John 20:16, “Mary.”
Short Thoughts:
Because He has gone before them through suffering into glory, when the Risen Christ calls His sheep by name, He turns their mourning to joy, their sorrow to laughter, and their death into life.
Long Thoughts:
John 10:3-4, “…He calls His own sheep by name and leads them out. When He has brought out all His own, He goes before them, and the sheep follow Him for they know His voice.”
It is awesome to see John 10:3-4 fulfilled in the Lord’s interaction with Mary here….He calls His own sheep by name…and when the sheep of the Good Shepherd hear their name spoken by Him, they come to Him, they follow Him.
He “brings out” all of His own and goes before them. Brings them out of where? Well, in this specific instance, Mary is “stooping” to peer into the tomb. If she is not literally in the tomb—which I think is possible—she is at least occupied with it, focused on it, peering into it…..her eyes and mind and thoughts are consumed with the tomb—not as a symbol of Christ’s resurrection, but as a picture of His death and her despair. And it is from this place of hopelessness, this place of darkness, from this shadow of death that the Risen Jesus calls out His own by name.
So from where does the Good Shepherd lead out all His own? From death…and all that death entails….from hopelessness, from loss, from fear, from sorrow, from darkness, from exile, and leads us into Life. And notice, if He is going to lead them out, the implication—made explicit in John 10:4—is that He Himself goes before them.
Yes, the Good Shepherd goes before His sheep, through the tomb, through death, through that dark and deep and wide river—He has gone before. His sheep will never come to a place where their Shepherd has not first been Himself. They will never endure an experience that their Lord and their God has not endured the perfect equivalent of for their sake. He goes before and leads out.
Consider also the simple beauty of this account. Weeping under the shadow of Death turns to—I have to believe—laughter in the presence of Life Himself….How deep her hopelessness must have been! Here is Mary standing at the tomb of Him who saved her from seven demons, the One to whom she had anchored all of her hope, all of her good, the one whom she loved with all that she was……and she is at His tomb. He has died, He is gone……and not only that, his body has been stolen…….stolen by enemies…..she weeps, she is beside herself, she’s without hope…..
And it is from that place that Jesus lifts her with a word. And what word? Her name. He speaks her name and turns her mourning to laughter, He speaks her name and turns her sorrow to joy, He speaks her name and turns her death into life. When the Love who is stronger than death speaks our name in welcome, we are loved into life.
And is it not true that—just as He spoke her brother’s name only a few days earlier and called Him out of the tomb—so too now He speaks her name and calls her, as it were, out of the tomb as well? Awesome.
May we hear this word as well……..when we are fixed on the tomb….when the bleak, gaping, dead mouth of loss, of sorrow, of pain threatens to consume us, when the looming shadow of death draws our eyes and heart and thoughts, when we stoop into the tomb and it is all we can see……then may we too hear the voice of our RISEN Lord. The tomb that consumes our attention is His tomb…this death is His death, and that means it is conquered. He has gone before us, He has passed through it, He has overcome, and—in fact—this tomb that now fills us with sorrow and loss will, one day, stand as an evidence and picture of joy….but only because the One who passed through it before us now stands in the radiant light of Easter morning and calls us by name….calls us to turn from the Grave and set our eyes on the One who is Life itself……He who has gone before, He who will lead us out, He who will bring us through death and shadow and loss and sorrow to Himself in great and lasting joy.
