(Contemplative time spent with John 20)
Mary jerks awake in the dark moments before dawn and rubs her eyes. It takes her brain a second to clue in to what woke her, but then it hits her, and I watch her whole body stiffen – the memory of Jesus’ death pummelling her, again. It’s the third day she’s woken like this. My chest tightens with hers in that breathless squeeze of renewed loss. It’s new for her; it’s old for me.
But the both of us miss him right now. The two of us hurry out into the dew-drenched air. I follow behind her on tiptoes, like a shadow, as she leaves the house; not wanting to admit how envious I am of what she’s going to find out.
There’s nothing to do, no task to make things better – but she needs to be close to him anyway, even if he’s not really there. Me too, I think, yearning – my heart like a boulder in my chest. She needs to check on the tomb. Me, too. I need proof he’s really there. I need a reminder that he lived. Even if I’ve been feeling lately like he just died and left the world to limp along alone. Her breath is catching a bit, in her need to arrive at his feet, her eyes wet.
My eyes are dry. I feel the ache so deep in my bones that I cannot express it and I’m feeling left out. Like an envious interloper on Mary’s story. Like I’m insignificant to him. Just a human in the mass. What was it Solomon said? I have seen all the things that are done under the sun; all of them are meaningless, a chasing after the wind. – eccl.1:14
Or… if I’m being really honest… I’ve really been feeling like he’s not real.
Like he’s not the love I was convinced he was. Like I made him up. And boxed him into my infantile understanding of fantasy. I’m almost convinced at this point by the sophisticated, accusatory and logical questions I’ve heard both in my brain and from the world around me.
But that thought opens up a crack into the abyss, and if I let myself look in there for too long I will break apart piece by piece until there’s nothing left of me.
These past few weeks have inched by in tiny increments of boredom, grief over broken relationships, and that instinctive need I have to forget him after what feels like awakening to a world he doesn’t really exist in. Doesn’t have power to fix. Left to us to deal with. I’m trying to forget I need him like I need my heart to beat. I’ve been trying to soothe myself with other pursuits that are so much easier and more accessible.
Have you noticed how often we have conversations about God as if God’s not in the room with us wishing to be part of the conversation?
This is one of my deepest heartaches. It follows me all day long when it happens. Like a toothache. That I can talk about Jesus in a group and forget he’s there beside me, shoulder pressed against mine, leaning in and listening.
Lately I’ve listened to too many intellectual words – even though they’re impassioned ones – on memes and pithy reels with eye-catching phrases; as if God is a collection of facts; a pile of characteristics; a theoretical model or system; and if I’m not careful (I haven’t been) I absorb them in ways that make me forget Jesus is my Person.
My person who Carefully frees me from my endless cages, all while holding my heart safe. My person who holds the truth of who I am in his heart whenever our gazes meet. I forget that we are in a relationship and that I do best when I get a hug from him every morning and night and sometimes a long talk in the afternoon over coffee about Beauty and Good.
I’ve hovered at the edge of difficult history discussions and scriptural studies that lecture what this or that means and how to interpret a reality with God in it…
All while keeping my eye glued to the peephole of humanity that feels so sharp and angry and tragically alone. Full of rape and war and self-righteous voices calling for punishment against the abuser in a way that perpetuates the cycle.
We finally reach the tomb after what feels like an eternity of wrestling with Jesus’ death – her in real time and me in a twisted perception of spiritual truth … and that’s when Mary notices the stone has been rolled away.
Adrenaline courses through her and she rushes to look inside. She’s remembering Lazarus and she’s trying not to jump to conclusions even though she already has.
I think it’s what’s drawn her here every morning. That little bit of fantasy that he might rise.
That fantasy is what pulls me into a hunt for him every day, too. I don’t want to take his place in the world – to be his ambassador as if he can now be an absentee ruler and I’m his proxy. I want to find him there around every corner, risen, living, rolling up his sleeves and showing me his magic wonder that looks at first glance like normalcy; mossy logs, ocean tides, and sunrises. I want him to do life with me at my side, holding me safe, teaching me how to love from the safety of being loved fiercely by him.
I pull myself out of my yearning and see that Mary has found the tomb is empty and dark, and now she’s frantic. Would the Romans or the Pharisees have come to steal his body – hide it or make a mockery of it?
My heart squeezes tight in despair with her – how often do we make a mockery of him now? Christians with their too spiritual words and bible quotes, pat answers and loud prayers; Christians who make people who don’t know Jesus yet sure they don’t want to…
… see how my heart has filled with judgement at us? All because I am looking at a world where he is dead and we are the dregs of him.
Mary runs back to wake the men.
Every time I’ve started to reach for him these past weeks, I’ve heard this accusation in my head that I’m just trying to manufacture him – that I’m writing to dredge up a fake encounter, while the inside of me is faithless and empty. And I don’t want to make something up that’s false. I want the real deal.
I want him. My Jesus.
I want his arms to scoop me up suddenly and take my breath away with his closeness and his teasing me that I take things too seriously. With his bear hug and his admonishing that I’m supposed to remember he never leaves my side – not ever.
I’m like a two year old stamping my foot, wanting him to reach for me first. Sitting on the floor wailing when he doesn’t.
I think Mary’s on the edge too; I think both of us are wailing: Where is he? Why can’t he see I need him? Why can’t he fix this world of suffering?
I wait for Mary to come back…
… and out of the corner of my eye I watch the stranger I can see in the semi-dark, kneeling by some lilies, seemingly caught up in the beauty. He almost looks like someone who works here.
