On this morning, 2000 years ago, I see Jesus' friends waking up with eyes red from tears, hearts raw, souls anguished. Their hopes lay dead and buried with Jesus in a borrowed tomb. It was dark outside, for the light had gone out of their world. He was dead, the promise ended, the present eviscerated, the future still-born. The Messiah was no more.

Mary Magdalene couldn't sleep. So she goes to the place she last saw Jesus. Her grief and devotion draws her back to the cave that was his grave; however, the stone had been removed and the tomb was open. Mary ran, the story says, to find Peter and the disciple whom John calls "the one whom Jesus loved". And Mary blurts out the seemingly obvious: they must have taken him away, where I do not know.

Now Peter and the other disciple themselves are running -the other gets there first -looks inside and sees Jesus' burial wrappings lying there. Peter catches up, and brash point-man that he always was, he goes into the tomb and sees only the grave cloths. Then the other disciple, too, goes in and sees the same thing: No Jesus. The Gospel of John captures their dilemma: "they did not understand the scripture, that he must rise from the dead." So Peter and the other went home, thinking Jesus still dead ... and now stolen.

"But Mary stood weeping outside the tomb." The depth of her anguish is evident in her response to angels she sees sitting where Jesus had been laid. She acts as if seeing angels is an everyday occurrence and strikes up a conversation with them! Then "She turned around," the Gospel recounts, "and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not know that it was Jesus." Even when Jesus speaks to her, asking why she weeps, Mary thinks it's the gardener, whom she asks for directions to where Jesus' body has been put.  

Then Jesus calls her by name: Mary! Reflexively she answers: Teacher!! Jesus launches into an explanation of things Mary had no way of understanding, about not having yet ascended "to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God." Mary rushes back to the disciples and translates it all into the words she knows they will understand: "I have seen the Lord."

With Mary Magdalene's words, their third day of grief became our first Easter Sunday. The Good News, "I have seen the Lord," took time to sink in, for next week we will have the story of Thomas, our Parish's patron saint, who asked to be shown that this was really the Jesus who has been willing to suffer for them - not some imposter. Other stories were told of Jesus appearing to his followers who recognized neither him, nor his voice. Resurrection doesn't seem to be simply resuscitation, as had been the case when Lazarus was given life again after dying.
On this day, however, Mary Magdalene's experience is what makes Easter come alive - knowing she had seen him die, she hears Christ calling her. Jesus didn't just appear, as in some Houdini-like escape. He knows who she is - for he calls her by her name.