From
Monsignor Charles Pope:
Mary Magdalene makes a journey in this passage from fear to faith. Let’s prayerfully examine her journey of faith.
I. Her Fearful Fretting –
Mary Magdalene is looking for a corpse. She’d come out to the tomb that
morning for one purpose: to finish the prescribed burial customs for
Jesus. His body had been placed in the tomb hurriedly on Friday evening,
for it was almost sundown and the Passover feast was near. Now the
Passover and Sabbath were complete; it was time to anoint the body and
finish all the usual customs.
On Friday, Mary had been through immense trauma,
seeing her beloved Jesus, her Messiah, brutally tortured and slowly
killed through crucifixion. It seemed as if things could not possibly
get worse, yet they just did. It would appear, according to her, that
grave robbers had broken in and stolen the body. Strangely, they had
left the expensive linens behind. But never mind that, things were now a
total disaster. Now it would seem that she could not even perform a
final kindness for Jesus.
Because of her fearful fretting, Mary is not able to look at the information before her properly.
Jesus had promised to rise from the dead, on the third day, and this
was the third day. The empty tomb does not signify grave robbers; it
manifests resurrection! In her fear and fretful grief, though, Mary
draws only the most negative of conclusions.
This, of course, is our human condition.
So many of us, on account of fear and perhaps past trauma, tend to
place the most negative interpretations on the events of our daily life.
We are quick to seize on bad news, and we dismiss good news too easily,
or barely notice that every day most things go right. Instead, we focus
on the few things that go wrong. So easily we are negative and forget
that even in painful transitions, as certain doors close, others open.
New possibilities often emerge even in painful circumstances. (Read more.)
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