We reached the story where Mary Magdalene meets the risen Jesus.
Mary Magdalene — we don’t know a lot about her from the Gospels. Her name Magdalene is not a surname. It either means that she came from the town of Magdala on the northern shores of Lake Galilee, or, because the word Magdalene is very close to the Hebrew word for a tower, it means that when she was having her teenage growth spurt she grew faster than her schoolmates and had spent all her life with the nickname ‘Mary the Tower.’ When you meet her in glory you’ll very quickly be able to judge which is the case — if she’s six foot six, you know she’s ‘Mary the Tower’; if she’s got a northern accent, you know it’s because she’s from Magdala.
It’s a lovely story. It features in fact in our Easter songs, does it not?
At break of dawn poor Mary still weeping she came, when through her grief she heard your voice now speaking her name.
Or:
See Mary weeping, where is he laid? As in sorrow she turns from the empty tomb.
Here’s a voice speaking, calling her name — it’s the master, the Lord, raised to life again.
It’s a tender story. Time slows down, geography is tight, the camera zooms in. John tells every tiny detail — every tear that drops to the ground, every word that is spoken, every muscle twitch as Mary turns this way and that — is recorded. Geographically, everything takes place at the entrance to the tomb in a very tight spot, zoomed in close.
There’s lots we could say about this story. We could talk about the fact that this is the first time that someone meets Jesus alive in John’s Gospel. We could talk about the fact that the first witness to the resurrection was a woman, and that in ancient times the testimony of a woman was not admissible in a court of law — that seems hard to believe these days, but that was the culture — which therefore means it couldn’t have been an invented story, because if you were to make it up you would have put a more credible witness as the first person on the scene, not somebody that nobody would believe. We could talk about all those things, but rather than choose our own lessons to draw out of the story, let’s instead look closely at how John tells the story, because John is telling Mary Magdalene’s story for a reason. And the way he tells it, he’s wanting to tell us three things about Jesus, and they are all absolutely wonderful.
1. Jesus dealt with our sin
So here’s the first thing that John is telling us in the way he tells this story: Jesus dealt with our sin.
As I’ve studied this and looked at it this week, one question really bothered me: why are the angels here in the story? We don’t need the angels in the story. Compared to the other Gospel writers, John tells us less about the angels — in fact he leaves out what you might think are the really important things. The angels — the word ‘angel’ means ‘a messenger’ — the angels came with a message. The message the other Gospel writers record is this: ‘Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here; he has risen.’ Only John doesn’t even pass on the message the angels bring. So John, why, if you think the angels’ message is not important, do you think it is important still to tell us that the angels were there? Surely if you don’t need to tell us their message, they don’t actually play a part in the story.
In fact, if you were to work your way through the story and remove the angels, the message and flow of the story doesn’t really change very much, does it? Verse 11: ‘Now Mary stood outside the tomb crying. As she wept she bent over to look into the tomb and looked where Jesus’s body had been. She turned around and saw Jesus standing there, but did not realise that it was Jesus.’ It works quite well — you don’t need the angels.
In fact, if you want to illustrate how people have the instinct, as you read this story, that you don’t need the angels, just consider the two songs that I quoted a moment ago, and ask yourself what those songwriters think the angels are doing here.
At break of dawn poor Mary still weeping she came, when through her grief she heard your voice now speaking her name — they’ve skipped the angels completely.
See Mary weeping, where is he laid? As in sorrow she turns from the empty tomb — straight to: ‘Here’s a voice speaking, calling her name, it’s the master, the Lord, raised to life again.’ No angels.
So our instinct, as we really understand this story, is just to skip over the angels as if they’re not desperately important, and yet John seems to think they’re there. And if we took them out the passage would be about half the length we’ve got it, so they must be there for a reason.
So it bothered me: why are the angels here? And our job is to listen carefully to what is here, not to replace what’s here with what we think should be here — which is a story without any angels in it.
