Perhaps all of the above?
After all, Mary had been with Jesus from early on. Most scholars agree that she was probably a wealthy widow from a family of silk merchants. Her wealth allowed her to fund a good portion of Jesus’ ministry, but, even with all that wealth in ancient times, a woman who struck out on her own, without the benefit of father, husband, brother or brother in law, was, at best, scoffed at, and at worst, a scandal.
In other words, Mary was just Jesus’ type!
So after spending the better part of three years with Jesus, trusting in his teachings, loving his spirit, hoping that he was indeed the promised messiah, how must she have felt after watching him arrested, beaten, killed and laid in a borrowed tomb?
She must have been struck to the very core, questioning all she had come to believe.
We’ve all been there, right? September 11th, Watergate and 1968…nothing colored my growing up like the 1960’s, especially 1968, the year my father cried.
I was 2 when JFK was killed and 7 when Martin Luther King, Jr. and Bobby Kennedy were killed. I’ll never forget that June night when Bobby was gunned down. For the first time in my life I saw my father full of utter despair as one more of his civic prophets were taken from him. It was the end of innocence and, for some, the end of hope.
...I bring this up because I want to consider----really consider----the weight on Mary’s shoulders that morning.
Remember where all the male disciples were—huddled in that upper room, behind locked doors. Mary and perhaps a few other women, were the brave ones, they were the ones determined, regardless of the risk, to give Jesus a proper burial. Maybe he wasn’t who they thought he was, maybe it was all a lie, maybe they had been fooled but still, they had loved him and he deserved a proper burial. So off Mary went, carrying the pack of spices, as well as the weight of the world, on her shoulders.
Mary risked-- she went, she believed, she didn’t give up, even when so very full of despair.
I have to say, I would have given up. I’m not proud of that, but the fact is, when faced with the “love everyone always no exception” theology of Jesus Christ, I would have, in the shadow of his utter and complete defeat, gone back to life as usual, to life of Empire and temple authorities holding on for dear life to the status quo, to business as usual; I would have been with the rest of the disciples, hiding in that upper room—not really expecting that Jesus would re-appear, but waiting, waiting until the hub bub had died down.
But not Mary. Mary swallowed her doubt, she pushed through her fear, she set aside her despair and forged ahead. …not because she thought she’d take center stage in the most amazing story of all time, but because she wanted her Lord, her teacher, her friend to be given a respectful burial.
Of course when she arrives it appears she is too late, the body is gone, the tomb is empty.
It’s at this part of the story when Mary’s stoicism, her hope, her strength, maybe even her faith…. Is shaken.
It’s this part of the story that takes me back to my childhood, to 1968, when Bobby Kennedy was killed. On that night, my father, a staunch democrat, a party loyalist, a faithful believer that MLK and RFK, just like JFK before them would bring our country more in line with the fundamental truth upon which it was founded, the fundamental truth of the great Abrahamic religions of this world---that all people, all people, are created equal—on that night my in the early morning hours of June 6, 1968, my dad, like Mary Magdalene two thousand years before him, sat down and wept.
We’ve all been there, right?
We’ve believed so strongly in something or someone, only to be disappointed, heart broken.
Could you blame Mary and the other disciples if they had simply washed their hands of this man, of this misguided prophet who promised all sorts of crazy things only to be felled by the status quo? Would you blame them if they just returned to their lives as fishermen, silk merchants, tent makers? Would you blame them if they looked back on those three years as some type of youthful whimsy?
No, I don’t think any of us would blame them for that.
But thank God, thank God, they didn’t just “move on.”
Thank God Mary engaged those two angels in a conversation, thank God Mary wouldn’t rest until she laid eyes on her Lord’s body. Thank God, Mary didn’t dismiss “the gardener,” thank God Mary asked and listened and then in that glorious moment of recognition, saw the truth of our Easter message--no matter how dismal the circumstance, no matter how heart breaking the life, no matter how bitter the memory, our Lord, the same man who was arrested, beaten and died, will always bring us to that utterly happy morning where there are no longer tears, no longer bitterness, no longer loss, no longer anger, no longer despair, but life. Beautiful joyous, love and light filled life. The message of Easter morning isn’t that one must suffer before one can reach glory, the message is that no matter how hard the forces of darkness work, no matter how horrific their attempts to derail us are, Good Friday is always followed by Easter morn.
So join my father whose hopes and dreams were seemingly dashed by an assassin’s bullet not once, not twice, but three times in the course of five years, join Mary whose hopes and dreams were seemingly dashed by an Empire and a status quo unwilling to dream, or hope, or believe and enter into resurrection life, where we shout, Alleluia Alleluia Alleluia, the Lord, Our Lord, Is Risen Indeed. Amen.
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