Mary and the Resurrection
As I meditated on the events of the Resurrection, I was struck by how “someone” responded to this great event: Mary, the mother of Jesus. What an amazing “woman” she is!
Everyone rushed to the tomb, caught between doubt and certainty, except her. She stayed where she was, contemplating, and seeing in her heart and in her faith the resurrection of her son Jesus from the dead.
At the crucifixion, she was there with Mary Magdalene and Mary the wife of Clopas. But on the third day after Jesus’ death, the evangelist Matthew tells us, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary went to see the tomb… Mary his mother was not with them. She was looking elsewhere: toward the Risen One, who from then on is present everywhere. She did not need to go to the tomb to see, or an apparition to be sure; she is his mother, and through her faith and the feelings of her divine motherhood she knows everything.
She is the one who carried him in her womb and accompanied him as a child, a boy, a young man and a man in his mission; she listened to him, pondered carefully the events of his life and his words, and kept them in her heart. She had the fullness of faith that the one she held in her lap when he was taken down from the cross, before he was laid in the tomb, would rise on the third day.
She is Mary, the icon of motherhood, from the Annunciation to the Cross and the Resurrection.
She is always the same: from the handmaid of the Lord, to her hurried journey to serve her kinswoman Elizabeth, to her loving attention when the wine ran out at the wedding at Cana, to her standing at the foot of the cross, and to her “presence” as a “living Gospel” in the first community before it was ever written down, she did not change. She is Mary, the only witness to the resurrection of her son Jesus who did not see him with her own eyes, but saw him through the motherhood of love and faith.
We will not go to the empty tomb, but to Mary, the one who held the Risen One, to see and believe with her.
Christ is risen… He is truly risen… And we, by our deep faith, are witnesses of it… until the end of time.
Fr. Joseph Abi Aoun
