One kind of theatre that never goes out of fashion is farce. Here’s the scene that everybody loves. We get three subplots which all reach their climax at the same time. In the first there’s two characters called the beginning and the end. In the second there’s two characters called the body and the soul. In the third there’s two characters called the personal and the social. It turns out that they’ve each made separate secret arrangements to meet by the large rock in the garden near Golgotha early on Sunday morning.
The audience realises that all six characters are going to show up at the same place at the same time, but in a farce, the characters don’t know what the audience knows. Most likely they each walk slowly and secretively backwards toward each other and if you want to ham it up you have piano notes that go du…du…du…du…doooo-duh-duh-duh-duh… until they all bump backsides and jump into the air. It’s the kind of thing it’s hilarious to watch over and over again because each time you not only laugh at the characters but you also more deeply appreciate their interconnections and the intricacies of the plot that brought them all there.
And this meeting in the garden between Mary Magdalene and Jesus is a lot like farce. It’s a simultaneous secret rendezvous between beginning and end, between body and soul, between person and society. You can see Mary backing slowly away from the tomb and bumping into a man she takes to be the gardener. She’s so blinded by grief she stupidly thinks he’s the gardener! But the whole point is, he is the gardener! He’s the Lord who’d made the Garden of Eden, who’d opened up creation as a playground of delights. This is the reunion of creation and final destiny, and in the clumsiness of her grief, Mary’s stumbled into it.
Meanwhile Mary’s still peering into the empty tomb. She’s still living in a world where body’s separated from soul. She’s looking at the empty place where the dead body ought to be, and she’s backing away from it…and though she knows she’s bumped into a living person, it doesn’t cross her mind it might be Jesus because she knows Jesus is dead and all she’s hoping to find is his body. But the whole point is, this is the great reunion of body and soul, and she’s about to be the first to witness it. And straightaway she grabs hold of Jesus, which means she gets the message that this really is God and this really is flesh and blood, so it’s Christmas all over again, but even better this time because this time it’s forever.
And then think again about the significance of the resurrection as an event both between Jesus and Mary, and between Jesus and the brothers. Mary—isolated, grieving, captivated by death—the epitome of what it means to be lost—is walking backwards from the tomb in dismay… when she’s deeply met in the most tender way possible—by the good shepherd who knows her by name. ‘Mary.’ Jesus has made the long journey to all humanity to show us the face of God in spite of our sin, and now here he makes a special journey to show his risen face to just one of us, Mary, softly and tenderly. Because he sought out and met Mary, we have reason to hope that he’ll do just the same to you and me. He died to save us all, but he makes a resurrection appearance to each one of us as if we were the only one.
I wonder if you have a secret garden. I wonder whether, this Easter morning, there are two irreconcilable commitments, two overlapping loves, two painfully separated poles in your life. And I wonder whether this morning there may be a secret rendezvous in a garden, and while God is getting on with the business of bringing together personal and social, beginning and end, body and soul, God may be just as busy reconciling the contradictory extremes in your heart. I wonder if in Jesus’ tender words of greeting and recognition, ‘Mary,’ you hear a call to bring to harmony the discordant notes in your being. And if so, this Easter morning may not just be a celebration of the way God resurrects all things, but even a celebration of the way God reconciles you.
Wonderings
- I wonder what difference it makes that Jesus meets Mary not in a temple or synagogue, but in a garden—a place of longing, beauty, vulnerability, and hidden growth.
- I wonder who in your life stands in Mary’s place—someone backing away in sorrow—and how the gentle presence of the Gardener might be revealed through your tenderness.
- I wonder what gardens you carry within you—the memories, landscapes, or moments where God felt near, or where you still seek God in the half-light of dawn
- I wonder how the resurrection might be reconciling things in you that feel opposed or irreconcilable—two desires, two commitments, two parts of yourself
