The Resurrection appearances do not conform to the usual sort of biblical ‘visions’. They are not associated with sleep and do not occur at night. They are sensory but different from sensual. The gospel accounts of these historical events do not aim at cinematic or scientific reality. (Cinematic realism is the result of high artifice.) They are events in which the usual constraints on the full experience of reality have been thrown off. Reality has been fully thrown open. It is disclosing itself in a dimension where there are no detached observers. At the same time it is wholly and literally down to earth.
Mary’s experience on Easter Sunday morning illustrates the role of self-knowledge in understanding who Jesus really is. She shows how we do not recognise him without knowing ourselves. She is brought to self-knowledge by the simple means of being known by another. He knew her and called her by name. Self-knowledge does not just mean knowing more about ourselves. It is generated by relationship. In such a relationship we feel ourselves known and loved. But the center of consciousness also unhooks from its usual egotistical moorings and relocates in the other. Mary suffered her way through total grief to self-realisation in her Resurrection experience. Maybe later, through the years in which that fresh morning’s experience was being understood and absorbed, she recalled how Jesus had warned them of his approaching death. Perhaps she then understood why he had taught that to discover the true Self they would, like him, have to suffer the loss of their old selves. She would have understood why she had not recognised him; why, in some sense, we must become unrecognisable to ourselves in order to see who he really is.
Overwhelmed by grief at losing him Mary is in search of his body, the familiar form of his presence. She suffers the human agony of bereavement and the desolation of irreversible absence. So absorbed is she in her stricken memory of Jesus that she fails to recognise him when he meets her in his spiritual body, his new way of being present to her. The nonrecognition, however, validates the experience. It is an element on every occasion that the disciples first saw him. If Resurrection meant only the resuscitation of a corpse or if it was no more than a subjective ‘psychological’ event, then those to whom he ‘appeared’ in those Easter days would have had no difficulty recognising him. They would have been seeing what they wanted to see. They would not have been surprised–as reality always surprises us.
In a small monastic cell in San Marco in Florence Fra Angelico painted a fresco of this scene which gives a commentary where words fail. On the far left of the painting is the black rectangle of the empty tomb contrasting almost eerily with the lush green of the Resurrection garden. Jesus, translucent and weightless, bearing the wounds of his death on his hands and feet, and carrying the gardener’s hoe turns towards Mary in the instant of her awakening. She, dressed in the red of this world is bathed in his light, her robes changing colour as she gazes in pure wonder at the beauty of his new form. They reach towards each other, never closer in spirit, but do not touch in the world of sense.
He is not invisible; not 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