Day One

Mary came running from the cemetery.
“Jesus’ body is gone!” she wailed in bewilderment.

Peter and John ran to see (John 20).

Here is what they observed: two angels in the tomb, positioned exactly as the cherubim had been stationed over God’s throne, the Ark of the Covenant!

Something truly holy was going on!

Mary Magdalene experienced it too, a little while later. She lingered in the garden alone, just wanting to be close to the last place where Jesus’ body had been, after that horrible day of execution.

Collapsed and weeping, she saw someone at the edge of her blurred peripheral vision. She thought he might be the caretaker of this garden, and perhaps he knew what had happened. The supposed “gardener”, though, simply spoke her name.

Suddenly she knew it was Jesus! He was alive!

What a silly mix-up, right?! But John did not think badly of Mary. In fact, Mary’s encounter only confirmed what John had been trying to say throughout his gospel.

John’s opening words were “In the beginning…” That was how the holy scriptures themselves began!

“In the beginning…”

And the stories unfolded in parallel between Genesis and John: creation, with light and life and humanity. Then the darkness and evil and death. And near this world of God’s hopes and dreams, the divine spirit lingered, hovering.

Until God tried again.

And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and blazed with light and life, and opened the eyes of the blind, and injected the vaccine of rebirth into the zombies of planet earth, infected generation after generation by the pandemic virus of evil.

“Mary…” Jesus spoke her name in the garden, and Mary was reborn like Eve, trembling with light and life and hope and vision and purpose and identity.

The risen Christ, the light and life of the world, spoke her name.

And today he speaks my name and yours…