She Thought He Worked There

It is nine o'clock on a Thursday and there is a man in the frozen aisle who knows your name.

He has just used it. Warmly, with a full basket on one arm, and now he is waiting, kindly, while your entire face does the thing your face does. You know him. You absolutely know him. You have known him for six years. He prayed for your mother when she was in hospital, he once carried a table for you across a car park in the rain, and his name is right there, right at the front, filed under a heading you cannot currently read.

The problem is the coat.

He is not in his chair. That is the whole difficulty. In the second row from the back, on the left, half turned so he can see the door, he is instantly and unmistakably himself. Take him out of that chair, put him next to the frozen peas in a navy coat you have never seen before, and he becomes a friendly stranger with your name in his mouth.

Everybody does this. The school gate parent at a wedding. The dentist at a bus stop, out of the white coat and somehow eleven years younger. The woman who cuts your hair, in the queue at the post office, saying hello twice before you get there. Nobody is bad at faces. Everybody is enormously dependent on chairs.

And you will have done the other half of it too, the small heroic performance where you carry the entire conversation without ever once using their name. It is an art form. You can go four minutes on "how have you been", "and how is everyone", "well it is lovely to see you", and then you get to the car and the name arrives immediately, unhelpfully, all by itself, and you sit there with your hands on the wheel saying it out loud to nobody.

That drop in your stomach, the one that is half apology and half embarrassment, is worth holding on to for the next two thousand words. Because it is the doorway into the most important morning in the history of the world, and it is not nearly as strange as it has been made to sound.

It was still dark. There was a man standing in a garden. And the woman who loved Him more than her own life took Him for the man who worked there.

From inside, it did not look like the greatest morning in history

Read John 20 slowly and the first thing that hits you is how little of it feels like a triumph while it is happening.

It is the first day of the week. It is early. Scripture says it plainly: it was yet dark. A woman comes to a grave, which is a thing people do, and finds the stone moved, which is a thing that happens to graves when somebody wants what is inside them. She does not conclude resurrection. She concludes theft, and she runs, and she says so out loud to two men, and they run back with her, and they find the linen clothes lying there and the napkin that had been about His head folded up in a place by itself.

And then they go home. That is in the text. They went home.

She stays. She stands outside the tomb crying, and at some point she stoops down and looks in, and there are two in white sitting where the body had been, one at the head and one at the feet, and they ask her why she is weeping, and she tells them the same thing she told the men. They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid Him.

Then she turns round, and Jesus is standing there, and she does not know that it is Jesus.

Jesus saith unto her, Woman, why weepest thou? whom seekest thou? She, supposing him to be the gardener, saith unto him, Sir, if thou have borne him hence, tell me where thou hast laid him, and I will take him away.John 20:15

Now sit with what that sentence actually contains, because it is one of the tenderest lines in Scripture and it is regularly read too fast.

She is in a garden, before sunrise, in the worst week of her life. There is a man on his feet nearby at an hour when only one sort of man is on his feet in a garden. She has come to finish a job that grief gives people to do, and it has been made impossible, and here is somebody who might know where things have been moved to. She asks the practical question. She is not being slow. She is reasoning correctly from everything she can see, in the dark, with her face wet, and the conclusion she reaches is the sensible one.

You have a Lord who does not require you to identify Him correctly before He speaks to you. Scripture has Him opening the conversation while she still thinks she is talking to the groundsman, and He asks her what she wants rather than telling her who He is, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes that piece of manners and presses it into a person who assumes God is waiting for them to work something out first.

Recognition came by name, not by working it out

Here is the thing the passage refuses to let us have. Mary does not solve it. Nobody in that garden reasons their way to Easter.

What changes everything is one word, and the word is hers.

He says her name. That is all. Scripture gives us the whole turn in about six syllables: He saith unto her, Mary. She turned herself, and said unto Him, Rabboni. The evidence did not improve. The light did not come up. He simply used her name, in the voice she had heard use it a hundred times, and the woman who had just been talking to a gardener was on the ground in front of her risen Lord.

You were never expected to arrive at Him by deduction. It is written that His sheep hear His voice and He calls them by name, which is not a description of clever sheep, and the Holy Spirit is the one who does in a heart what the sound of that name did in a garden.

So the mistake in the dark is not the embarrassing part of the story. It is the load bearing part. It tells us the tomb was a real place with real light conditions, that grief was doing to her exactly what grief does, and that the resurrection was not a bright idea somebody had. It was a person, standing on grass, at an hour when reasonable people assume the only man about is the one who works there.

You are not disqualified from encountering God by a morning that looks like nothing at all. Scripture put the greatest event in human history in a dark garden with one crying woman and a case of mistaken identity, and the Holy Spirit is the one who whispers that your unremarkable Tuesday is exactly the sort of morning He has form for.

And notice what He does with her tears. He does not tell her to stop. His first question is why she is weeping, and His second is who she is looking for, and both of them are invitations to say out loud what she wants.

You have a Savior who asks you what you are looking for before He tells you what He has done. John 20:15 is a question, not a correction, and the Holy Spirit is the one who keeps that tone alive in a heart that has always expected the Lord to open with a rebuke.