Tell someone to check into a hotel, interact with the desk clerk for several minutes, produce a credit card, and get directions to the elevator. Then have the clerk duck down behind the counter to retrieve the room key while a completely different person rises to hand it over, and the hotel guest will not even notice they are not speaking to the same person.
Psychologists call this Change Blindness. We see what we expect to see.
In the Gospels, Mary Magdalene goes to Jesus’s tomb to anoint his body with spices in a last act of devotion. She knows that the entrance has been sealed with a large boulder to keep animals out, as well as anyone who might desecrate the body, and I wonder, upon hearing the story, how she imagined she would move the rock. In the gospel of Mark, she has come with a few other women, and they even ask each other, “Who will roll away the stone for us?”
Women possess great faith that things will work out. I can imagine asking friends on our way to the tomb, “Wait a sec! How are we going to move the boulder?” and one of us assuring the others, “We’ll figure it out when we get there.”
So, when Mary and her small group arrive, they discover they’re in luck. The massive stone at the tomb’s entrance has already been moved aside. But when they enter the tomb, an alcove carved into rock, to their dismay, the body is missing.
By some accounts, an angel is waiting. “He is not here,” he says, knowing why they have come. “He is raised.”
In some gospels, Mary and the others are so afraid and disoriented by this incomprehensible news that they leave and tell no one.
But the story I find compelling is the version in which Mary Magdalene has come alone and stands weeping at the entrance of the cavern.
Grief-stricken and now confused, Mary turns helplessly away only to see a man approaching. Perhaps he can help.
“Woman, why are you crying? Who is it you are looking for?” he asks.
And thinking he is the caretaker, (because who else could he be?) Mary tells him she is looking for the body of Jesus. “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where and I will get him,” a feat as impossible as moving the boulder alone.
The stranger then looks into her eyes and responds with one word.
Mary.
Recognition is instantaneous upon hearing her name. Stunned, she cries out, “Rabboni! Rabboni!”
Teacher.
I don’t know why I am always so moved by this passage. I think it is that love and recognition are unlocked by the simple saying of a name. Jesus didn’t say, “It’s me.” He essentially said, “It’s you.”
For Mary, who could not see what was right before her eyes, this is more than Change Blindness. It’s a rupture in reality she initially can’t absorb. It is first contact with life everlasting, and she is first witness. In this story at least, death is an illusion; the energy that animates a physical being changes form but does not fundamentally change.
I am a student of story, so I look at this one and ask what I ask of writing students: what is at stake?
A new perspective on reality. A mitigating of grief.
What is my reason for telling it?
To give you hope.
Where is the transformation? The moment after which nothing will be the same?
At the entrance to an empty tomb. When love calls you by name.
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