There is a moment in the Easter story that I keep coming back to.
It happens in a garden, just after dawn. Mary Magdalene has come to the tomb and found it empty. She is weeping — not with joy, not yet — but with the particular grief of someone who has lost the one thing that made sense of everything else. She doesn't know what resurrection looks like. None of them did. All she knows is that the tomb is empty and the body is gone, and she is standing alone in the early morning trying to figure out what to do next.
And then someone speaks her name.
Mary.
That's it. One word. Her name. And everything changes.
I think about that moment a lot this time of year. Not just because it's Easter and that's the story we tell — but because I think most of us know what it feels like to stand in a garden we didn't expect to be in, trying to make sense of an emptiness we didn't plan for. Grief does that. Loss does that. Sometimes life just does that. We find ourselves somewhere unfamiliar, looking for something we can't quite locate, not entirely sure what we're even searching for anymore.
What the Easter story offers isn't a tidy resolution to that feeling. It doesn't promise that the grief goes away or that the confusion clears up immediately. Mary doesn't even recognize Jesus at first. She thinks he's the gardener. The resurrection, it turns out, doesn't announce itself with fanfare. It shows up quietly, in a garden, and it speaks your name.
That's the part I find most striking — that the first thing the risen Christ does is call someone by name. Not a crowd. Not a proclamation. Just one person, in the middle of her grief, heard and known and called by name. Whatever resurrection means — and I suspect it means more than any of us can fully get our arms around — it begins there. In the particular. In the personal. In the moment when someone who thought they were invisible discovers they have been seen all along.
We are well into the Easter season now, and the church has been sitting with this story for weeks. But I don't think it's a story that gets old, because I don't think the experience it describes gets old either. The need to be known. The longing to be found. The quiet hope that whatever has been lost might somehow, in a way we can't yet see, be given back.
I don't know what garden you're standing in this spring. I don't know what you came looking for, or what you found when you got there. But I do believe — it's the thing I keep coming back to, year after year — that the voice that spoke Mary's name is still speaking. Still finding people in their grief. Still calling them by name.
That, as best I can tell, is what Easter is about.
Word in Faith is a collaboration of Wayne Association of Congregations and Ministers (WACAM), an organization partially funded by the Wayne Community Chest.
