there, and he called a decomposing man by name and got obedience.

    Look at the household the Church puts before us today. Martha’s faith was imperfect, and Jesus worked with it anyway, and drew a complete confession out of her before the day was over. Mary sat still and listened, and that was not idleness. Lazarus contributed nothing at all except hearing his own name and walking out. Three friends, three entirely different capacities, one house Jesus loved enough to keep coming back to. When the Church joined all three to this memorial in 2021, she said that in the household of Bethany “the Lord Jesus experienced the family spirit and friendship of Martha, Mary and Lazarus, and for this reason the Gospel of John states that he loved them.”[15] Bethany, remember, is the house of obedience.

    You are being asked a question today, at whatever tomb you happen to be standing beside. Answer it out loud: Yes, Lord.

    Notes

    1. The Navarre Bible: Major Prophets, commentary on Jeremiah 15:10-21 and 16:1-21. ↩
    2. John Bright, Jeremiah, Anchor Bible 21 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1965), note on Jeremiah 15:10. ↩
    3. Bright, Jeremiah, note on Jeremiah 15:18. ↩
    4. Bright, Jeremiah, notes on Jeremiah 15:19. ↩
    5. Origen, Homiliae in Jeremiam 14.18, quoted in The Navarre Bible: Major Prophets, commentary on Jeremiah 15:19. ↩
    6. Bright, Jeremiah, note on Jeremiah 15:20 and comment on Jeremiah 15:5-21. ↩
    7. Francis Martin and William M. Wright IV, The Gospel of John, Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2015), 204-206. ↩
    8. Francis J. Moloney, The Gospel of John, Sacra Pagina 4 (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1998), 327. ↩
    9. Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Gospel of John, ch. 11, lect. 4, nos. 1508-1510. ↩
    10. Aquinas, Commentary on the Gospel of John, ch. 11, lect. 4, no. 1511. ↩
    11. Aquinas, Commentary on the Gospel of John, ch. 11, lect. 4, nos. 1516-1517. ↩
    12. Aquinas, Commentary on the Gospel of John, ch. 11, lect. 4, no. 1507. ↩
    13. Aquinas, Commentary on the Gospel of John, ch. 11, lect. 4, no. 1513. ↩
    14. Aquinas, Commentary on the Gospel of John, ch. 11, lect. 4, nos. 1518-1520. ↩
    15. Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, Decree on the celebration of Saints Martha, Mary and Lazarus in the General Roman Calendar (January 26, 2021). ↩
  • She Stayed At The Tomb

    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.

    PostImage722 2026.

    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.

    Notes

    1. Gregory the Great, Homilies on the Gospels 25.1–2, in the Roman Office of Readings for the Feast of Saint Mary Magdalene (PL 76:1189–1193).  ↩

    2. Gregory the Great, Homiliae in Evangelia 25, quoted in Thomas Aquinas, Catena Aurea: Commentary on the Four Gospels Collected out of the Works of the Fathers, vol. 4, St. John (Oxford: John Henry Parker, 1845), on John 20:15.  ↩

    3. The Navarre Bible: The Books of Wisdom, Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs, commentary on Song of Solomon 3:1–5 (Dublin: Four Courts Press), 498.  ↩

    4. Ambrose, Isaac, or the Soul 5.38, 42, in Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture: Old Testament IX, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon, ed. J. Robert Wright (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2005), 325.  ↩

    5. Cyril of Alexandria, Fragments in the Commentary on the Song of Songs 3.1, in Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture: Old Testament IX, 325.  ↩

    6. Theodoret of Cyr, Commentary on the Song of Songs 3, in Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture: Old Testament IX, 327.  ↩

    7. John Chrysostom, Homilies on the Gospel of St. John 85, quoted in Aquinas, Catena Aurea, 4: on John 20:1–2.  ↩

    8. Gregory the Great, Homiliae in Evangelia 22, quoted in Aquinas, Catena Aurea, 4: on John 20:1.  ↩

    9. Francis J. Moloney, SDB, The Gospel of John, Sacra Pagina 4 (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1998), 518–20.  ↩

