Jesus said to her, "Stop
clinging to Me, for I have not yet ascended to the Father; but go to
My brethren and say to them, 'I ascend to My Father and
your Father, and My God and your God.'"
Mary Magdalene came, announcing to the disciples, "I
have seen the Lord," and that He had said these
things to her. (John 20:17-18)
As I ponder how Jesus might have felt
when He spoke these words to Mary, I can't help but wonder if He
didn't have a playful smile, almost like a child planning a surprise
to spring on someone he loves. Clearly He did not immediately reveal
Himself to Mary to relieve her sadness right away when she arrived.
It is almost as if He planned an elaborate setup with the nearby
angels to draw her into the place where He could spring the surprise
on her to create the greatest reaction.
What was His tone of voice? His facial
expressions? His body language? I am pretty sure it was not the
austere, somber tones that religion so often imposes onto our
perceptions of this event. Jesus had long taught His disciples that
we must become like a little child if we are to enter the kingdom He
had come to bring. That means that He too might have taken on the
flavor of how a child might act when conspiring to spring a surprise
on one of his siblings. I can see Jesus grinning with anticipation,
maybe even suppressing some giggles as He can hardly contain His
eagerness to see the shock of surprise one of his most loved friends
is about to experience.
Remember, the last time she handled His
feet she had been in a room full of skeptics who had been critical of
both her and Jesus. When that had occurred, she had felt humiliated
by nearly everyone except Jesus. But Jesus had stood up for her, had
publicly defended her; He had openly affirmed her passionate
expressions of affection for Him and had rescued her from her fears
and the shame that had been intended to wound her even more deeply.
Up to this point she had still been
afraid to really take hold His feet with the kind of passion she
really longed to express. It was true that she had been compelled by
her love to pour out her most expensive gift on His head and feet,
but as the foul spirit of criticism exploded in the room she had
again felt ashamed and began rushing to clumsily mop up the mess that
was fueling all the dirty, hateful looks from those around her.
Instead of enjoying a moment of intimate affection with Jesus as her
heart had so longed to do, she had been forced to settle for a quick
'kiss' so to speak. She had been compelled to draw back from what her
heart really longed for to try to find an exit from the deteriorating
situation that had been created by the cold reception she had
encountered from the other men in the room.
Last time she had looked at Jesus' feet
they were fresh from the wounds of being nailed to the cross, bloody,
distorted, and lifeless. She had watched in agony as the only man who
had ever really loved her died a mysteriously agonizing death caused
by something internal to Him that had sucked the very life out of His
soul in just a few short hours, much quicker than crucifixion would
normally have done. Maybe she had sensed, like few others could, that
it was partly the heavy weight of her own sins that He had removed
from her heart, that was now siphoning away the very life that had
done so much to deliver her from condemnation and death. Nothing
could effectively describe the feelings she must have experienced as
she watched Him suffer alone on the cross and finally say that it was
all finished.
I wonder if she had then wrestled all
weekend trying to piece it all together to figure out just what it
was that had been finished. Intense feelings of hopelessness
likely overwhelmed her time and again as she emptied her heart in
buckets of tears with no one able to console her effectively. Her
Savior and best friend had died – now what? She was such an
emotional person that looking for intellectual solace in the
Scriptures was probably not much of an option for her. And even if it
had been the confusion and incompleteness of everyone's understanding
of what Jesus was all about had prevented anyone from having much
idea of what was transpiring in these strange events.
Mary was the kind of person who
followed her heart almost transparently. Because of this she had been
exploited over and over as different people had seduced her into
trusting them only to exploit her trust and abuse her natural beauty
for their own pleasure. Then they would turn and publicly shame and
condemn her for what they had done to her.
But in sharp contrast to all of that,
the only real Friend who had ever given her hope, who had treated her
with utmost pity, tenderness, respect and had fearlessly stood up to
all the others in her defense was now suddenly absent from her life.
