an insubstantial ghost or just a disembodied voice. If he were one of these, he would have been less complete in the Resurrection than he had been ‘in life’. He would have been less alive. His new body however is more alive; he is even more real. His new freedom to reach into human beings beyond the barriers imposed by the mind or senses testifies to this. He is real enough to Mary’s senses (she hears and sees him) but she just doesn’t recognise him. Even questioned by him, talking to him, obsessed with him, she cannot see. She mistakes him for the gardener, just like someone cutting the grass you might pass as you walk down the avenue of a cemetery, or someone you brush past in the street or stand beside on the subway. Would she ever have recognised him unless he had first revealed himself to her by showing her that he recognised her?
Once again he communicates this through a question, similar to the compassionate question by which the Fisher King is healed and freed. The process of healing and self-recognition is begun. Awakening starts when he speaks her name. Knowing that she is known, her self-knowledge clears the veil of illusion which had hidden him from her. Spontaneously she addresses him as her guru: rabbuni, teacher. He is the same teacher who started her journey to self-knowledge and taught her through their friendship over the years. Now he speaks to her from deep within herself. It is a new degree of friendship, a level of intimacy where the usual dualities of inner and outer, even of the visible and invisible, strangely seems to be suspended. What has happened to her now explains and authenticates everything he taught her. Being known and knowing that we are loved, is how human identity comes into its own. We fully exist only in relationship. Outside relationship (or thinking we are outside it) we are illusory beings, no more than impermanent individuals. As individuals we are sentenced to death. But knowing we are loved, boundlessly and uniquely, raises us to a new degree of life as risen persons capable of truly loving. What Mary now experiences she ‘sees’. What she sees is what she shares in.
There are three significant turnings in this scene after her encounter with the angels who also ask her why she is weeping. First she turns round and sees Jesus but does not recognise him. Then when he speaks her name she turns to him again. Had she turned away from him after asking him to take her to the body? Or is it an interior turn, a revolution of perception which has changed everything? The third turn is implicit in her leaving him. She lets go of the particular experience of this appearance and goes to the disciples with her news, ‘I have seen the Lord.’ He had told her not to cling to him because his return to the Father was not yet complete. There is no sense that she felt spurned. It had not been a passing experience. She knew he was with her. So, as the first Christian missionary, she ran to the disciples with nothing less than sheer joy. Mary’s third turn is towards others.
The new kind of life made possible by the Resurrection does not rely upon the forensic evidence of the empty tomb or even the circumstantial evidence of the apparitions. The evidence is found in daily living. In fact Mary is told not to cling to the experience. Faith in the Resurrection is not crazy but it rests on a particular kind of sense and rationality. Ideas of what constitutes reason are historically variable. Like love, faith in the Resurrection has its own reasonableness and cannot be argued away by logic alone. Its truth is attested in a new quality of being, a heightened degree of wholeness that is caught rather than taught. Experiences, even Resurrection appearances, come and go. They become memories. We, however, know the Resurrection, in what the early disciples called the ‘Day of Christ’. It is the present moment illuminated with faith’s ability to see the invisible, to recognise the too obvious. As Simone Weil wrote,
He comes to us hidden and salvation consists in our recognizing him.9
The question that Jesus asks is the rabbuni’s gift to us: its very asking bestows the ‘grace of the guru’.
In every era his question is the gift waiting to be received. Its power simply, subtly to awaken Self-knowledge in our own experience of the Resurrection is perennial. St Thomas uses the present tense when he speaks of the Resurrection. He can be understood to be saying that the Resurrection by the divine power transcends all categories of space and time. In a similar way icons of the Resurrection in the Orthodox tradition suggest the same transcendence and show that the power that raised Jesus is presently and continuously active.10
The essential work of a spiritual teacher is just this: not to tell us what to do but to help us see who we are. The Self we come to know through its grace is not a separate, isolated little ego-self clinging to its memories, desires and fears. It is a field of consciousness similar to and indivisible from the Consciousness that is the God of cosmic and biblical revelation alike: the one great ‘I AM’.
Jesus of Nazareth knew who he was within the limits of his mortal humanity. The risen Jesus is the Jesus of the Cosmos whose love of life was stronger than death and who knows himself in the boundlessness of the Spirit. This knowledge, not miraculous powers or supernatural experiences, is what he shares of himself liberally with humanity. This is what it was his nature and destiny to do:
My task is to bear witness to the truth. For this I was born; for this I came into the world.11
His self-knowledge is the catalyst necessary to awaken his disciples’ self-knowledge. Self-knowledge is the fundamental therapy, that healing of the soul which is the meaning of salvation. Carl Jung said that the crucial element in the relationship between analyst and patient is the therapist’s own self-knowledge. This is a continuously evolving consciousness which derives much of its life from the therapist’s interaction with the patient. We benefit (‘receive grace’) from the self-knowledge of Jesus in a way analogous to any deep human relationship. Because it is human and therefore reciprocal, we can even say that Jesus benefits from his relationship with us. Through us, with us and in us, he also comes to fulfilment. In St Paul’s letters Jesus now lives in the ‘Body of Christ’ which is the whole of humanity and even co-extensive with the material universe. And so all individual human development, as in the growth of a community, contributes substantially to the building up, the completion of his Body.
God’s ‘need’ for humanity can be glimpsed in Christ’s love for us. It has been one of the great insights of Christian mystics down the centuries that if love is mutual, the love flowing between God and humanity somehow shares in the pain and joy, longing and fulfilment of the human condition. The more pedestrian theologians of the day were outraged by Meister Eckhart’s witty exploration of this insight. Playing with words and paradox best conveys it. Julian of Norwich has this same mystical sense of humour and lightness of thought. She shares the same sense of the profound delicacy of divine love. She speaks of God’s thirst for human well-being and the ‘courteous’ and joyful way that that thirst expressed itself in the suffering and resurrection of Jesus. It is ‘inevitable’, she says, that we will sin ‘because of our weakness and stupidity’12 yet there can never be any anger in God towards us. She conveys the entirely unconditional nature of God’s love by describing God as Mother. She applies this to Jesus as well. As much as any mother ‘our Mother Jesus’ needs to feel loved by his children. In her great work, Revelations of Divine love, Mother Julian drew her response to his question and her experience of his continued life. Because of it she cheerfully accepted the sufferings of life.
Thus he is our Mother in nature, working by his grace in our lower part, for the sake of the higher. It is his will that we should know this, for he wants all our love to be fastened on himself . . . And this blessed love Christ himself produces in us.13
Everyone must work hard at coming to the self-knowledge necessary to know who Jesus is. The harder we work the more we are helped. Then our personal growth in turn builds up his Body. Individual spiritual practice is thus saved from the danger of spiritual egotism. It is never for the individual alone but through the greater Body of Christ that spiritual practice benefits the whole of humanity. Mother Julian knew that when she risked describing her experience and said that it
