A great lesson from Mary Magdalene....
Many
a times we hear sayings like:" Where there is a woman there is magic",
“Behind every successful Man is a great Woman” and so on and so forth. Today I want
to believe that Jesus too understood the same and much clearer than we do, and
that is why he chose and gave Mary Magdalene the opportunity she got in life:
been forgiven, been an apostle of the apostles and been first to see the resurrected
Lord.
As
we celebrate the feast of Mary Magdalene today (July 22), and I would say, one
of the most important feasts in Christian life, we don't want to focus on so
many accounts as: she was a sinner, prostitute, but really on how come she
could not recognize Jesus at the tomb! In today’s account of the gospel (John
20:1-2, 11-18) we see that Mary Magdalene failed to recognize the Lord. Why did
she fail to see that the man talking to her was already the Lord?
I
see at least two reasons why she missed the presence of the Risen Christ
initially. First is because of her tears.
She was weeping and therefore she could not see very well because all her
energy, all her attention was focused on her weeping. Her eyes had blurred from
the tears, had swollen and so when the Lord came, she could no longer open them
wide. Isn’t that the same with us, my dear friends? If we carry lingering
doubts it may be because we still do not enjoy the Easter peace. We are not
enjoying the Easter joy because we still live in tears of complains and doubts.
Let us not live in the past. Let us not
miss the presence of the Lord because of our excessive sorrow, because of our
excessive sadness. Mary missed the Lord because of those tears.
The
second reason why Mary missed the presence of the Risen Lord was that she was
looking in the wrong direction. She was talking to the Lord but she was looking
at the tomb. That is why she missed
the Lord. Well, again, in a sense, that is the same with us. We miss the
presence of the Lord because we choose to look at the tombs of our past rather
than look at the Lord in the events of the moment. We may be focusing our
attention on the trauma of the past, of what we did in the past. Our gaze maybe
fixed on our failures, our abuses, and our sins of the past. We need to be
roused from our fixation on the tomb. The Lord was buried there but the Lord is
already risen. We are still looking at the past. We are still looking at the
tomb. And if we continue to do so, chances are, when the Lord comes, just like
Mary, we will not be able to see Him. The Lord is not in the past. The Lord is
in your present. The Lord is beside you, in front of you, behind you, on top of
you, under you, inside you. The Lord is there and we must look where the Lord
is. And then enjoy His presence.
Talk
to Mary during the moments of silence today and tell her, “Mary, you missed the presence of the Lord because you wept too much.
You missed the presence of the Lord because you were looking in the wrong
direction. You have taught me a lesson. I want to enjoy the Lord’s presence. I
will stop crying. I will be happy again. I want to enjoy the presence of the
Lord. I will not look at the tombs of the past. I will look at the Lord now."
The past is history, the future is unknown, and the present is a gift. Live the
present life with total joy, happiness, emotion, feelings, pleasure, dedication,
service, etc...And remember as Eric Fromm said: ''Mature love says, ‘I need you
because I love you.’ Immature love says, ‘'Love you because I need you.''
