Buddhism and Christianity

Easter: Don’t Cling

The Gospel of John tells the Easter story in this fashion (John 20:1-18):

Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene came to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed from the tomb.... Mary stood weeping outside the tomb. As she wept, she bent over to look into the tomb; and she saw two angels in white, sitting where the body of Jesus had been lying, one at the head and the other at the feet. They said to her, "Woman, why are you weeping?" She said to them, "They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him." When she had said this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not know that it was Jesus. Jesus said to her, "Woman, why are you weeping? Whom are you looking for?" Supposing him to be the gardener, she said to him, "Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away." Jesus said to her, "Mary!" She turned and said to him in Hebrew, "Rabbouni!" (which means Teacher). Jesus said to her, "Do not hold on to me, because I have not yet ascended to the Father. But go to my brothers and say to them, `I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.'" Mary Magdalene went and announced to the disciples, "I have seen the Lord"; and she told them that he had said these things to her.

All four canonical gospels attest that Mary Magdalene witnessed Jesus’s crucifixion. The three synoptics, Matthew, Mark, and Luke say she was present at his burial. Matthew alone says she remained after the burial, that she kept vigil at his tomb. All four gospels say she was the first witness to the resurrection. In fact, Mary Magdalene came to be known as “the apostle to the apostles.” It’s remarkable, given the diminished status of women in later Christian tradition, to hear the unanimous testimony of the gospel writers that it was a woman who was the first witness to the resurrection.

Who was Mary Magdalene? Episcopal priest and mystic Cynthia Bourgeault has a fine book I’ve been reading this week, The Meaning of Mary Magdalene: Discovering the Woman at the Heart of Christianity. Bourgeault asks a provocative question: “How do you feel about the possibility that Jesus had a human beloved?”

Cynthia Bourgeault argues, and I think convincingly, that Mary Magdalene was Jesus’s beloved partner, perhaps his sexual partner. I have to acknowledge that before reading Bourgeault I’d not very deeply thought about a special relationship between Jesus and Mary Magdalene, The DaVinci Code notwithstanding. Maybe it’s like thinking about your parents having sex: you just don’t think about it, until you do! I am rolling this grenade down the aisle in part to wake you up, but more importantly to invite you into a fresh look at the resurrection.

This meeting between Jesus and Mary Magdalene is one of the most beautiful moments in the entire New Testament. It is a reunion of two people who love each other. It was, Bourgeault rightly says, love that was standing at the cross, love following the body to the tomb, love waiting in vigil, and love hearing her own name called, “Mary.” In the noncanonical, so called “gnostic” gospels of Thomas, Phillip, and Mary Magdalene (yes, she had her own gospel), Bourgeault says Mary has “the deepest understanding of Jesus’s teaching, is best able to live out what she understands, and has an ongoing relationship with Jesus in visionary realms.” (37) This is to say that Mary Magdalene, of all the disciples, is the one that really “gets” Jesus.

In a somewhat striking coincidence, this Easter Sunday happened to be my sixtieth birthday, and oddly, though I have been a priest for thirty-four years, I’d never preached on Easter day, until this year. At one level this is because my vocation has been as a pastoral psychotherapist and not as priest-in-charge of a parish. But at another level, it’s only now that I can speak at a deeper level from direct knowledge of divine love and Jesus’s presence. This is what Phillip Moffitt calls “knowing that you know.”

Here’s what I now know. When you can be unconditionally present to the full flame of longing, without trying to change it or make it go away, simply allowing it to be as it is, waiting without resisting or grasping, in its own time something will begin to shift. When you then let go of the object of your longing while remaining present in your body to longing’s full intensity, an inner alchemy takes place. What arises in that alchemy is a resonance with unseen realms, realms that go by the names of Presence, Emptiness, Love, Compassion. In that alchemy is access to what the poet Dante called “the love that moves the sun and the other stars.”

This love, this compassionate empty fullness, is the connective tissue of the universe - it is what binds everything together. Access to this love comes through full awareness of the power of longing and clinging, knowing in the body the felt sense of this longing and clinging, resting in the willingness to let these felt energies of longing and clinging just be, then watching how the longing and clinging, in their own time, let go into the lightening and warming that is love. In Mary Magdalene’s meeting with Jesus in John’s gospel, we see the shape of her enlightenment taking place.

We can hear Jesus in this encounter, and the Buddha in his teaching, both saying: don’t hold on, don’t cling. For the Buddha, the whole of the dharma is knowing clinging and non-clinging, grasping and non-grasping. Medieval and renaissance depictions of the Easter reunion between Jesus and Mary Magdalene are titled Noli me tangere, Latin for “don’t hold on to me.” There’s the whole teaching, the whole transmission in a phrase: don’t cling. Don’t hold on.

I think Mary Magdalene knew the full intensity of this longing to cling, and she knew from her teacher Jesus the practice of egoic emptying, of letting be and letting go. In her empty unknowing following his death, some miracle took place. Out of this very emptiness and not-knowing she met him that first Easter morning in a different realm of ongoing, non-dying connection. She knew the love that does not die, the love that is stronger than death. Because of the intensity of her connection with Jesus, Mary Magdalene is rightly the first witness to his ongoing life, the mystery we call the resurrection. All she had to do was hear her name, and in flash, she was connected. Because of her profound love, and her willingness to follow him in his way of self-emptying, we’re telling this story two thousand years later.