If there was any woman in Scriptures who loved Jesus best, other than His own mother, surely it would be Mary Magdalene. She was at the foot of the cross when almost all of Jesus' closest friends fled to save their skin. She very bravely set foot early Sunday morning to go to the tomb, as if to properly make the ritual of saying goodbye.
When she realized that the body of Jesus was not in the tomb, she was caught in great grief. Desperation filled her whole being that she ran to ask somebody, anybody, for any information as to where she can find the dead body of Jesus.
This happens too in our relationship with God. Sometimes, God seems silent, or worse, absent. So we try to look for God, to try to go back to the old ways that always worked, with the hope of recapturing the former feeling. We try to hang on to prayer, to rituals or to anything that could assuage the emptiness that we feel.
Sometimes, these work. They give us consolation, and everything seems to be right again in our relationship with God.
But sometimes they don't work; and the aloneness and desperation just grow more and more each day.
When Mary Magdalene saw Jesus, she didn't recognize Him. She thought he was a gardener. Then Jesus calls her by name, Mary, and it was then that she recognizes that it is the Lord.
God is never absent in our life. He is always present even if we cannot recognize Him.
We need new eyes. We need to allow God to become God, not confined to our old categories and familiar ways.
What we do is we ask God that in the many ways He may want to manifest Himself, He would call us by name, by that name He whispered as He kissed our heart before sending us forth to planet Earth.
When we hear that name, spoken by that familiar voice, we can say with Mary Magdalene, "It is the Lord". We are home.
No comments:
Post a Comment