By Christopher Jobson.
In the Easter services we are called to ‘remember’ anamnesis which means ‘calling to mind’, a phrase at the very heart of the central act of Christian Worship. At the Last Supper Jesus said to his disciples ‘Do this in remembrance of me’. Remembrance therefore is a deeply Christian thing. The dying thief on the cross said to Jesus ‘Remember me when you come into your Kingdom’ – he asked to be remembered. To which Jesus replied, ‘today you will be with me in paradise’. That is the one and only time that the word ‘paradise’ was used by Jesus and the word means, ‘a beautiful garden’. It’s a word that pious Jews of Jesus’ time would understand to mean, ‘the garden of Eden’, the garden of Creation and perfection. But there was also a serpent in that garden and that serpent brought death into the world.
It was also true in another garden on the night before the Crucifixion, the Garden of Gethsemane, that same serpent was also active in the form of Judas who betrayed Jesus. As we read the account of Gethsemane we are once again reading the story of the Garden of Eden.
The death of Christ on the Cross for many might seem like the end of the story but, at Easter, we enter a third garden, the garden in which was the sepulchre in which the body of Jesus had been placed on the night of Good Friday by faithful Joseph and Nicodemus. Now we move from the garden of betrayal to a garden wherein ‘love is stronger than death’. Early in the morning, ‘on the first day’, the day that began the week and that had begun creation at the very start, Mary Magdalen came to the tomb; she found it empty. She ran to tell Peter and John. They came to the tomb in turn. Peter entered first and John gives us a precise description of the grave clothes he found there and he tells us very carefully that ‘they saw and believed’. They see the tomb empty and could describe it in detail and they go home. That is not the end of the story. One figure remains outside the tomb,
Mary stood at the tomb, outside it, weeping. As she wept, she stooped down….and she sees two angels, in white, sitting where the body of Jesus had lain….one where his head had been on one where his feet.
The first readers of John’s Gospel would see in this something lost on us in the 21st century – they would have seen the empty holy of holies adorned with the cherubim.
That could be the end but it’s not – it’s dawn and the light is rising. It recalls how in the beginning God said ‘Let there be light’ and the light John told us in the opening of his Gospel shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it. Mary overcome with grief, weeping bitterly, her eyes blinded with tears fails to recognise Jesus at first and when she does she longs to touch Him, to reach out to him as the human presence that she loved and missed so much. It’s a scene that practically every bereaved person can identify with. The risen Jesus will appear to His disciples later; those knowing disciples have checked the evidence, believed, and left. But it is not to them that Jesus first appears. It is to the grieving Mary. But at first she does not recognise Him through her tears and mistook Him for the gardener. Jesus calls her by her name ‘Mary’ and she responds ‘Rabboni’ (St John has carefully preserved the actual Aramaic word) which means ‘my teacher’. In that inconsolable weeping is the voice of love.
In Church we are in the presence of Christ, in that garden of love. Like Mary we are sad and bereaved and, like Mary, we cannot touch. But our lighted candles are the visible reminder of the uncreated light of paradise. Here in this garden Our Lord is in our midst and we too say ‘Rabboni-my teacher’. It is here in church on Easter morning and at every Eucharist that we greet Our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament of bread and wine.
Christopher Jobson
Feature Image: Mary_Magdalene_at_the_tomb,with_two_angels.jpg, Wkicommons, PD