When Jesus Speaks Our Name

A Day in the Life of Jesus

There are moments in the Gospels where the scene is so tender and personal that it feels almost intrusive to read it too quickly. John 20:10–18 is one of those moments. I find myself slowing down here, lingering with Mary Magdalene in the early morning light, standing outside the tomb, overwhelmed by grief and confusion. The resurrection has already happened, yet for Mary, the world still feels broken. She is not searching for victory; she is searching for a body. That detail matters. It reminds me that God often begins His greatest revelations in the very places where our understanding has collapsed.

Mary’s tears are not theatrical; they are honest. John tells us she is weeping, and the Greek verb klaíō suggests audible, uncontrolled sorrow. Even when angels appear—two of them, seated where Jesus’ body had been—her grief dulls the wonder of the moment. When they ask, “Why are you crying?” she answers with aching simplicity: “Because they have taken away my Lord, and I don’t know where they have put him.” She has not yet made the leap to resurrection faith. Like many of us, she knows loss far better than hope. And yet, even here, Jesus is already near.

When Mary turns and sees Jesus standing there, she does not recognize Him. John makes no attempt to soften that reality. Her eyes see, but her heart cannot yet comprehend. Grief has a way of narrowing our expectations, training us to anticipate absence rather than presence. Augustine once observed that “she sought the living among the dead, because she had not yet learned to hope beyond death.” I recognize myself in that description more than I would like. There are times when Jesus is standing closer than I realize, but my assumptions about how He should appear keeps me from seeing Him clearly.

Jesus repeats the angels’ question: “Why are you crying?” Then He adds another: “Whom are you looking for?” That second question reaches deeper. It is not merely about emotion, but about desire and direction. Mary assumes He is the gardener, a detail John includes with careful irony. The One through whom creation came into being is mistaken for a caretaker of the soil. And yet, even in that misunderstanding, there is truth. Jesus is, in a very real sense, the gardener of new creation, tending what sin and death have tried to destroy. As N. T. Wright notes, “John wants us to see resurrection not as escape from the world, but as the beginning of God’s renewal of it.”

Everything changes with a single word: “Mary.” Jesus does not explain. He does not argue. He speaks her name. In Hebrew thought, a name is more than a label; it represents identity and calling. The Greek text uses María, spoken with recognition and intimacy. In that moment, recognition floods back. “Rabboni!” she cries—Teacher, Master. The veil lifts, not because Mary reasons her way to faith, but because she is known. This is consistent with Jesus’ own words earlier in John’s Gospel: “The sheep hear his voice. He calls his own sheep by name and leads them out” (John 10:3). Resurrection recognition comes not through analysis, but through relationship.

Jesus’ next words can feel abrupt if we read them carelessly: “Do not hold on to me, for I have not yet ascended to the Father.” This is not a rejection of Mary’s love, but a redirection of it. The verb haptomai implies clinging, an understandable response after so much loss. But Jesus is teaching Mary—and us—that the relationship is changing. The resurrected Christ cannot be contained at the tomb. There is movement ahead, mission unfolding. As Gregory the Great wrote, “She sought Him as He was, but He revealed Himself as He would now be.” Jesus is preparing her for a faith that will soon be sustained by the Holy Spirit rather than physical presence.

Then comes the commission. Mary is sent to the disciples with a message of astonishing intimacy: “I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.” This is the first time Jesus speaks this way so directly, placing His followers within His own filial relationship with the Father. The resurrection does not merely restore Jesus to life; it restores humanity to belonging. Mary becomes the first witness of the risen Christ, the first to proclaim, “I have seen the Lord!” Her grief becomes testimony. Her tears become proclamation.

I am struck by the quiet urgency of this scene. Jesus does not linger at the tomb. As the study rightly notes, there is work to be done. The ascension must come, the Spirit must be given, the mission must expand beyond one garden in Jerusalem. Mary, too, has work to do. She moves from mourning to witness in a single encounter. That pattern continues to shape discipleship today. We do not meet the risen Jesus simply for personal comfort, though comfort is given. We meet Him so that we may bear witness to His living presence.

What stays with me most is this simple truth: Jesus is near, even when I do not recognize Him. Mary’s story reassures me that delayed recognition does not mean abandoned faith. Jesus does not shame her confusion; He meets it. He speaks her name. And He sends her forward. Karl Barth once said, “The resurrection is not an idea that can be grasped; it is a person who must be encountered.” That encounter still happens—in Scripture, in prayer, in quiet moments when Christ calls us by name and reorients our vision.

May you, like Mary, discover that the risen Jesus is closer than you expected, calling you out of sorrow and into joyful witness as you walk with Him today.

For further reflection on this passage, see this article from Crossway:
https://www.crossway.org/articles/jesus-appears-to-mary-magdalene-john-20/

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“Where Bones Cannot Speak—But Christ Does”

On Second Thought

There is something unsettling about walking beneath a city and finding yourself surrounded by the bones of its past. The Catacombs of Paris are a somber reminder of human mortality—an underground labyrinth where six million Parisians rest in carefully arranged anonymity. Tourists step down a narrow spiral staircase and into dimly lit corridors lined with femurs and skulls, stacked with symmetry that feels both artistic and tragic. Here, death is not hidden. It is curated, preserved, and displayed.

