by Joan Mitchell, CSJ
In the art on this page Fra Angelico paints the key moment in Mary Magdalene’s encounter with Jesus on Easter morning. The scene takes place in a garden sprinkled with flowers. Mary Magdalene recognizes that the man she supposes to be the gardener is her teacher, Jesus, risen from the dead. The artist expresses the change in her perceptions by picturing Jesus with a gardener’s hoe on his shoulder and a halo around his head. His feet show nail marks from his crucifixion.
In this scene (John 20.11-18), Peter and the beloved disciple have left the empty tomb; Mary Magdalene stays, grieving. She brings to the Easter encounter a wholehearted commitment to Jesus that intensifies her grief and loss.
In the tomb two angels sit at head and foot of the place where Jesus’ body had lain. Like the seraphim atop the Ark of the Covenant, the angels enthrone the emptiness as divine presence.
In their encounter Jesus affirms that his relationship with his disciples will endure. He tells Mary, “Don’t hold onto me because I have not yet ascended to the Father, but go to my brothers and sisters and say to them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’”
In these two parallel phrases Jesus reveals that we share his inseparable relationship with his Father. Sister Terese Okure, a professor at the Catholic Institute of West Africa in Port Harcourt, Nigeria, builds her sense of who Jesus is for us today on Jesus’ words to Mary Magdalene. We are children of the same God and Father. Jesus entrusts us to one another as his brothers and sisters who can live together, following his way of love and forgiveness.
“The risen Jesus entrusted to Mary Magdalene, a woman, the foundational message of the resurrection for the entire group of believers, namely, that they are now children of God and hence brothers and sisters to him and to one another,” Sister Terese writes.
- What do you see in Fra Angelico’s art?
