John 20:1-18.
Jesus said to her, ‘Woman, why are you weeping? For whom are you looking?’
Supposing him to be the gardener, she said to him, ‘Sir, if you have carried
him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away.’ Jesus
said to her, ‘Mary!’ She turned and said to him in Hebrew,* ‘Rabbouni!’ (which
means Teacher).
I think it’s not a coincidence that each of the four
gospels reports that Mary Magdalene was the first disciple to whom Jesus
appeared following his Resurrection. It was Mary Magdalene, after all, who
presented herself to Jesus with such holy humility for healing. We have no
reports of any of the other disciples being so forthcoming with Jesus. (As an
aside, the idea that Mary Magdalene might have had an unsavory past has no
basis at all in the biblical text. That gets dreamed up 400 or so years later
by Pope Gregory the Great.) She then keeps watch at the foot of the cross with
Jesus after Peter and so many of the others have taken off. She is drawn to
Jesus’ tomb, searching for something she probably couldn’t identify. Her
faithfulness, her persistence, her longing for relationship with Jesus, seem to
put her in the right place at the right time, the time and the place where she
can recognize the voice of Jesus, the Good Shepherd, as he calls her by name.
Why do we gather here at St Thomas in Jesus’ name?
There’s an image that we here in the Northwest know well that maybe gets at the
question. I think maybe we share something with the salmon, that beautiful fish
that after an eventful and treacherous journey out to sea, experiences an
ineffable pull to return home. And so the salmon makes her way back upstream to
the place of her birth—she is called back home. It is as powerful as it is
unexplainable.
We gather in Jesus’ name at St Thomas because we too
are each being called home. Even if you have never entered these doors before,
you have been called back home. Because home for each of us is that place where
we hear the Good Shepherd call us by name. This morning, in this place, Jesus,
the Good Shepherd is calling you by name. And we are here as this community of
St. Thomas to call each other by name in the name of the Good Shepherd.
— The Rev. Lex Breckinridge
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