Did she feel abandoned? Betrayed? Forsaken? Her emotions and brain
could no longer sort things out; nothing fit together to make sense
any more. All she knew was that nothing could ever take the place of
this Man who had loved her so intensely, who had delivered her time
and again, who had brought hope into her life and had shown her true
love for the first time.
Now He had been falsely accused,
condemned, viciously treated and was now dead. Her heart must have
felt hopeless, afraid, alone, deserted, devastated. Yet she still
could not stop following her heart and so she found herself again
looking for her Jesus, her defender, her only real friend. Even
though He was dead, somehow there seemed to be nothing else to do but
to go back to be close to what was left of the only person who had
brought life and hope into her soul.
Yet now, after a string of very
confusing discoveries one right after the other that made no sense to
her, she found herself confronted by a stranger that she assumed
might be the culprit who had removed the body of her only true
friend. Maybe putting Jesus into a nearby tomb that was not His own
in their hurry to finish before Sabbath had violated yet another rule
that someone was going to enforce. Maybe they had taken Him to the
dump where the trash smoldered day and night where they put all the
other victims of crucifixion because they thought He did not deserve
a proper burial. In response to His question about who she was
searching for, she asked to please have access to His body so she
could do whatever she could to show how much she loved Him still.
Of course this was all a setup. This
encounter had been carefully planned and coordinated with the angels
in the nearby tomb. Jesus knew Mary's heart far better than even she
herself and arranged this whole sequence of events to strategically
poise her for the most intense reunion possible. Jesus knew the
intense pain that was driving Mary to search for His body, but I
think He wanted to create the optimum moment to enhance the intensity
of their joy when she finally caught sight of reality. He also did
not forget all the other hurting disciples who also needed comfort
and chose her as His witness to give them opportunity to engage in
the kind of faith that millions would need to experience in future
generations who would not have the same opportunity to see Him
physically like they did.
I ponder how each person in this story
related to their need to move into real belief as Jesus wanted them
to have. Ideally the optimal kind of belief would have been to
embrace the truth as had already been recorded by the prophets in
Scripture, not needing to see or touch Him in person in order to
believe. But no one was prepared to believe in Him on that basis at
this point, so Jesus had to go to whatever lengths necessary for each
person in order to induce living faith in their hearts. They then
could in turn become witnesses to encourage others to believe. In
these stories we find that each person had different levels of
evidence required to bring them into saving belief.
Belief as John constantly seeks
to show us in his writings, is not just a head knowledge, an assent
that some fact is true. It is a very dangerous assumption that far
too many people hold and teach today, that when the Bible speaks of
belief or faith, that all we need to do is to agree to some fact or
doctrine or creed. This is a counterfeit of true, saving faith as
presented in the Bible. Real faith/belief always involves a
relationship of trust that in turn not only results in actions in
harmony with it, but involves an inner healing of the soul. What the
disciples needed more than anything at that time was a belief that
could counteract the intense pain and fears they were feeling inside.
While it is true that they needed to believe certain facts about
Jesus in order to be 'saved', what they needed most was to be
restored to proper perceptions of what was real, who Jesus really was
and most of all how God felt about them. This is the kind of healing,
unifying, restorative kind of faith that saves us both now and for
eternity.
In Mary's situation, it appears that
even though her heart was more intensely emotionally attached to
Jesus than possibly anyone else, her need for evidence seemed to be
very high. The hints Jesus had provided along her way to encourage
belief were passed by, for her emotions had so blinded her ability to
think and reason that she could not fit it all together. Any person
who had followed Jesus for very long could have recalled the repeated
times He had spoken about His impending death on a cross, and she
seemed to have picked up on that previously. But He had also
mentioned more than once that He was going to rise again on the third
day. But that part seems to have become lost for all of them.
