A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint John. Early in the morning of the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene came to the tomb of Jesus. She saw that the stone had already been moved away, So she ran off to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one Jesus loved, that of course is John, Saint John, and said to them, the lord has been taken from the tomb. We do not know where they have put him. Mary stood weeping beside the tomb.
Even as she wept, she stooped to look inside, and there she saw two angels in dazzling robes. One was seated at the head and and the other at the foot of the place where Jesus' body had lain. They asked her, Woman, why are you weeping? And Mary answered, because the Lord has been taken away, and I do not know where they have put him. She had no sooner said this than she turned around and caught sight of Jesus standing there.
But she did not recognize him. Woman, he asked her, why are you weeping? Who is it you're looking for? She supposed it was the gardener. So she said to Jesus, sir, if you are the one who carried him off, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away.
And Jesus said to her, Mary. She turned to him and said in Hebrew, Raboni, meaning teacher. Jesus then said, do not cling to me for I have not yet ascended to the father. Rather, go to my brothers and tell them, I am ascending to my father and to your father, to my god, and to your god. Mary Magdalene went to the disciples and announced, I have seen the lord.
Then she reported what he had said to her. And this is the gospel of the lord. In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit. Amen. There is much that tantalizes me in this reading.
For example, and this isn't the only occasion, where after our lord had risen from the dead, he is not recognized. And then he is recognized. What happened in between? Are the disciples on the road to Emma House when Jesus joins them and they walk along? They didn't recognize Jesus.
They didn't recognize him until they they stopped and went in and were eating a meal. And Jesus broke bread and were told they recognized him in the breaking of the bread. In other words, they didn't recognize his person. They didn't recognize his voice. They didn't recognize or identify him with what he was saying.
And here we have the same thing. Mary turns around and she sees this man she takes to be a gardener, so apparently it had a body. Well, all I'm saying is I'm confused, and it doesn't bother me in the least. I don't pretend to know everything, just most everything. What I what strikes me about Mary Magdalene is what I hear, and I've heard it more than once.
Whoever Mary you know we have the problem of the three Marys. But whatever it is, Mary Magdalene is identified with the woman who was a sinner, whatever that means. Generally speaking, they it's interpreted. The text doesn't say it. All the text says she was a sinner.
And remember, there are 10 commandments, not just one, the sixth. However, she's often, if not practically all the time, thought of as a woman of loose morals, which means she was something like a a prostitute. Now what has been thrown at me more than once by some of our very advanced young people is how Mary Magdalene was a saint. Christ did not throw her out, and therefore Christ approved sin. Now, of course, this is really first class reason, but I this has been put thrown at me more than once.
That the sins of the flesh as we euphemistically revert to them, After all, they are not so bad. Look how Christ handled it with Mary Magdalene. Well, see, this isn't the way it is at all. The fact that Christ forgives sinners, the the fact that he opens his arms to them, the fact that he welcomed her, the fact that he recognized who she was and how he didn't throw her out as the other people assembled at the meal would have. How she was a scandal to him.
Because they said, Look, if he is a prophet he certainly would know what manner of woman this is. He would not be treating her with so much courtesy and decency and accepting her. That was a contrary to fact condition because Jesus was doing all of those things. But how in the world you can interpret that the way he accepted and treated Mary Magdalene, the sinner. How you can interpret that as as our blessed lord countencing sin is ridiculous and absurd, to put it mildly, very mildly.
You see, the thing we often forget is that Christ came to save sinners. And how do I know it? He said so. He said so. I have come, he said, not to call the just but sinners.
You can't say it much more clearly than that, can you? And he had gave us many several examples of the love of God for the sinner. Now a man like Francis Thompson grasped that truth, and he gave us that to me, one of the finest things in English, the hound of heaven. But you see, the fact of Christ's love doesn't mean that he loves sin, that he is that he's weak towards sin, that he's compliant and complacent with sin, that doesn't follow at all. Not in the least.
Not in the remotest least. There is no way that you can identify Christ as being favorable towards sin, but he was towards sinners. Sinners. Sinners. Because remember, a sin is not a person.
The sinner is a person, And our blessed lord never once, never once repelled a sinner. I mean, fur an honest to god first class sinner. The only time that our blessed lord had a harsh word for a sinner, in quotes, was for the hypocrites. For the hypocrites. And when you have a person who lies to themselves, there is little hope for them until they get out of that vicious circle.
Now what I have found, and I don't want to exaggerate my experiences, they are not big, but I've had a few. And what impresses me forcefully is that people who have listened to these texts year after year from the time they they got in the pews as a wailing baby, and they've heard these words, they've heard these texts, they've heard this gospel, and they accept it with their mind. But when it happens that they become a honest to God sinner, they forget it. They forget it. And they are eaten up with guilt.
And there is no excuse whatsoever for any first class sinner being destroyed by their own guilt feelings. There is no excuse. Christ came to save precisely that kind of person. In the name of the father, of the son, and holy spirit. Amen.