Tell us, Mary:
what did you see on the way?

John 20:11–18
“But Mary stood outside the tomb weeping. As she wept, she bent over to look into the tomb and saw two angels in white, seated where Jesus’ body had been, one at the head and the other at the foot. They asked her, ‘Woman, why are you crying?’ She said, ‘They have taken my Lord away, and I don’t know where they have put him.’
At this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not realise that it was Jesus.
He asked her, ‘Woman, why are you crying? Who is it you are looking for?’ Thinking he was the gardener, she said, ‘Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have put him, and I will get him.’
Jesus said to her, ‘Mary.’ She turned towards him and cried out in Aramaic, ‘Rabbouni!’ (which means Teacher).
Jesus said, ‘Do not hold on to me, for I have not yet ascended to the Father. Go instead to my brothers and tell them, “I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.”’
Mary Magdalene went to the disciples with the news: ‘I have seen the Lord!’ And she told them that he had said these things to her.”

Tell us, Mary: what did you see on the way?
“The tomb of the living Christ, the glory of the risen Christ,
and the angels as his witnesses, the shroud and his clothes.
Christ, my hope, is risen!”
(Easter Sequence)

I believe that one of the great biblical figures of the New Testament who should be placed on the “lampstand of our house” (Matthew 5:15) is precisely Mary Magdalene, the woman of the glorious dawn, the first to proclaim the resurrection of Christ. She is the perfect image of the Church, the passionate bride who spends the night searching for her Beloved. Mary Magdalene remains intimately and inseparably linked to the event that is at the origin and at the heart of our profession of faith: the feast of Easter.

Indeed, for Christians, Easter marks their rebirth, and as far as possible, it is during this feast that new Christians are born again through baptismal waters. In it, all our fears are conquered and all our deepest desires fulfilled. Whoever welcomes the Easter proclamation without reservation cannot remain unmoved by the cry of the Exultet, which breaks the silence of an expectant assembly to invite heaven and earth to rejoice at the great and joyful news of Christ’s victory.
Easter is the unexpected triumph of Life that restores certain Hope.
Easter is the morning star that lights up the deep night and opens the way to the noonday sun.
Easter is the explosion of spring that ushers in a season of Beauty, a time of colours, of song, and of blossoms.
A Christian closed to Easter is a defeated soul from whom people flee because of the stench of death he carries!
The Christian of Easter is a messenger of contagious joy, an anointing full of fragrance capable of resurrecting the hearts of the dying!

Mary, the Woman of the Dawn

The first witness of Easter is Mary Magdalene (John 20:11–18). Her passionate love for the Master kept her heart awake throughout the night of the great “passing”: “I sleep, but my heart keeps watch” (Song of Songs 5:2). And because love had kept her watching, the Beloved appeared to her first.

It is to her that we ask: Tell us, Mary: what did you see on the way? (Easter Sunday Sequence). Yes, to question the witnesses about what they saw. Unfortunately, today our society, saturated with a culture of suspicion and transgression, obsessed with itching for novelty and pursuing selfish desires, surrounds itself with false teachers and storytellers (2 Timothy 4:1–5).

Pope Paul VI once said, “The world listens more willingly to witnesses than to teachers,” but today that is far less certain. Those “who see with eyes capable of perceiving the invisible” (Hebrews 11:27) are mocked and labelled as dreamers or fools, while those who “do not see”—and thus deny spiritual reality, invisible to the myopic gaze of modern “teachers”—are acclaimed and celebrated by vast audiences.

Mary, the Lover

As children of an “unbelieving” society ourselves, a brief introduction to this privileged witness becomes necessary. First, let us dispel a common confusion: Mary Magdalene is not the “sinful woman” mentioned in Luke (7:36–50) or the adulteress in John (8:1–11). In fact, we encounter several Marys among Jesus’ followers. In addition to Mary, mother of Jesus, there is Mary of Bethany, Mary the wife of Clopas, Mary the mother of James the Lesser, and, of course, our Mary Magdalene. She came from Magdala, a village on the shores of Lake Tiberias, which gave her the name Magdalene. She had suffered much, but was freed from seven demons (Luke 8:2), and had followed Jesus from Galilee from the very beginning.

