My name is Mary. I come from a place called Magdala, so I am known by many as Mary Magdalene. People have said many things about me over the years, many, many things to suit their own ideas. All I will say is that I became a follower of Jesus early on. He healed me and I followed him.

Let me tell you about that first morning…

Shhh! It was so quiet, so very quiet. It was dark still, that first morning. My nerves were jangling, I had not slept for three nights. The first because I was fearful, but still hopeful, trying to guess how he would escape the guards. For surely he would. And the next night, that Sabbath night, and the next, I did not sleep. I wasn’t sure I would ever sleep again. How could I? Not after what I had seen. Not after seeing and hearing his agony, not after seeing his broken body, the way he tried to breathe, the awful rasping, the cries, his cries and those of the two men with him. Not after being a witness to that. His face, the mask of pain and despair, was imprinted on my mind. Even now I shudder as I remember it. And his mother, his broken mother, her soundless sobs which she tried to hold in, as she held him, his blood staining her robe, covering her hands, her face as she kissed him, and then the howls of despair at her home, her shaking, my shaking, and everything we knew crushed. All light had gone.

Maybe that was why I left when it was still dark to go to his tomb. I could not bear the light. And I was frightened too, afraid of the Romans, afraid of the religious leaders, afraid, even, of what my neighbours would say. They still treated me with fear and disdain, even after the demons had been cast out from me. They would say that I was like the wild ass; you may think that you have tamed her but she will kick and bite and run wild again. And now the one who had healed me was gone.

It was so quiet. I crept towards the tomb and, in the dark I could not at first make out what had happened. But as the first rays of the sun touched the eastern sky I saw that there was a gaping hole. A gaping hole where the stone should have been over the entrance. They must have taken him! Someone must have stolen him! Why? Who? I was terrified. Where was he? Was I not even going to be able to mourn in peace? I turned and ran, ran all the way to find the others, Simon Peter, John. I gabbled at them that he was gone, stolen, body snatchers, maybe the Romans, but why? And they ran, and they saw that he was gone. Simon even went in. And then they left, confused, talking, arguing even. Saying he was not there and that maybe this was right and good. How could it be? How could anything be good and right? Stupid men with their stupid noise.

I stayed. And it was quiet again. I could hear birds, the first scuttling of lizards as the sun warmed the land. the buzz of flies. I shuddered at the buzzing of flies, remembering the buzz around his body on the cross. I glanced up to see if there were vultures there, circling, looking for death. But the sky was clear. Blue. Why did it have to be blue and beautiful? Why did anything have to carry on now that he was dead? Tears coursed down my face and I stifled my sobs.

My blurry vision settled again on the tomb’s entrance. Was he really not there? And why did it seem so light there? Was it a trick of the sun? Of my tears?  I crept forward, my steps soundless. I bent down and peered in and gasped. Two men in white. Sitting there. Had they been there all along? Had John and Simon seen them?

They smiled at me, and one of them asked me, his voice low and gentle:”Why are you crying?”

“They have taken my Lord away,” I said, “and I don’t know where they have put him.” 

Then I heard a sound, a soft footfall behind me and I turned and saw another man. I was weeping so hard that I could not see him properly, or was there some other reason why I thought he must be a gardener? I didn’t recognise him. I couldn’t do, because I knew he was dead.

But then I heard his voice, just one simple word, a word I heard with my ears and with my soul. “Mary!”

It was him! He was back. I leapt at him, held him. My heart pounding. He was back. But he pushed me gently to arms’ reach and said that I must not hold him as he had to go to his father. I didn’t understand then. But he told me to tell the others. His father and my father. Everyone’s father.

I didn’t sleep that night either. I was so excited. I felt maybe I had imagined it, but no, that voice in my soul. Mary. It was him. He knew me.

Then I slept the next afternoon and night. And when I woke before dawn the world was quiet again. Quiet and waiting. I didn’t know what had happened. I didn’t know what we were going to do, what he was going to do. And who would believe us? Unless he was going to appear with some sort of army, that’s what some of them said, a supernatural army. But his mother and I didn’t think that. We knew him better than that. We felt it too, deep down inside. It wouldn’t be something dramatic in the way most people think of drama, nor huge in the way that most people think of huge. Though it would be huge and dramatic, it would be a revolution, life-changing, life-renewing.

But it would start quietly, it would start small. With just a few. And it would start, it was starting already with the change in us. Without that change, who would believe us, they’d think we were mad, delusional, thinking we had seen him just because we wanted to, because we couldn’t accept that he had gone. And who would blame them? But with that change, that quiet, but overflowing certainty that he was alive, he is alive, that he still knows us, still calls us to follow him, then they would know start to ask the questions about what had happened, then they would start to believe us, they would start to change too.

Yes, shhh, it starts quietly in us, in the change in our hearts as we open ourselves to follow him, as we open ourselves to love, to his love, to the love of God. And then it grows and it grows, and it really is quite huge, and dramatic.