Interestingly, one of the main reasons
that had compelled Mary to anoint Jesus with her perfume was because
she was about the only person who had actually been paying attention
when Jesus spoke about these things. All the other disciples had been
very resistant to any such scenario because it clashed with
everything they had ever believed about the Jewish Messiah. They had
thus ignored these references and settled themselves in unbelief. But
Mary had been very alarmed by Jesus' references about a soon-coming
death and had decided to take Him seriously. That is why she had come
to anoint Him at the feast of Simon, and Jesus had affirmed that in
His response to her outpouring of affection at that time.
Now the foretold events had actually
taken place. The death He had spoken of that had compelled Mary to
anoint Him had just happened. All of Mary's worst fears seem to have
been realized – Jesus was gone out of her life. But she could have
not only recalled His words about His impending death but could also
have remembered that He had also spoken openly of His subsequent
resurrection from that death. Mary could have stopped to consider
carefully His past words and thus could have been strategically
poised to welcome His resurrection if she had chosen that option. But
even though she had accepted His warnings about His death, she had
overlooked those related admonitions to be conscious of the outcome
of these events and His promise to return to life.
In the amnesia produced by her emotions
dominating her awareness, Mary found herself looking for a dead body
that no longer existed. Jesus was now living in a new glorified body,
one like all will receive when the final glorious mass resurrection
occurs for all who choose to trust in the power of God's love. It was
love that brought Jesus to life and gave Him a glorious body, and
that same love will give all of us a similar body if we will accept
and believe in the truth about God that Jesus came to show us.
All of this chapter near the end of
John's gospel seems intent on drawing us into this kind of saving
faith. There are multiple references about our need to believe, just
as each person in this incredible story also needed to believe. And
while there were other stupendous issues involved in this event, the
need for each person to come into belief is central to the whole
story as John presents it. The question I have had for many years has
been, 'believe what?' It is not enough to just keep insisting that we
must believe. Belief is not an end in itself like it has all too
often been presented by religion. There always has to be an object
for belief to anchor itself on. Otherwise it turns into something
more like a magic spell in which we illogically engage in mental
gymnastics thinking that by doing so we can trigger some supernatural
effect that supercedes the natural principles of God's universe.
Much of what is promoted about saving
faith or belief today is more reflective of concepts of magic than
based on truth and reality. Yet this whole system of 'magical' faith
is actually a decoy in Satan's system, for it really displaces true
faith and even insulates those trusting in it from perceiving their
true need for the kind of transforming faith that can prepare them to
live in God's presence. This notion is Satan's response to the
glorious truth about God's love that Jesus revealed in His death and
resurrection. In the intervening centuries Satan has masked over and
diluted the potent power of the gospel by replacing it with a
counterfeit gospel that now infects nearly every presentation about
the cross and the resurrection. What is referred to today as faith is
a very different thing from what Mary and John and Peter and all the
others experienced as they came to believe in what Jesus had come to
show them.
While it was very important that Mary
needed to come to believe that Jesus was alive and not still dead,
that was not the only thing her faith needed to grasp. Yes, she
needed to begin with that, but as that seed of faith would begin to
mature inside her heart, she needed to see how all the other pieces
fit together as she began to grasp the much larger picture of why
Jesus had come to live and die and raise Himself up again. Without
this bigger context coming into view, these events become just
disconnected pieces used to promote confusing views of God like what
we see all around us today.
The core issue of salvation does not
involve some supposed appeasement of an offended deity by the
shedding of the blood of an innocent victim. That is the counterfeit
scenario promoted by religion today and directly descended from
ancient Baal worship. Rather, what we must begin to grasp in these
stories is the central issue of our need for a restored relationship
that has been ruptured by myriads of lies promoted by God's enemy to
keep us afraid of Him, distrustful of His intentions towards us. This
fear of God actually puts us in grave danger of being consumed by the
very love meant to bring us life.
