March 24, 2019

“Woman,” he said, “why are you crying?”
—John 20:15

Let us turn to the depth of Mary’s love.53 And how intensely she loved may be most surely gathered from her refusal to believe that he was lost. There was nothing more to be done; the grave was empty. Mary could not tear herself away but stood outside at the sepulcher weeping. There is a kind of love that faces facts, and it is a noble and courageous love. But there is an agony of love that hopes against hope and beats against all evidence. No one will ever doubt John’s love to Jesus. No one will ever doubt the love of Simon. But the fact remains that on that Easter morning Peter and John went to their homes again, and only a woman lingered by the grave. She must linger and watch in the teeth of all the facts. Measured by a test like that, there is not a disciple who can match the love of Mary.
The unceasing wonder of it all is this, that to her first he should have showed himself, neither to John nor to Peter had there been a whisper—no moving of pierced feet across the garden—all that was kept for a woman who had been a sinner and out of whom there had been cast seven devils. It is very notable that the first word of Christ after he had risen from the dead was Woman. “Woman, why are you crying?”
That he should pass by Pilate and the people and his mother and John and James and Simon Peter, that he should show himself first and foremost to a woman who had nothing to her credit but her love, I tell you that even the genius of a Shakespeare could never have conceived a scene like that.
—George H. Morrison

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