for April 14
Tuesday in the Octave of Easter

The first reading today continues Peter’s speech at the first Pentecost. Peter makes clear the connection between Jesus and the Holy Spirit. Baptism in the name of Jesus Christ brings the gift of the Holy Spirit. Peter is calling his listeners to conversion, and he is also bridging the divide between those who knew and believed in the incarnate Jesus and the rest of us who have come to know and believe in the risen Christ. The first person to confront that divide was Mary Magdalene, and her poignant experience related in the Gospel passage can shed light on our struggles to know and to love Jesus as both man and God.

Yesterday as I was working on my computer at home, I was aware of a background of noise.  There were waves of raindrops beating against the windows, water reverberating down the drainpipe, the wind swooshing along the wind tunnel behind our house and through the branches of the backyard maple, already in almost full leaf. A gray sky and sheets of rain also made the room shadowy beyond the circle of light formed by my computer screen and desk lamp. That helped keep me focused on my own work. Then at one point I looked up and realized there was now silence, the tree was still, and the sky was an odd shade of black. I felt as though the atmosphere around me had changed without my noticing even as I thought I had been aware of what was going on.

This is what I imagine it must have been like for the group of disciples, including the women, who shared the work of Jesus’s mission proclaiming the good news of the Kingdom. There was a lot of excitement, action, and noise around Jesus as he moved through Galilee and Judea. Though they were aware of ominous signs of opposition to him and even heard Jesus himself describe the events to come, his inner circle remained focused on the earthly mission that seemed to be going so well. They were filled with hope as he triumphantly entered Jerusalem. And then, almost in a moment, Jesus’s still body was hanging from a leafless tree. The voice that had galvanized crowds with his teaching, healed those sick in body and spirit with a word or two, and even commanded the elements to do his bidding was silent. The sky turned dark. All that remained was the lovingly anointed and wrapped body placed inside a rock tomb.

The eleven disciples retreated to their safe upper room, perhaps to consider what they should do now, perhaps to figure out how to avoid a similar fate. It was the women who continued their ministry of serving. In John’s Gospel, Mary Magdalene goes to the tomb alone and discovers it is empty, Mary Magdalene who experienced a profound healing at the hands of Jesus and now seeks to care for his body with her hands. Her love for him is expressed in her grief at his absence. And Jesus’s love for her is expressed in his concern for her grief. And so he responds to her. What joy she feels at seeing him alive! Yet he knows that her love for him is still an earthly love, her love for Jesus the man who nurtures souls, who has nurtured her soul, as a gardener nurtures his plants. She doesn’t recognize “the gardener’s” voice, but when he calls her by name, she knows him and perhaps begins to know herself as one called by him. She yearns for the human, person-to-person contact with him, but she must let the man go so that the Spirit that will continue God’s presence on earth can enter into her.  She cannot hold onto—or, in a more evocative translation, cling to—the love between herself and Jesus but is called to share that love in all its intimacy with others.

So too are we called both to love Jesus intimately as our closest friend and to live out of that love as Jesus did. To love our faith but not to cling to any aspects of it that impede the full expression of that love. This is particularly our Easter experience this year. To safeguard all our lives we have let go of many treasured rituals. We pray they return next year, though perhaps with a greater appreciation of the Resurrection as new life in the spirit, whatever surprising form that might take.
—Christine Szczepanowski

The readings can be found on the US Conference of Catholic Bishops website.