It was Easter in the 1970s that I first met my wife. I received a phone call from the local convent asking me to drive three Dominican sisters and their friend to Heathrow. It was at the last minute so I had no time to change out of my working clothes. The three nuns sat in the back seat and their friend, a young doctor who was working in a hospital next to their convent in KwaZulu, South Africa, sat in the front seat next to me. When she finished talking to her friends she finally deigned to look at me and asked me whether or not I was the gardener! When I said that I was not the first person to have been mistaken for the gardener, she carried on talking to her friends unaware of my reference to Mary Magdalene’s meeting with Jesus immediately after the Resurrection. In fact, it was only last Easter when I reminded her of our first meeting and how I replied to her question that, after almost forty years she finally picked up on my reference to Mary Magdalene.
He Had Become a Different Person
However, the point I want to make is how did Mary Magdalene mistake Christ for the gardener; after all, she had known him so well? The truth is he had risen from the dead to become a different person, or rather the same person, but significantly different from the man who had only recently been preaching and teaching the Gospel only a few days before he was crucified. The key to the difference is in the message that he preached. God, he proclaimed, is not just infinite love but infinite loving. When he created us he created us out of love, in love, and for love – his love – and for all eternity. When we say that he created us in his image and likeness, we mean that it is God’s love that is deepest in us, despite what nature and nurture have done to distort it. When least distorted, it mirrors that love, not only in the depth of our spiritual being but also in our physical appearance too. It is this love that attracts men and women to each other. Without them fully realising it they are both drawn onwards and inwards through the physical to infinite love, as it resides deep down in its human embodiment. That is why it is the most powerful force on earth.
Nevertheless, the love of God, whether it is realised in its fulness in God himself or partially in those he has created, is ultimately a mystery. I will not, therefore, try to define it as no one will ever be able to do so. This is not because it is irrational, but because it is supra-rational. Nor does Jesus try to define love. He does something that is far more important. If I may paraphrase the Imitation of Christ, “I would far rather know how to experience God’s love than know how to define it.” That is precisely what he came to do for us, namely to show us how to come to experience it.
The Continual Practice of Selfless Giving
Most of us first come to know and experience God’s love as it is partially embodied in another human being. Although that love is indeed embodied in the man or woman to whom we have given our lives in marriage, that love can only be accessed for any length of time through the continual practice of selfless giving. It is this that not only opens us to receive the love of God embodied in our wife or husband, or anyone else for that matter, but it does something further, not just for us, but for the one we are reaching out to with love. It actually re-charges their love with our love, or to be more precise, with our weak human love suffused with, and surcharged by the divine that dwells within us. If this selfless giving stops, then we no longer have access to God’s love through our married partners, and the love implanted in both begins to wither and so, therefore, does the marriage.
The British politician Gordan Brown was once asked whether or not he knew what love is by an irate reporter annoyed that his political questions remained unanswered, so he wished to catch him out. With uncharacteristic speed and brevity, he answered, “It is when someone else’s happiness becomes more important than your own.”
Why Didn’t Jesus Get Married?
When I was trying to develop these ideas in a talk that I was giving some years ago, a man put his hand up to ask a question. “If all this is so important,” he said, “Why didn’t Jesus get married himself, to preach to us by the example of his own life?” The question took me by surprise and whilst I was searching for an answer to satisfy him, a girl, the youngest person in the room shouted out. “Because he was already married, silly.” It was, of course, a brilliant answer, not because it was so simple and clear, but because it was the truth, as the girl went on to say, “Because he was married to God, wasn’t he?” Remember what Jesus said at the Last Supp:- “You must believe me when I tell you that I am in the Father and the Father is in me” ( John 14:14-15). If this is not a marriage what is?
It was because of this marriage, called by theologians the hypostatic union that Jesus spent every moment of every day doing everything in his power ‘to make God happy’ by selflessly doing what God wanted him to do. Doing this was what he called his ‘meat and drink’. It was this that gave him life and fulfillment, but it also meant giving that life up in the most horrifying and hideous way imaginable. This only became possible because as he gave, he also received, the “height and depth and length and breadth of God’s love” that made even the impossible possible.
Love Had Made Him Himself Again
Nevertheless, all this took its toll on his human nature as the day of his ultimate ordeal approached, and this would have shown in his demeanour, in his posture, in his body language, and in all he said and did. However, the moment he died was the moment when, as St John tells us, he was flooded by God’s love, through his divine nature, appearing as a new man who was hardly recognisable. That is why Mary Magdalene did not recognise him, nor did the disciples who met him on the road to Emmaus, and for that matter the Apostles, who saw him cooking their breakfast on the banks of the Sea of Galilee. Love had made him himself again, calm, and serene in all he said and did once the terrible ordeal was behind him and he could look forward to sharing the love he had received with everyone else. However, it was not just his demeanour that had changed, the very nature of his physical body had changed too by the massive inflow of infinite love that he received at his Resurrection. A body once limited by space and time was limited no longer. He could mysteriously appear and disappear, be in two places at once, pass through locked doors or thick walls and what was even more incredible, enter into his devoted followers, and remain with them forever.
When he first entered into human weakness Christ was inevitably limited by having a human body that could only be at one place at a time. Getting to know him, therefore, involved coming and going, meeting, and departing. Not even his closest disciples could be with him all the time. However, after the Resurrection all that changed. Now, raised outside the limitations of space and time he could be with everyone at one and the same time, and furthermore he could be with them all the time because he could be with them from the inside through love.
All Christ’s Human Qualities Brought to Perfection
Now the Resurrection did not mean that he became transformed into some sort of disembodied spirit quite other than the man who walked the highways and byways of Palestine, as he was at pains to make clear. That is why he showed the marks of his suffering to his disciples and made those who doubted touch him and shared food with them. If he was not exactly the same person as before, it was not because he was less of, but more of a man, because his glorification meant that all his human qualities were brought to perfection. They were refined, distilled, and transformed by the Holy Spirit who raised him from the dead into a supernatural love through which he could be available to all. As the Risen Christ is a true man and the same man that he was, both in the body as well as in soul before the Resurrection, so he has still the same human affections the same feeling and emotion now. He is indeed our Divine Lord, but the love with which he loves us now is redolent with all the human feelings and emotions that he experienced while on earth but brought to perfection by the Holy Spirit now that he is in heaven. Now he can transmit them to other human beings at all times, and in every subsequent century through his sublime supernatural love.
Now, this is love that gradually begins to enter into a person most effectively through contemplation. Through a single shaft of love all the human perfections that were originally embodied in Christ’s human body whilst he was on earth, are transmitted to those for whom he gave his all. Now he can continue his work on earth through as many as are prepared to receive him and with as much of his love and compassion that they allow him to embody in them.
The Ultimate Marriage
We too then can be changed by love, the love of God that many of us can encounter through the one we have chosen to love for life. When, last Easter, my wife finally realised what I was getting at when she mistook me for the gardener, I managed to get a smile, after all, she has become used to my rather wry sense of humour over the last thirty years or more. But thank God we have never become used to the love that binds us together and binds us ever more closely together with each passing year. It grows through death and resurrection, the daily death and resurrection of giving and receiving, come hell or high water when dark nights descend upon us, and clouds of unknowing distort our vision. Because we know for sure that as long as we keep giving, as Christ himself did, we too will come to share in the fruits of his Resurrection. This will not only happen in this life but in the next life too, as the love we have encountered partially through each other will be experienced in full, in, with and through Christ who will take us both with him to the ultimate marriage when the love of God will be for all, the All in all.
The themes in this article are developed in David Torkington’s latest book Wisdom from the Christian Mystics
