For Sunday
Easter
Collect
O God, who for our redemption gave your only-begotten Son to the death of the cross, and by his glorious resurrection delivered us from the power of our enemy: Grant us so to die daily to sin, that we may evermore live with him in the joy of his resurrection; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.
Amen.
Reading
Reflection
Jesus calls Mary by name and only then can she recognize Jesus. The man standing before her should be recognizable; after all, it doesn’t say he changed his appearance. Maybe he shaved! Probably not, though. But because a third of our brain is devoted to dealing with sight and because Western culture has placed it at the top of the hierarchy since Aristotle, we treat seeing as inherent to believing. But Mary hears her name and then can see Jesus.
How we perceive our environment through all of our senses working in concert has a way of helping us know what we are encountering for sure. But I think we can all think of times when we’ve been “tricked” by an illusion or had a memory come flooding over our reality when we smelled something.
What happens for Mary, however, is not an illusion or a memory, but a jolt of a reality she can’t truly imagine being true. Even as Jesus tried to prepare her for it. But it was the intimacy, of her name, familiarity, comfort, of place and memory and affection, and he invites her to see him, not only as she remembers or as he was the last time she saw him, taken down from the cross, but as he is. Now, very much alive.