Scripture
14 She turned to leave and saw someone standing there. It was Jesus, but she didn’t recognize him. 15 “Dear woman, why are you crying?” Jesus asked her. “Who are you looking for?”
She thought he was the gardener. “Sir,” she said, “if you have taken him away, tell me where you have put him, and I will go and get him.”
16 “Mary!” Jesus said.
She turned to him and cried out, “Rabboni!” (which is Hebrew for “Teacher”). (John 20:14-16)
Observation
Imagine this scene: Mary is upset because she just watched a very good friend, the man who saved her from a life of prostitution, suffer brutality and die a painful death. She went to put spices on his body, and probably to talk to him in private as we sometimes do at peoples’ headstones. He wasn’t there. Now she’s doubly upset. She’s probably looking at the ground trying to hide her swollen eyes. As she turns to leave the tomb, her shoulder bumps someone. She probably doesn’t even look up, or if she does, she sees the man through a haze of tears, wet hair, and internal anguish. She doesn’t expect it to be Jesus. She pleads with the man to tell her where he has taken the body. It isn’t until he says her name and speaks to her that she recognizes who it really is and turns to him with joy.
Application
I love this little scene. It is a scene that I believe is played out many times in all of our lives. Some circumstance in our lives gets us down. We are in dispair. We look, but do not see, our surroundings. We live inside our self pity and see everything through darkly painted glasses. When we do look, we expect to see more suffering, more pain. We are not looking for goodness and so we do not see it. Then a common person bumps shoulders with our daily existance. Someone we are not expecting to see. Maybe an acquaintance we barely know, or the lady behind the counter at the grocery store, or a man in recovery at church, or a bum on the bus. They are commonplace in our lives; people we pay little attention to. They are “just the gardener.” We may project our anger on that person. We think this person must in some way have contributed to our suffering. What we do not realize is this person was sent by God to be an encouragement, to be a light in the darkness, to be His representative in our dark lives.
When Jesus speaks to us through His sent one, we can choose to turn and embrace Him with joy like Mary did or we can continue to brush past Him with head down lost in our own world of despair.
Prayer
Lord, often times I pray that I will be an encouragement to those who need a touch from You. Many, many more times I have been encouraged and blessed by the most unlikly sources. Thank-you for sending me your angels. Help me to always see You when You call my name. Forgive me the times when I have been so absorbed in my own pain that I fail to look up and see You calling out to me.
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