dimmed into darkness, it has better lights in the form of self-knowledge. . . . From this arid type of clothing comes not only the source of self-knowledge, which we have already described, but also all the benefits which we shall now describe . . .4
It is this same insight gained in self-knowledge that illuminates the way we listen to his question and know Jesus. Self-knowledge introduces us into that quality of spiritual consciousness where knower and known are known (by whom?) to be one. By self-knowledge and in the Spirit, Jesus and we meet and know each other. We are changed by the meeting. And, while becoming more and more uniquely ourselves, we also become increasingly like him as this process unfolds.
What we shall be has not yet been disclosed, but we know that when it is disclosed we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is.5
People in close relationship often grow to resemble each other, in the way they speak, their idiosyncrasies and mannerisms and attitudes, even in physical appearance. Just by living together union perceptibly happens even though it may be resisted and denied. In marriage or religious communities it can be amusing, mysterious, inspiring, sometimes slightly scary to see the signs of union at the level of personality. Spouses sometimes panic at the idea that they have merged or are losing their identity in marriage. All this simply shows that every healthy relationship entails a death of the ego. Co-dependence, domination or absorption by a stronger personality have quite different signs. What unites people is faithful love growing ever stronger through the recurrent deaths of the ego. Then human communion evolves into the vision of God. Two people can become one while each remains who they are as individuals. Perhaps this helps to understand the theology that describes the human and divine natures: united and yet distinct in Jesus. Light, quantum physics tells us, is neither wave nor particle but both. It depends how you look at it. Similarly, it depends how we look at Jesus. Who he is and who we are become, for the disciple, two intertwining experiences of self-knowledge. They are intertwined in time, the medium in which human relationship achieves full awareness. We can measure time. But there is also the dimension of spirit, the immeasurable medium in which time is transcended. The best way to see this in relation to Jesus is to situate it in the context of what happened in the early morning on the first day of the week after Jesus had been executed.
A lot happened on Easter Sunday.
As the day is described in the gospels, it seems more than could possibly have happened on one day. If the question of Jesus reveals the connection between self-knowledge and the knowledge of God, his Resurrection awakens us to the relationship of time and eternity. How long did Easter Sunday last? One day or all the days that have ever happened, before and since? In what way is the Jesus who died on the Cross the same person we encounter in the abyss of our self-knowledge today? What happened, the gospel suggests, is an absorption of space-time and matter into spirit. Historians, theologians and scripture scholars will not end their research and polemics about the Resurrection before we discover what that means. The attempt to understand it has value, however, because it sends us back to reread the gospel story and so to listen to the question the gospels contextualise for us.
Mary of Magdala had no doubts about the Resurrection she experienced. For her it was a reality in which she knew herself known:
So the disciples went home again; but Mary stood at the tomb outside, weeping. As she wept, she peered into the tomb; and she saw two angels in white sitting there, one at the head, and one at the feet, where the body of Jesus had lain. They said to her, ‘Why are you weeping?’ She answered. ‘They have taken my Lord away, and I do not know where they have laid him.’ With these words, she turned round and saw Jesus standing there, but did not recognise him. Jesus said to her, ‘Why are you weeping? Who is it you are looking for?’ Thinking it was the gardener, she said, ‘If it is you, sir, who removed him, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away.’ Jesus said, ‘Mary!’ She turned to him and said ‘Rabbuni!’ (which is Hebrew for ‘My Master’). Jesus said, ‘Do not cling to me, for I have not yet ascended to the Father. But go to my brothers, and tell them that I am now ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’ Mary of Magdala went to the disciples with her news: ‘I have seen the Lord!’ she said, and gave them his message.6
These words are so densely charged with meaning they constitute a supreme example, perhaps the greatest, of the form of poetry we call sacred scripture. Its level of reality can hardly be compared with the language of newspaper prose or scientific journals. Mary’s experience of the risen Jesus has the certain feel of reality but of reality undergone rather than observed, reality seen in and by its own light. ‘In your light I see light’, as the psalm puts it. The gospels and St Paul sometimes use the Greek verb ophthe (‘appeared to’ or ‘was revealed to’) to describe the encounters with Jesus that individuals and groups experienced after his death. St Paul, who never met the historical Jesus, said ‘He appeared to me.’7 Yet Mary’s experience of vision was also clear and personal. Afterwards she said simply ‘I have seen the Lord.’8
The Resurrection appearances do not conform to the usual sort of biblical ‘visions’. They are not associated with sleep and do not occur at night. They are sensory but different from sensual. The gospel accounts of these historical events do not aim at cinematic or scientific reality. (Cinematic realism is the result of high artifice.) They are events in which the usual constraints on the full experience of reality have been thrown off. Reality has been fully thrown open. It is disclosing itself in a dimension where there are no detached observers. At the same time it is wholly and literally down to earth.
Mary’s experience on Easter Sunday morning illustrates the role of self-knowledge in understanding who Jesus really is. She shows how we do not recognise him without knowing ourselves. She is brought to self-knowledge by the simple means of being known by another. He knew her and called her by name. Self-knowledge does not just mean knowing more about ourselves. It is generated by relationship. In such a relationship we feel ourselves known and loved. But the center of consciousness also unhooks from its usual egotistical moorings and relocates in the other. Mary suffered her way through total grief to self-realisation in her Resurrection experience. Maybe later, through the years in which that fresh morning’s experience was being understood and absorbed, she recalled how Jesus had warned them of his approaching death. Perhaps she then understood why he had taught that to discover the true Self they would, like him, have to suffer the loss of their old selves. She would have understood why she had not recognised him; why, in some sense, we must become unrecognisable to ourselves in order to see who he really is.
Overwhelmed by grief at losing him Mary is in search of his body, the familiar form of his presence. She suffers the human agony of bereavement and the desolation of irreversible absence. So absorbed is she in her stricken memory of Jesus that she fails to recognise him when he meets her in his spiritual body, his new way of being present to her. The nonrecognition, however, validates the experience. It is an element on every occasion that the disciples first saw him. If Resurrection meant only the resuscitation of a corpse or if it was no more than a subjective ‘psychological’ event, then those to whom he ‘appeared’ in those Easter days would have had no difficulty recognising him. They would have been seeing what they wanted to see. They would not have been surprised–as reality always surprises us.
In a small monastic cell in San Marco in Florence Fra Angelico painted a fresco of this scene which gives a commentary where words fail. On the far left of the painting is the black rectangle of the empty tomb contrasting almost eerily with the lush green of the Resurrection garden. Jesus, translucent and weightless, bearing the wounds of his death on his hands and feet, and carrying the gardener’s hoe turns towards Mary in the instant of her awakening. She, dressed in the red of this world is bathed in his light, her robes changing colour as she gazes in pure wonder at the beauty of his new form. They reach towards each other, never closer in spirit, but do not touch in the world of sense.
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