We are told two things about the angels. They were dressed in white — we’re not often told about people’s clothing and physical appearance in the Gospels, so that’s telling us quite deliberately that they are dazzlingly bright, glorious, heavenly beings. That’s one thing we’re told. The other thing we’re told is that there are two of these angels: one seated at the head, and the other at the foot.
Ask you a question: where else in the Bible do you find two dazzlingly bright heavenly beings seated at opposite ends of something? Have a think.
The answer is the Ark of the Covenant.
Now, just in case you have learned your Old Testament by watching Harrison Ford movies, let me just tell you a little bit about the Ark of the Covenant, because it may be that some of your ideas are a little warped. The Ark of the Covenant was a gold-covered box — about so long, about so wide, about so high — in which God was symbolically thought to live. It was placed in the innermost room of the temple, the Holy of Holies, to symbolise the fact that God was there. Nobody could look at that box; nobody could touch that box — they would die if they did, because God is so pure and holy. Jones got that bit right, at least.
On top of the box was a seat called either the atonement cover or the mercy seat. Once a year they had a special day called the annual Day of Atonement, when sacrifices were made for the sins of the people, and then the high priest would take the blood of those sacrifices into the holiest place and would apply the blood to that seat — to the atonement cover, to the mercy seat. Now, the very fact that that needed doing once a year proves that this whole sacrificial system was not actually dealing with sin, because next year it had to be done again. A permanent solution to sin still needed to be found — this was just symbolic. But nevertheless, it was symbolic of the fact that their sin was being dealt with by these sacrifices.
Let me give you two details about this atonement cover and about the Day of Atonement.
Number one: the cover had two cherubim on it — that is, a heavenly, angelic-type being; they’re not angels, they’re different, but heavenly beings — one at each end, overlaid in gold, with wings that arced round. Their two sets of wings touched each other high over the top of the seat.
Number two: when the high priest went into the holiest place to bring the blood of these sacrifices in, he had to wear special linen garments. And when he’d finished doing his work in the holiest place, he would take off the linen garments and leave them in the Holy of Holies, and leave without them. He was not allowed to leave the holiest place still wearing the linen garments — they had to be left behind.
Now, does any of that remind you of anything?
Here we have two angels — two heavenly beings in dazzling white — one at each end of where Jesus’s body has just been. And we have Jesus’s linen garments left behind in the tomb.
Jesus’s tomb has just become the Holy of Holies. Not because that’s where the sacrifice for sin was offered — that was actually offered at the cross, although if you remember, the Old Testament Day of Atonement sacrifices weren’t offered in the Holy of Holies either, they were offered outside — but because this is the place where Mary can come and see that the sacrifice for sin has been concluded. The ultimate Day of Atonement has taken place. The high priest’s linen garments have been left where they were, and the cherubim — the angels — are there to symbolise the fact that this is now the Holy of Holies.
As John records Mary Magdalene’s story, the first thing he wants to tell us is that Jesus has dealt with our sin.
2. Jesus has returned to the Father
The second thing John wants to tell us is: Jesus has returned to the Father.
This story has a somewhat unexpected ending, both in terms of what actually happens and in terms of the message that Jesus gives Mary to take to the other disciples.
Look at what actually happens. This is basically the story of Mary looking for Jesus — that’s the narrative energy driving the story. Mary is searching for Jesus. He is not in the tomb. ‘He’s not here — you’re the gardener — oh, he is you!’ Even though she thought he was the gardener, she turns around, she grabs hold of him, she’s got him back. Mission accomplished — Mary has found Jesus.
But the story is not over. Verse 17: ‘Do not hold on to me, for I have not yet ascended to the Father.’ Mary finds him — that should be the climax of the story — but instead she discovers that Jesus is just passing through on the way to heaven.
So there’s a surprise at the level of what happens. Then there’s a surprise at the level of the message that Mary has to give to the disciples.