The great tragedy in the distortions of
the real gospel by counterfeit gospels so many now have embraced is
that they continue to promote the very attitudes of distrust about
the heart of God that brought about the death of Jesus in the first
place. Jesus was crucified by men defending what they believed was
God's truth. Yet it was for the purpose of reconciliation that God
sent Jesus to this earth, to make it plain to everyone that our
problem with sin has nothing to do with how God feels about us but
rather has everything to do with how we feel about God rooted in what
we believe about Him.
Each person involved in this story of
the resurrection had many false ideas and beliefs embedded in their
heart and mind about how God felt about them. In each instance, God
worked to convince each one, but designed to address their uniqueness
in order to attract them to begin seeing God radically different than
they had previously thought about Him before. The whole purpose of
Jesus coming to this earth was to change all of our thinking about
how God feels towards us as sinners. It was not to take some beating
that God intended to inflict on us that Jesus came to die; rather it
was to explicitly demonstrate under most severe conditions and
treatment that it is sin that behind violence, not God.
Mary had lived all her life under
similar delusions that permeated most of the religious culture of her
day. God had been presented as being harsh, severe, exacting and
waiting to harshly punish all infractions of His demands. In
addition, she had experienced in her own life repeated exploitation,
betrayal, shame and condemnation from the very people who claimed to
represent God as His authority on earth. Mary's heart had been
severely wounded by many lies about God that had been used to justify
violence committed against her, so she needed the revelations of God
by Jesus at least as much as anyone else. Wandering about in a
graveyard in the darkness of the early morning that day, she was
still looking for love just as the whole world has been looking for
it since Adam and Eve.
It was in this context that Jesus was
planning the surprise of a lifetime for her. She had passed up sign
after sign like billboards marking out hints of life, failing each
time to comprehend the truth that each one pointed to. But at each
point along her way, Jesus was preparing her for the moment when her
sorrow would be instantly transformed into irrepressible joy that
could never be taken away from her again. She would come to see that
not only did Jesus love her with an irrepressible, passionate love
that would never stop, but more importantly God in heaven felt
exactly the same about her as did Jesus.
It might be easy to dwell at length on
the intensity of the emotional reaction that Mary felt when it
finally soaked in that this man in front of her was actually Jesus
and not just some stranger/garden caretaker. It is important to soak
in this glorious moment with Mary and let our imagination marinate in
the flavors of Jesus' presence. But we must go even farther if we
want to enter into the kind of belief that John intended for us to
find in this story. It is not enough to simply believe that Jesus
rose from the dead, for indeed this level of belief can leave us
vulnerable to the lies of the enemy that have since that time blinded
the world to the real significance of the resurrection.. What Jesus
wanted Mary to come to experience and pass on to others was embedded
in words that we often skim over in this passage.
I ascend to My Father and
your Father, and My God and your God.
No doubt Mary had every reason to be
delirious with joy when she was reunited with the One who had done so
much to save her from all the evil she had experienced. But Jesus was
eager to move her to a deeper level of intimacy with Him by assuring
her that His Father was also her Father; that His God was the same as
her God. The whole reason Jesus came to this world was to reveal the
real truth about His Father, and if we overlook this central truth we
will not be able to enter into the deeper kind of belief urged
throughout the entire gospel of John.
This statement to Mary must have had
enormous emotional significance, for there is evidence that Mary
likely had been orphaned possibly early on in her life. Living in a
home with her brother Lazarus and sister Martha with no parents, she
had possibly become an easy target for exploitation by male relatives
seeking to replace her father. The natural effects of sexual abuse
are shame, condemnation and humiliation which seriously compromise
feelings about men in general and especially men purporting to act as
father figures. With no loving father of her own and anyone
pretending to love her, only to take advantage of her for their own
selfish pleasure, her concepts and feelings about father figures
would have been far less than affectionate or endearing.