    10. Commentary on John 20:7 in the Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture volume on John, drawing on Gail R. O’Day, “The Gospel of John,” in The New Interpreter’s Bible, vol. 9 (Nashville: Abingdon, 1995), 841.  ↩

    11. Augustine, Tractates on the Gospel of John 121, quoted in Aquinas, Catena Aurea, 4: on John 20:11.  ↩

    12. Gregory the Great, Homiliae in Evangelia 25, quoted in Aquinas, Catena Aurea, 4: on John 20:11.  ↩

    13. Chrysostom, Homilies on the Gospel of St. John 86, quoted in Aquinas, Catena Aurea, 4: on John 20:12.  ↩

    14. Augustine, Tractates on the Gospel of John 121, quoted in Aquinas, Catena Aurea, 4: on John 20:12.  ↩

    15. Gregory the Great, Homiliae in Evangelia 25, quoted in Aquinas, Catena Aurea, 4: on John 20:12.  ↩

    16. Ignace de la Potterie, SJ, The Hour of Jesus: The Passion and Resurrection of Jesus according to John, trans. Dom G. Murray, OSB (Staten Island, NY: Alba House, 1989), 171–72.  ↩

    17. Chrysostom, Homilies on the Gospel of St. John 86, quoted in Aquinas, Catena Aurea, 4: on John 20:14.  ↩

    18. Gregory the Great, Homiliae in Evangelia 25, quoted in Aquinas, Catena Aurea, 4: on John 20:14.  ↩

    19. Commentary on John 20:14–15 in the Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture volume on John, citing John 2:4; 4:21; 19:26 and 1:38.  ↩

    20. Gregory the Great, Homiliae in Evangelia 25, quoted in Aquinas, Catena Aurea, 4: on John 20:15.  ↩

    21. Ibid., on John 20:16; see also Gregory, Homilies on the Gospels 25.4–5, Roman Office of Readings.  ↩

    22. Augustine, Tractates on the Gospel of John 121, quoted in Aquinas, Catena Aurea, 4: on John 20:16.  ↩

    23. Gregory the Great, Homilies on the Gospels 25.5, Roman Office of Readings.  ↩

    24. Augustine, Tractates on the Gospel of John 121, quoted in Aquinas, Catena Aurea, 4: on John 20:17.  ↩

    25. Ibid.; see also Augustine, De Trinitate 1.9.  ↩

    26. John Chrysostom, Homilies on John 86.2, in Commentary on Saint John the Apostle and Evangelist: Homilies 48–88, trans. Sister Thomas Aquinas Goggin, SCH, Fathers of the Church 41 (New York: Fathers of the Church, 1959), 449–50.  ↩

    27. Augustine, Tractates on the Gospel of John 121, quoted in Aquinas, Catena Aurea, 4: on John 20:17.  ↩

    28. Hilary of Poitiers, De Trinitate 11, quoted in Aquinas, Catena Aurea, 4: on John 20:17.  ↩

    29. Bede the Venerable, Expositio in Cantica Canticorum, in The Song of Songs: Interpreted by Early Christian and Medieval Commentators, trans. and ed. Richard A. Norris Jr. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), 289.  ↩

    30. Moloney, The Gospel of John, 527; see also the commentary on John 20:18 in the Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture volume on John.  ↩

    31. Gregory the Great, Homiliae in Evangelia 25, quoted in Aquinas, Catena Aurea, 4: on John 20:18.  ↩

    32. Bede, quoted in Aquinas, Catena Aurea, 4: on John 20:18.  ↩

    33. Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, Decree Apostolorum Apostola (June 3, 2016).  ↩

    34. Gregory the Great, Homilies on the Gospels 25.2, Roman Office of Readings.  ↩

    35. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 14, a. 8.  ↩

    36. Hans Urs von Balthasar, Love Alone Is Credible, trans. D. C. Schindler (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2004), 76.  ↩

    37. Wilfrid J. Harrington, OP, in A New Catholic Commentary on Holy Scripture, and Edward Mally, SJ, in The Jerome Biblical Commentary, both cited in “Saint Mary Magdalene,” Franciscan Media, franciscanmedia.org.  ↩