The View Up Here: "I have called you by name: you are mine."

On the first day of week, after Jesus had been crucified and laid in a tomb, Mary Magdalene arrives early, before dawn, to the tomb where he lay. She finds the stone of the tomb entrance rolled away, the blessed body of her Rabbi gone. She is distraught. She runs and tells Peter and John. They come back to the tomb with her and verify that it is, indeed, empty. Then they go away. But Mary, she stays. She stays and weeps.

I completely understand this. When my mother died, I didn't want to be apart from her, even at the funeral home, where I stood next to the casket the entire time, even at the grave, when I didn't want to leave after the service was over. I wanted to stay and be still, to mourn and cry, and to be near her. There is something visceral about this experience, when the connection to the deceased is so strong that separation feels like an impossibility, and there is a sense of massive disorientation, like this person isn't truly gone, somehow.

Mary turns around from the mouth of the tomb, and there he is, standing there, her Master. But she doesn't recognize him. Until he says her name. Then she hears, she sees, she realizes, she believes. She believes: he is alive! Risen! Her joy is so intense, her relief so deep! Can you imagine?

The thing that catches my breath every time I read this passage is that it is only when Jesus says her name that she is carried over from her grief, despair and darkness (as the text tells us, she arrives while it is still dark) to the knowledge of the new Life that stands before her, that will Live within her from that day forward.

illustration by James Jacque Joseph Tissot
http://www.globible.com/gallery/easter/34.php

The year before I moved to L.A., Yeshua was calling my name. I ignored him at the time, of course, but now I look back and laugh, because he wasn't very subtle, and he definitely wasn't giving up on me. The first time was just before Easter of 2011. I was in a parking lot of a TJ Maxx with my friend. It had been raining (of course it had been raining; when is it not raining in Ithaca in April?), and I parked in front of a lamp post. On the base of the lamp post was a little black Bible. Clearly, it had fallen out of someone's purse or pocket, and clearly, someone else had picked it up off the ground and set it on the lamp post. And there it was, waiting for me. My friend saw it and said to me, "Hey, look, it's a Bible." Then she, a non-Christian, looked me in the eye and said, "I think you need to take this." So I did. I put it in my purse and carried on with my day.

Fast forward to December of 2011. A couple weeks before Christmas, less than a month before I was set to move to L.A. I decided to go see the movie Soul Surfer by myself. Loved the book, was psyched to see some girl surfers on the big screen. It also happens to be a story of spiritual renewal. So on my way into the theatre, hunched down into my coat (my normal posture for winter in Ithaca), I spied on the ground...a crucifix. One of those that someone carries in their purse or pocket that says "In case of emergency, call a priest." Obviously, it had been lying there some time and had been run over; it was flattened out completely. Well, I couldn't just leave it there on the ground! I picked it up, put it in my purse, and carried on with my day.

But as I did, I could tell, I could feel a sort of...I dunno...mystical tapping on the shoulder. "I'm right here," he whispered to me. Of course, it wasn't until after I moved to L.A. that things started to get REALLY interesting.

Is God calling your name? Is Jesus beckoning you to see, hear, and believe in him, against all odds, like he did Mary Magdalene, like he did me?

JN 20: 11- 18

Mary Magdalene stayed outside the tomb weeping.
And as she wept, she bent over into the tomb
and saw two angels in white sitting there,
one at the head and one at the feet
where the Body of Jesus had been.
And they said to her, “Woman, why are you weeping?”
She said to them, “They have taken my Lord,
and I don’t know where they laid him.”
When she had said this, she turned around and saw Jesus there,
but did not know it was Jesus.
Jesus said to her, “Woman, why are you weeping?
Whom are you looking for?”
She thought it was the gardener and said to him,
“Sir, if you carried him away,
tell me where you laid him,
and I will take him.”
Jesus said to her, “Mary!”
She turned and said to him in Hebrew, “Rabbouni,”
which means Teacher.
Jesus said to her, “Stop holding on to me,
for I have not yet ascended to the Father.
But go to my brothers and tell them,
‘I am going to my Father and your Father,
to my God and your God.’”
Mary went and announced to the disciples,
“I have seen the Lord,”
and then reported what he had told her.