Tell us, Mary:
what did you see on the way?
Year A – Easter Sunday
“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, his witnesses,
the shroud and his garments.
Christ, my hope, has risen:
he goes before his own into Galilee.”
Mary Magdalene, the woman of the glorious dawn, is the first herald of Christ’s resurrection. She, a passionate bride who spends the night searching for her Beloved, is the image of the Church. Mary remains closely linked to the event that lies at the origin and at the heart of our profession of faith: the feast of Easter.
Easter is the unexpected triumph of life that rekindles hope. Easter is the morning star that illumines the deep night and opens the way to the midday sun. Easter is the bursting forth of spring that inaugurates a time of beauty, a season of colours, of song and of flowers.
Mary, the woman of the dawn
Mary Magdalene is the first witness of Easter (John 20:1–18). Her ardent love for the Master kept her heart awake throughout the night of the great “passage”: “I sleep, but my heart is awake” (Song of Songs 5:2). And precisely because love kept her watchful, the Beloved reveals himself first to her.
It is therefore to her that we wish to ask: “Tell us, Mary: what did you see on the way?” (Easter Sequence). We wish to drink from the fresh and flowing spring of the first witnesses of the resurrection. Mary is the guardian of a first-hand testimony, a feminine first fruit, “apostle to the apostles”, as the early Fathers of the Church call her.
Tell us, Mary: what did you see on the way? Tell it with the fire of your passion! Let us behold in your eyes what your heart has seen. For the vocation of an apostle has no value unless it is lived with your passion!
Let us then see what made Mary the first witness of the Risen One.
Mary, the lover
What characterises Mary Magdalene? A great love! She is a woman passionately devoted to Jesus who does not resign herself to the prospect of losing him. She clings to that lifeless body as her last chance to touch “the one whom her heart loves” (Song of Songs 3:1–4). If the “beloved disciple” (the apostle John, according to tradition) is the prototype of the disciple, Mary Magdalene is his feminine counterpart (without thereby overshadowing the figure of the Virgin Mary). She is the “favoured disciple” and the “first apostle” of the Risen Christ.
Called twice by the generic name “woman”, she represents the new humanity, suffering and redeemed. She is the Eve transformed 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 her Beloved had descended (Song of Songs 5:1).
Remaining and weeping
Mary Magdalene is moved by love and, at the same time, by faith. Faith and love are both necessary: faith gives the strength to walk, love gives wings to fly. Faith without love takes no risks, but love without faith may lose its way at many crossroads. Hope is born of both.
It is love and faith that lead Mary to remain near the tomb, to weep and to hope—even though she does not fully understand why. While Peter (a figure of faith) and John (a figure of love) move away from the tomb, she, who holds both dimensions within herself, “remains” and “weeps”.
Her remaining is the fruit of faith, and her weeping is the fruit of love. She remains because her faith perseveres in the search, does not lose heart in the face of failure, 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 them in the vain attempt not to let him go (Song of Songs 3:1–4).
Today, we—apostles, disciples and friends of Jesus—often give up too easily before the “tomb”, turning away from it. We lack the faith to hope that from situations of death, emptiness and defeat life can be reborn. We lack the faith to believe in a God capable of “raising the dead”. We hasten to seal those “tombs” with the “very large stone” (Mark 16:4) of our unbelief.
Our mission then becomes a desperate struggle against death—a task doomed to failure, for death has reigned since the beginning of the world. We end up being content with the work of mercy of “burying the dead”, forgetting that the apostles were sent by Jesus to “raise them” (Matthew 10:8).
To face the drama of death and the tomb is like crossing the Red Sea for the Christian. Unless we remove the stone of our unbelief in order to confront and overcome this terrible enemy, we shall 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 struggle to weep, perhaps because we love too little. Our hearts forget their “dead” too quickly. “Life goes on and we cannot stop,” we say. We do not have time to “remain” and to “weep” with those who suffer.
The courage to remain and to weep is not fruitless. The angels respond to Mary Magdalene’s tears. They do not return the body she was seeking, but announce to her that “the one whom her heart loves” is alive!
Her eyes, however, need to see and her hands to touch the Beloved, and Jesus yields to the insistence of Mary’s heart and 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 own name, to be recognised, is the deepest desire we carry within us. Only then can a person reach the fullness of their being and the awareness of their identity. Only then will one be able to say, with the fire of a loving heart: “I have seen the Lord!”. And on that day, like Mary, we too shall become first-hand witnesses.
“…what we have seen and heard we proclaim to you…” (1 John 1:1–4).
Easter greeting
Let us seek the Crucified with the faith and love of Mary Magdalene, and the Risen One will come to meet us, calling us by name. Let us weep for the dead of today—those of injustice and war—but let our gaze be turned towards the future, towards the Risen One, and no longer only towards the past, towards the Crucified, forgetting the resurrection.
Then our prayer will be that which concludes Scripture: “Come, Lord Jesus!” (Revelation 22:20). With Easter, the Church has entered into the eschatological tension: “We proclaim your death, O Lord, and profess your resurrection until you come again.”
A blessed Easter, and may our lives manifest the presence of the Risen One in our daily “Galilee”!
P. Manuel João Pereira Correia, MCCJ
Fr. Manuel João, comboni missionary
Sunday Reflection
from the womb of my whale, ALS
Our cross is the pulpit of the Word