My heart thuds. Something pings in the back of my thoughts at his presence there. But I don’t approach him, I just watch his silhouette, wary and wishing. Feeling like I don’t have the right to intrude. Resentful that Mary gets this moment and not I.
Mary and the men are back, their voices a jumble of panic behind me as they discover the empty tomb and the men race away to figure out what’s going on and how to fix it.
Mary doesn’t leave though, she stands there behind me, staring at that dark hole, the seemingly desecrated space of the holy, gulping sobs as she faces the emptiness.
She bends down to look closer through her tears, and sees two angels, sitting one at the foot and one at the head of where Jesus’s body should be.
They speak first; asking her why she’s weeping.
“They have taken my Lord away and I don’t know where they’ve placed him.” She answers through her sobs. I look at her, eyebrow raised. Doesn’t her brain clue into… hello, angels? Supernatural beings of power?
But she’s so focused on Jesus she doesn’t care about power.
I feel the keening in her soul echo in mine. So often I don’t know where he is. I struggle to hang on to the spiritual reality of him in the chaos – let people – or more often my own perceptions “take” him away by listening to the dark and the despair and feeding it.
I read a meme yesterday that said something about how Jesus was just a footnote to Christians in the battle against sin – how sin always wins and still is winning in the world even if they wish Jesus had fixed something.
The words pierced me, because I believe them sometimes. Maybe most of the time. I live like sin/pain/all the ways we hurt each other and ourselves, is more powerful than Jesus/God/ Love… more often than not. Afraid of it. Despairing of us.
The man Mary doesn’t notice yet, rises from the lilies, after gently tracing a petal, and steps towards us.
“Woman,” he says, all formal and strange, “why are you weeping? Who do you seek?”
Mary turns and sees him through her tears, and like me she thinks he’s a gardener – or the garden warden. Is it because he is dressed simply? Is it because his hands are rough and dirty? What does she see that makes her brain link garden to his figure?
There is something tugging in the back of my brain. Some connection that I can’t quite pinpoint. It won’t let me fully enter this moment with Mary. I can’t feel him close through her encounter.
It destroys me. Makes the abyss creep a little closer. Why did I come into this story if not to be reassured like Mary is about to be?
My brain insists; Why does he look like a gardener?
“If you took him, tell me where he lays and I will take him away.” She says, half accusing, half pleading with him. Desperate. The way we get with him when we’re trying to bargain with an angry judge. A stranger we can’t bend to our will but want to.
“Mary.” He says.
In that voice of his; rough and gentle with just a hint of teasing. The one that demolishes doubt and loneliness.
And she knows – she knows instantly who he is – and she cries out and reaches for him. I stand there watching the two of them talk, as he warns her she can’t hold onto him yet – that he’s in the middle of returning to his dad still.
Tears stream down my face, I am so, so lonely for him. I have been so tired of fighting doubt. So lost at the thought of accepting a world where he doesn’t exist.
I want that, I think. My whole heart yearns for that voice to speak my name in such a familiar way that I know I am known and loved. That voice that rescues me from my defeat over him being real.
But instead I am distracted by this connection my brain wants to follow between the gardener and Jesus.
I read this verse in John 15 not too long ago when Jesus talks about his dad – how God is the gardener – or in the Greek, “land/earth-worker.” Something about that image stuck with me, maybe because my grandpa and my dad were both farmers.
It pops into my brain, then.
Did Jesus resemble his dad to Mary?
Did he look more obviously like Yahweh now that he’d conquered death? Is that why Mary subconsciously jumped to the gardener – because Jesus resembled the Creator who works the soil of the earth?
Does the authority of a King like Yahweh look like a farmer, a land worker, a gardener? Someone clothed simply, with work-roughened hands. Someone gentle with patience, with endurance. Someone carrying the quiet knowledge of what the soil needs; how to tend each plant…
There’s something in there that comforts me a little. That makes my doubts pause, pushes back the abyss. I like the thought of Yahweh as a gardener. And I like the idea that Jesus is starting to look like his dad.
All of a sudden, as I imagine gardens and gardeners, I am transported to the garden of Eden and I land smack inside Jesus’s hug. I can tell Yahweh, and Holy Spirit are here too.
I am surrounded.
I don’t know if it makes sense – encounters with him don’t always; but there’s always a second where doubt steps back and belief clicks on. It’s a simple switch that’s hard to find sometimes.
The truth that he doesn’t want me to fix the world all by myself (or even fix me by myself) sits clear in my mind – as if he put it there and is laughing at me (just a little) for thinking he would.
And if Jesus reassembled his dad even more after he conquered death… it tells me relationship matters to him. And if a King-like gardener can stop in the middle of his way home just to soothe Mary, then he’s someone worth trusting when nothing seems to make sense.
It sends a such an immense wave of relief through me that I melt… and all of a sudden I can feel the texture of Jesus’ shirt as my face presses against his chest. I can feel my arms already wrapped around his torso while his rest on-top of mine. He is squeezing me tight, chasing away my loneliness, wordlessly telling me I am safe in his love.
And that is when I hear his voice; a teasing voice, a gentle voice; a whisper deep in my heart that I recognize instantly…
“Kerri.”
I forgot. I always forget.
Until he pulls me back to his hug.
Until I let him take the hammer of control and worry from my hand that I thought would help me beat the world and myself into perfect shape.
Do you hear it yet? Do you hear your name?