This is one of Satan' strategies, to so
darken our perceptions of the true meaning of a father that we react
in fear rather than affection when we are told that God is our true
Father. I wouldn't be surprised if Jesus didn't wait until this point
in time before bringing up this issue of God as Father to Mary. In
addition to all the abuse she had suffered, it is also normal for a
young person to experience strong feelings of abandonment whenever a
father dies prematurely, even though it is not really true. They can
then develop resistance to bonding with other men because intuitively
they are afraid that they will be abandoned by them as well.
Mary had finally come to allow her
heart to become deeply attached to Jesus, the only man she had ever
met who was really worthy of her trust. This is exactly what God
desires for all of us. Yet after publicly risking her heart by
displaying her deepest affections to Him in public, He too had soon
after died and was no longer around to love her, reminding her of
what had happened with her own father some years previous. This
reminder of early and intense feelings of abandonment may have played
strongly into Mary's reactions during these events surrounding Jesus'
death, and it may also help explain why Jesus wanted to explicitly
assure her, along with all His other friends, that they all had a
common Father who would never abandon them.
Jesus was demonstrating that He was
stronger than even death itself and that He was now strategically
positioned as a fellow human in such a way that all humanity could
rely on Him to deliver them from death as well as view God with new
eyes. Everyone could now see Him as their brother as well as
perceiving and relating to God as their ultimate Father that we all
have been desperately longing for.
Jesus accomplished what was mirrored in
the story of Ruth when she and her mother-in-law lost all the
important men in their lives. By becoming a brother to us and
reconnecting us with our heavenly far who will never abandon us, even
in death, Jesus demonstrates the attitude revealed in the words of
Ruth, that great example of love from the Old Testament.
But Ruth said, "Do not urge me
to leave you or turn back from following you; for where you go, I
will go, and where you lodge, I will lodge. Your people
shall be my people, and your God, my God."
(Ruth 1:16)
In the story of Ruth and Naomi, it is
very clear that what was most important were the bonds of love and
relationship between them, not any artificial relationship based on
rules or demands. Thus we must also come to see Jesus, for He did not
come to show us how to keep rules better in order to make God happy
with us, but rather He demonstrated how to live in such intimate
connection with His Father that His life naturally revealed what love
looks like in relation to everyone around Him. Now He offers that
same relationship to everyone willing to believe in what He revealed
about the love of God for each of us.
Mary, like Thomas, seemed to need an
extended amount of evidence in order to bring her to believe more
deeply in Jesus at this point. It has been pointed out that even
though Thomas had his doubts and stubborn streak, he was still the
first disciple to ever confess that Jesus was his own God. I find
that significant parallel to what Jesus says to Mary.
It is vital that we embrace the reality
that God really is our Father and that Jesus wants us to consider Him
as our brother while all of heaven longs for us to see ourselves as
family. We are not just subjects involved in an impersonal political
relationship to others like our governments operate here; we must
begin to appreciate the importance of knowing that God is the only
source of hope and life and love that exists anywhere. Not only is
God and heaven our true family but this is the only option for
embracing eternal life with all the richness and joy we were meant to
experience from the beginning.
Bonding and intimacy with God is the
whole point of a true relationship with Him and is His greatest
desire for us. Religion has far too long misled us into thinking that
what God wants is compliance and blind obedience to His demands. But
Jesus made it clear to the disciples early on that He longs to take
us far past the mindset of a servant or slave into a relationship of
intimate friendship, a relationship of living like family. While it
is true that in a healthy, loving family there will be
synchronization with the way things are done in that family, the
motives for loving cooperation have nothing in common with forced
obedience, sullen submission or unthinking obedience to the desires
of the parents. Rather, when true love is the motivation behind every
action, it becomes a joy to live in interaction with wise, caring
parents who have only the best interests of the children at heart in
every situation. This is the kind of relationship God desires for all
of us to have, both in our own families here on earth but especially
in our connection to the family of heaven.