What defines Mary Magdalene? Great love! She is a woman passionately devoted to Jesus, unwilling to accept losing him, clinging to his lifeless body as her last chance to touch “the one whom her heart loves” (Song of Songs 3:1–4). From this stems another, more recent distortion, fabricated by another master of deception: Dan Brown, the American author of The Da Vinci Code, a worldwide bestseller (2003). According to Brown, Magdalene was in fact Jesus’ lover!… Yes, Mary Magdalene is the great lover of Jesus—but not in a carnal sense, as Brown suggests.

If the “beloved disciple” (possibly the Apostle John, though never explicitly named in the Gospel) is the prototype of the male disciple, then Mary Magdalene is in a sense his female counterpart—without eclipsing the figure of the Virgin Mary. Mary Magdalene is the “favourite disciple” and the “first apostle” of the Risen Christ. She, addressed twice as “woman”, symbolises the new humanity—suffering and redeemed—Eve restored by the love of the Bridegroom, that love lost in the Garden of Eden and now rediscovered in the new garden (John 19:41) where the Beloved had descended (Song of Songs 5:1).

Tell us, Mary: what did you see on the way?
Tell it with the fire of your passion. Let us see in your eyes what your heart has seen! For the vocation of an apostle is worthless unless it is lived with your same passion.

Remaining and Weeping

The vocation of Mary Magdalene is animated by love and, at the same time, by faith. Both are essential: faith gives strength to walk, love gives wings to fly. Faith without love does not risk; love without faith can get lost. Hope is born of both. It is love and faith that drive Mary Magdalene to remain by the tomb, to weep, and to hope—even if she doesn’t understand why. Unlike the two apostles, Peter (symbol of faith) and John (symbol of love), who leave the tomb, the woman, who embodies both dimensions, “remains” and “weeps”. Her remaining is fruit of her faith; her weeping is fruit of her love. She stays because her faith persists in seeking; she questions (the angels and the gardener) like the Beloved in the Song of Songs. She hopes against all hope! Until, having found her Beloved, she throws herself at his feet, embracing him in a desperate attempt never to let him go again (Song of Songs 3:1–4).

Today, we—apostles and friends of Jesus—often retreat before the “tomb”. We lack faith to believe that life can be reborn from situations of death, emptiness, and defeat. We no longer “believe in miracles”, we have no space left to hope in a God who raises the dead. We hurry to seal our “tombs” with the “very large stone” (Mark 16:4) of our disbelief. Our mission thus becomes a desperate struggle against death—a hopeless effort, since death has reigned from the beginning. We end up settling for the work of “burying the dead” (with or without embalming), forgetting that we have been sent to raise them (Matthew 10:8).

To face the tomb is the apostle’s crossing of the Rubicon, his passage through the Red Sea (Exodus 14–15). Unless we remove the stone of our unbelief to face and overcome this terrible enemy, we will not see the glory of God: “Did I not tell you that if you believe, you will see the glory of God?” (John 11:40).

We do not like to weep—undoubtedly because we love little. “Weeping is proper to the feminine genius,” said Pope John Paul II. Perhaps women are more capable of loving. “Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also” (Matthew 6:21). Mary Magdalene’s heart remains in that garden, where she bid farewell to the Master—and that is why she stays there and weeps. Our hearts forget their dead too quickly; preoccupied with our “many things to do”, we lack time to remain and weep with those who suffer.

Yet the boldness of remaining and weeping is not sterile. Mary Magdalene’s tears are met by angels who do not return the lifeless body she seeks, but instead announce that “the one whom her heart loves” is alive! But her eyes still need to see, and her hands to touch the Beloved. And Jesus, finally yielding to the insistence of her heart, comes to meet her.

When he calls her by name, “Mariam”, her heart trembles with emotion as she recognises the voice of the Master. To be called by one’s name: this is the deepest (and often unspoken) desire of the human heart. Only then does the person reach the fullness of their being and consciousness. Only then can they say, with the fire of a heart in love, “I have seen the Lord!”
And on that day, like Mary, we too shall become first-hand witnesses:

“That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched—this we proclaim concerning the Word of life. The life appeared; we have seen it and testify to it. And we proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and has appeared to us.
We proclaim to you what we have seen and heard, so that you also may have fellowship with us. And our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son, Jesus Christ.
We write this to make our joy complete.”
(1 John 1:1–4)

Manuel João Pereira Correia, mccj