The tunnels themselves once served a practical purpose—stone quarries that fed the growing city above. But as Parisian cemeteries overflowed in the 18th century, workers exhumed bones and stored them underground. One hundred ninety miles of tunnels twist beneath the capital—twice the length of the metro system. Only one mile is open to the public. Even then, the catacombs have claimed lives. A hospital worker who wandered them alone during the French Revolution vanished into the darkness; his skeleton was found eleven years later.

Many visitors feel unsettled, imagining spirits of the dead haunting the tunnels. Others grow numb to the sights. Nestor Valence, who spent eight years rearranging bones in the catacombs, said, “Touching bones doesn’t bother me anymore. When you start, it’s a bit weird, but it becomes part of the routine.”

Death—even in its most haunting displays—can become ordinary.

But that is where the Christian story breaks sharply from the tunnels beneath Paris. Death may silence the bones of millions, but it could not silence Jesus Christ. And on the morning Mary Magdalene reached the tomb, she found something that no catacomb, no ossuary, no grave in history has ever offered: an empty resting place.

A Tomb Without Bones

John 20 tells the story with breathtaking simplicity. Mary arrives at the tomb expecting to tend to a corpse. Instead, she finds the stone rolled away. Her first instinct, understandably, is confusion. She runs to Peter and John and cries, “They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we do not know where they have laid Him!” (John 20:2).

Mary feared the worst—that His body had been stolen. She was not expecting resurrection. As John later admits, “For as yet they did not understand the Scripture, that He must rise again from the dead.” (John 20:9)

This moment stands in total contrast to the catacombs. If Mary had found Jesus’ bones—lifeless, arranged or rearranged, preserved or crumbling—Christianity would have remained a memory of a good teacher, not the living faith we hold today. The early disciples would have stood before a dead Messiah. Their hope would have ended at the same point as every other religious leader or philosopher: a grave.

Instead, Mary found absence. Loss. Mystery. And then—Jesus Himself.

He speaks her name.
He calls her to trust.
He reveals that death has been defeated—decisively and eternally.

The Hope We Keep Forgetting

The catacombs remind us how easily bones settle into routine. Death becomes “normal” to those who work in its shadows. But the resurrection is God’s bold declaration that death will never become normal again. Not for His children. Not for His Church.

We forget this far too often. We treat spiritual life with routine familiarity. We acknowledge Jesus’ resurrection the way tourists observe stacked bones—more with curiosity than with conviction. But the resurrection is not a museum exhibit to contemplate. It is an earthquake that split history. A declaration that not even the darkest tomb holds authority over God’s purposes.

Mary learned that morning what every believer must learn again and again:
Your Savior is not resting.
Your Redeemer is not silent.
Your Hope is not buried.

Jesus’ tomb is empty because Jesus Himself is alive—gloriously, eternally, sovereignly alive.

Bones That Never Needed Rearranging

Think again of Nestor Valence, spending eight years rearranging bones that had “fallen out of place.” Death demands maintenance. Bodies decay. Graves sink. Bones crumble. Time erases.

But not so with Christ.
No rearranging was needed.
No maintenance of memory.
No preservation of remains.

His body was not misplaced—He was risen.
His bones were not resting—He was reigning.
His life was not over—He had just begun His victory.

This is why the message of Easter reverberates through every season of the year, not only Resurrection Sunday. We live in the light of an everlasting truth: Christ’s resurrection is the guarantee of our salvation. If His body had remained in the grave, Paul writes, “your faith is futile” (1 Corinthians 15:17). But because the tomb is empty, our faith is anchored in a living Redeemer, not a dead hero.

Let the Resurrection Reframe Your Faith

Sometimes, our spiritual lives feel like catacombs—dark, winding, silent, filled with old memories or guilt or fear. Perhaps you feel spiritually lost, much like the hospital worker who wandered those tunnels alone, only to be discovered years later.

But the risen Christ does not leave His followers lost. He comes to them—calling them by name, breaking through their confusion, dispelling their fear, lifting them from darkness into light.

When Mary realized her Lord stood before her alive, everything changed. Her fear turned to joy. Her confusion turned to worship. Her sorrow turned to proclamation.

That is the resurrection’s power.
It lifts the human soul from resignation to renewal.
It replaces routine religion with living hope.
It turns spiritual wandering into resurrection clarity.

And it all begins with an empty tomb—a quiet, unassuming, astonishing truth:
“He is not here, for He is risen.”

On Second Thought…

Maybe today is a day to rethink how you see your faith.
To pause and ask:
Have I grown too familiar with the idea of resurrection?
Has Christ’s victory become routine to me?
Do I walk through life as though my Savior is still buried—or as though He walks beside me?

On second thought, perhaps the empty tomb invites us to renew our sense of wonder.
To remember that our faith is anchored in a Savior who shattered the silence of death.
To live with courage, because He lives with authority.
To hope with confidence, because His promises stand unbroken.
To walk with joy, because the One we follow is alive forevermore.

If Christ is risen, then there is no tunnel too dark, no fear too deep, no burden too heavy, and no sin too binding that He cannot break through.

And He will call your name—just as He called Mary’s.

May the risen Christ draw you closer to Himself today, fill your heart with renewed hope, and refresh your spirit with the reminder that death is defeated, and life in Him is eternal.

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