“Woman, why are you weeping?”
For the past two Easters, these words spoken by the resurrected Lord have been a balm to my heart.
In my area of the world, both springs of 2020 and 2021 were locked down with restrictions and sky-high Covid cases. If we were lucky, we got to attend reduced versions of the traditional Holy Week and Easter Masses; otherwise, we were watching these liturgies take place through a screen. Meanwhile, the pandemic’s lingering, worldwide maraud was leaving its trail of suffering everywhere.
Even this year, faced with the reality of war, ongoing global health crises, and social instability, this Easter passage is a familiar scene – after the hardest loss of her life, Mary is hoping to visit the one whom her soul loves at his gravesite. It is not hard to imagine how his absence even here at the tomb would compound her grief. As human beings we naturally infuse temporal, material, and physical things with meaning – here is a picture of my niece, this was my mother’s favourite scarf, here are bouquets on the roadside where a young man died. All of these things are a visible sign of something invisible – love, affection, longing, grief. Christ’s tomb is this kind of physical place for Mary, representing more than the sum of its parts. When she arrives to find it empty, it is this physical absence that she gets caught on, rather than its implications.
Before the Lord’s Passion, knowing that He was about to leave us and that we would be lost without something of His to hold, He too left us a visible sign of an invisible reality – that is, His body in the Eucharist. In the absence of in-person Mass and access to the Eucharist for months at a time, especially over Holy Week and Easter for two years in a row, Mary’s response to the angels’ question – “Women, why are you weeping?” – sounds all too familiar: “They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid Him.” Her words are laden with despair: The only One who can comfort me is not only dead but missing. Without someone tangible to weep over, to weep with, what can I do with all this grief?
As the passage continues, Mary turns and sees a man who she mistakes for the gardener. He repeats the angels’ question: “Woman, why are you weeping? For whom are you looking?”
In her confusion she says, “’Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away.’ Jesus [says] to her, ‘Mary!’ She turn[s and says] to him in Hebrew, ‘Rabouni!’ (Which means teacher)” (John 20:15-16).
What strikes me in reading this passage is Mary’s double turn. First, she turns and lays eyes on who she assumes is the gardener, but it is only after Jesus speaks her name that the passage says she turns again and recognizes the Lord. This second turn is not sloppy writing on John’s part. It is intentional – depicting a turn, perhaps not of the physical gaze, but of the gaze of the heart.
How many times in the past two years, and even before this, have I wept at the feet of Jesus for a loss or lack I perceived in my own life? How many times has He asked me, “Woman, why are you weeping?”, patiently waiting for me to recognize in Him the answer to all my longing? How long has He waited, patiently, for my heart to turn again?
This year, by the grace of God, I was able to attend in-person Mass every day during Lent, as well as the Holy Week liturgies and the Easter Vigil. Yet, in reflecting upon the last few years with gratitude, I’ve realized that, even in those periods without access to the Sacrament of Communion, the Lord has been meeting me in my longing. He has been asking me who I am looking for, and I’ve been stuck at Mary’s first turn, fixated on the gardener and the emptiness of the tomb, looking at the Lord but not seeing Him.
On these occasions, as I poured out my confusion and grief to the Lord I didn’t fully recognize as present, He waited until I had finished speaking to reveal Himself to me. Similarly in this passage, Jesus doesn’t accost Mary with His identity. He doesn’t reprimand her for grieving Him, even though He had made it clear before His Passion that He would resurrect from the dead. Instead, gently, He asks her for the source of her grief, willing to listen with patience and compassion to the pain of His beloved. He gives her space to speak and process.
He does the same for you and me – each time we return to Him with weeping, He meets us in this place with the same question, waiting for us to turn our whole broken heart to Him. He speaks our name in a way only we can recognize, like a gentle parent who takes a distraught child’s face in their hands and says “look at me. I’m right here.”
Lord, help me to hear you speak my name this Easter, so that I may turn from the places of my life that are empty and find instead that my hope and joy has always been in You.
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