On Being Found

We listened to a tremendous (as usual) Tim Keller sermon as a team last night, based on John 20:11-18, the passage where Mary comes to the empty tomb. As he points out in the sermon, Mary is weeping, lost, bewildered, and thinks she has been abandoned. She is aggressively ready to fight for the missing body in spite of her grief. But in reality she has just seen two angels, she is walking through the scene of the greatest miracle of all time, and she is speaking to the Lord. It is not until Jesus calls her name that her eyes are opened to reality. Mary. Just that word, and the entire scene for her changes. Instead of despairingly pleading to fix the burial/spice/location-of-the-body problem . . she is suddenly clinging so tightly to her friend Jesus that he has to tell her to let go!

How much of our lives to we miss? What looks like a bleak road or a disastrous outcome, like loneliness or opposition, may turn out to be the presence of Jesus. Our expectations blur our perception of reality. Grasping for what we think we need, or for what we sense to be our role, we may be missing the whole picture. Like Job and his so- called friends, we completely miss the reality of what is happening, because we assume God to be small or absent, we misread the signs, we operate in the wrong context.

May we all hear our name spoken in love, know who we are and where we are, have the veil rent to see the truth of God's unassuming and gentle walk into our lives. May we be, like Mary, called by grace.