“Incredible glimpses”
By Rev. Michael Stonhouse
Meditation – Sunday, April 20, 2025
John 20:1-18 (Forward, p. 81) CEV p. 1129
To me, this brief account of happenings on that first Easter Sunday morning has all the marks of authenticity: the fright and fears of Mary Magdalene and her assumption that someone had stolen her Lord’s body, the footrace between Peter and John, their report of the grave clothes, and Mary’s encounter with Jesus. To me, they have all the marks of authenticity, of truthfulness in their telling.
However, there are two other details that would point me in this direction. One is the utter hard-headedness of those two disciples, Peter and John. We are told that at that time they ‘did not know that the Scriptures said Jesus would rise to life” (verse 9). And so where had they been all through those many weeks when Jesus had predicted His arrest, death and rising again to life? Undoubtedly, they were rather ‘dense’. Anyway, this account hardly puts them in a positive light, not at all. One would think that someone ‘doctoring’ this account would have made them come across better, especially given that they were among the future leaders of the church. But, no, the gospel writer merely told it was it was, warts and all.
The other detail that surely would have been edited out was that a woman, Mary Magdalene, was the first person to actually see and interact with Jesus! And, what is ‘worse’ (or more astounding in the male-oriented world of that day), is that Jesus commissioned her to go and tell the others. This, in a world that did not accept the unsupported testimony of a woman in a court of law! So, surely, an evangelist trying to undergird the reliability of his account would have glossed over this somehow. But he didn’t—because it was true. And so here we have it, the unvarnished, undoctored, literal truth. This is what happened that first Easter Sunday morning. What an incredible glimpse, of the glory and power of Almighty God. Thanks be to Him forever. Amen.
Forward notes: “Jesus said to her, ‘Mary!’” (verse 16a).
“Alleluia. Christ is risen! The Lord is risen indeed.
“And so, we begin this glorious day of Resurrection. t is fitting to reflect on the very moment when Jesus ‘sees’ Mary in the garden. As Kallistos Ware, a bishop in the Eastern Orthodox Church, once said, ‘To address someone by name is to render that person present.’ In the despair of grief, Mary encounters Jesus: she recognizes him, and she is recognized. Emboldened by love, she goes back to the place of death and in the fresh trauma of its emptiness, she encounters the risen Christ.
“We, like Mary, long to be known, to be seen. As we begin this season of Resurrection, may we offer our full selves to the risen Christ. Like Mary, perhaps when we weep and stoop and look into the painful places in our lives, we too will find angels.”
Moving Forward: “Where do you need to look to see the resurrected Christ?”