Jesus says, ‘Do not hold on to me — go instead to my brothers and tell them…’ What? Now if I was writing this I would say, ‘Go and say to my brothers and tell them that I’m risen from the dead, that you have seen me, that if you go to Galilee they too will see me.’ That is not the message Mary is to give to the disciples. ‘Go instead and tell them I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’
The message is that Jesus is risen from the dead and is going to heaven. In fact, if Mary records this message verbatim — which she doesn’t, by the way; ‘I have seen the Lord’ — she can’t resist it. But if she just said the bit she was told to say, the disciples would not even know whether they were themselves going to see Jesus alive. All they would know is that Jesus is going to heaven, and briefly on the way through he paused to say hello to Mary. So they can believe it for themselves — they wouldn’t even know if they were going to see him.
Now this shouldn’t surprise us, because in John’s Gospel Jesus has always spoken of returning to his Father after his death. So for example in John chapter 17, Jesus prays to his Father the night before he dies and he says this: ‘I have brought you glory on earth by finishing the work you gave me to do. Now, Father, glorify me in your presence with the glory I had with you before the beginning of the world.’
Jesus was sent to this earth to do a job. He’s done the job, and he’s coming home.
It’s a little bit like — if you watch any film with a war theme, you know, maybe the RAF go out to fly some foreign mission, bomb somewhere, rescue someone, something like that — it’s always a bit nerve-wracking. You can’t sleep easy until you know that they’ve done the job on foreign soil. You rest easy when you know that they are safely landed on an airfield in England and the people who went out on that dangerous mission are safely back home.
And that is what Jesus has done. He’s come to this earth, he’s done the job he came to do, and the thing we’re all waiting for is that at the end of it all he’s returned home to his Father.
He did need to stop on earth briefly — for about forty days. Some people had to see him alive so that they could tell the rest of us; otherwise we would never know, because we can’t see him in heaven, so we’d never know that he’d actually made it back home. And because he had some final teaching to deliver that would only make sense having died and risen from the dead. So he did have to stop here briefly for forty days. But his resurrection is a resurrection not to earth, but back to heaven.
This makes sense of a song that was popular in churches about twenty years ago — Gillian probably knows it, some of you will know it — but it always puzzled me whenever we sang it. Here’s how it goes:
You came from heaven to earth to show the way, from the earth to the cross my debt to pay, from the cross to the grave, from the grave to the sky — Lord I lift your name on high.
Now I always wondered with that song: why from the cross to the grave, from the grave to the sky? Why not from the grave to the garden? Well, apart from the fact that ‘garden’ doesn’t rhyme with ‘high,’ theologically it’s right. If you read John 20, the resurrection is the grave to the sky, and the bit on earth is a temporary thing that had to be done.
We often ask the question: if Jesus is risen, why can I not see him? And the answer is because he didn’t rise to earth — he rose to go to heaven. The reason you can’t see him is that he’s not here. But he did stop briefly on earth so that some could see him, so that we can know that it’s real: he’s risen, and he made it home.
So there are two things about Jesus from John’s telling of Mary’s story: Jesus dealt with our sin; Jesus has returned to the Father.
3. Jesus adopts us into God’s family
And number three: Jesus adopts us into God’s family.
Jesus didn’t just deal with our sin so that we can be not guilty but otherwise no better off. He welcomes us to the family.
Remember all the way through John’s Gospel, the name by which Jesus refers to God is ‘the Father’ — God is the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. When Jesus says in John 17 that he has revealed God’s name to his disciples, the name he’s revealed is ‘Father.’
And now look at verse 17: ‘Do not hold on to me, for I have not yet ascended to…’ — what name? — ‘…the Father. Go instead to my brothers and tell them I am ascending to my Father and your Father.’ So the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ becomes our Father — and that makes Jesus our older brother. ‘To my God and your God’ — God becomes our God, the one who watches over us and takes care of us. We are family.
Conclusion
So aren’t you glad that John recorded Mary Magdalene’s story in such detail? What a wonderful Jesus we meet here — a Jesus who dealt with our sin, a Jesus who left his linen garments behind in the tomb, a Jesus who then returned home to his Father, mission accomplished, and who now stands to welcome all who put their trust in him into God’s family, into the community of those who are the objects of his love and care.