Why Are You Weeping?
“Woman, why are you weeping?” - Jn 20:13
I cannot imagine what it would have been like to be Mary Magdalene at that moment. What little we do know of this woman, we know that she truly believed Jesus to be the Son of God. It was her deep devotion that pushed her to this most devastating of moments. Mary simply wished to mourn the man who she hoped was the Messiah. But as today's Gospel tells us, the man she mourned was no longer in the tomb. His body was nowhere to be found, and she feared that someone had stolen it. Everything that she had hoped for was gone. She was left with nothing.
Hope is a funny thing. It’s the act of believing that something will happen without knowing for certain that it will. We have hope constantly in so many things. We envision them coming to fruition, and we might even have a clear picture of what should happen. But so many never pan out. Even fewer seem to turn out exactly as we imagine. In those crushing moments, Mary Magdalene is with us.
She is also there to remind us that what we hope for and what God hopes for can be quite different. As she mourned the loss of everything she knew, her hope stood behind her. He looked entirely different than she expected. He looked like… a gardener? What began as a moment of deep grief, immediately turned into a moment of pure, unexpected joy. Her hope, our hope, arrived in a way that she never thought possible. Let us hope that ours, too, comes unexpectedly and joyfully as well.
What is my hope for my life?
How tightly do I hold onto this hope?
How do I allow myself to be open to God’s dreams for me?
Matt Keppel