For I know the plans I have for
you," declares the LORD, "plans to prosper you and not to
harm you, plans to give you hope and a future." (Jeremiah
29:11 NIV)
So I see in these carefully chosen
words of Jesus to Mary an invitation to alter what each of us thinks
and feels about both Jesus and His Father. To live in the family
relationship Jesus talked about so often as the model of the kingdom
He was setting up, He urges everyone to turn away from the
misapprehensions about Him that have so poisoned our hearts so we can
begin to enter into joyful trust in our real Father. He is eager to
provide for all of our needs and longs to transform us with His
unfailing love that heals us and restores us to the original design
He had in mind when He created us.
Likely other disciples may also have
had triggers from unfortunate history related to what the idea of
father meant to them. This relationship is so often damaged by the
malfunctions of our earthly fathers, myself included. For most of my
life I have struggled with fears and distortions and deep resistance
to love because of the weaknesses of my own father and the mistaken
notions he had about how to raise a child. Inevitably my feelings
about God were largely shaped by the experience of how my father
treated me. Now any assertion that God is my Father has to confront
all the reactions and triggers associated with the dysfunctions in my
heart received from my earthly father.
So I too need to embrace healing from
these words of Jesus to Mary and experience more healing in my own
heart as well. I know that I need much remediation in the area of
what a father is supposed to look like and act and feel towards his
children. My own children are infected with similar fears and
triggers about the concept of father as I received, for sadly I
passed on a great deal of the negativity I received from my father in
his misrepresentation of God. But that is what God's grace is all
about, right? ... but where sin increased, grace abounded all the
more. (Romans 5:20)
Jesus came to so identify with the
human race that He could challenge their mistaken ideas about their
identity coming from the character of Satan. By usurping the dominion
of this world from Adam, Satan immediately infected humanity's sense
of identity to reflect his false principles and attitudes. Now Jesus
brings to us a new awareness of our true identity, for now all
humanity is now 'in Christ'. For Christ did not die just for all who
might believe in Him but for the whole world.
For while we were still helpless,
at the right time Christ died for the ungodly.
But God demonstrates His own love
toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.
For if while we were
enemies we were reconciled to God through the death of His
Son, much more, having been reconciled, we shall be saved by His
life. (Romans 5:6, 8, 10)
For to this end Christ died and
lived again, that He might be Lord both of the dead and of
the living. (Romans 14:9)
For as in Adam all die, so also in
Christ all will be made alive. (1 Corinthians 15:22)
Christ displaced Satan as the
representative of this world in the heavenly councils and when He
encountered Mary just after His resurrection He was on His way to
heaven to confirm that this transition would be accepted. But because
His deep compassion and love and tenderness, He postponed His own
desires to wait and reveal Himself to His distraught Mary and then
send her off joyfully to become His first ordained apostle to
announce His victory over Satan's system, His new kingdom of family
where all are welcomed to live in the healing, transforming
atmosphere of His irrepressible love.
When we embrace the reality that Christ
embraced all of us whether or not we believe it, our very belief
moves us into a far deeper level of being 'in Christ' where the
transformation really begins to happen. This is why John is so urgent
to help us to move into the saving kind of belief that the disciples
experienced along with Mary. It is the saving faith in a God who
loves unconditionally before we even know Him or even like Him. It is
the faith that responds to encountering His love by reflecting it
more and more in all of our relationships to those around us.
Therefore if anyone is in Christ, he
is a new creature; the old things passed away; behold, new things
have come. Now all these things are from God, who reconciled us to
Himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation,
namely, that God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself, not
counting their trespasses against them, and He has committed to us
the word of reconciliation. Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ,
as though God were making an appeal through us; we beg you on behalf
of Christ, be reconciled to God. (2 Corinthians 5:17-20)
No comments:
Post a Comment
Thank-you for leaving a comment. Let me know how you feel about what you are reading. This is where I share my personal thoughts and feelings about whatever I am studying in the Word at this time and I relish your input.