It was just starting to turn light. A group of women were going to the tomb of Jesus (we aren't sure exactly how many there were; three are named, but there were probably a couple more). Some, if not all of them, had followed Joseph of Arimathea, Nicodemus, and the disciples as they took the body of Jesus to bury it in Joseph of Arimathea's tomb. The woman in the group whom we want to keep our eyes on is the most famous of them all: Mary from the small fishing village of Magdala, which is tucked in along the Sea of Galilee. She's known simply as Mary Magdalene. We’ll focus on her because as it turned out, she was the first human being to see Jesus alive again!

According to one of the gospel accounts, the women discussed who would roll away the stone that was across the entrance of the tomb. We can speculate that they were also bracing themselves emotionally for the somber business of tucking spices around Jesus' body, which was the reason for their early morning visit to His tomb. What would they be feeling and thinking once they were inside the tomb? They never had a chance to find out. As for Mary Magdalene, what became important to her that morning wasn’t what she thought inside the tomb with the dead body of Jesus; it was what she thought outside the tomb, facing the resurrected Jesus!

THINKING OUTSIDE THE BOX/
THINKING OUTSIDE THE TOMB
The women were committed followers of Jesus. They had allowed Him to influence their lives like no other person had. They put all of their hopes in Him and had given Him all of their fears. Now all of that had changed catastrophically. Jesus had been crucified, and now He lay dead in a borrowed tomb. The future must have seemed empty, as if there were no future at all.

Then it happened, outside that tomb in which Jesus had been buried — and it happened first to Mary Magdalene. She met the resurrected Jesus outside the tomb!

Thinking outside the box can be revolutionary, and it’s a worthy aim. It means looking at things from a fresh perspective, considering things in a new way. It means not being confined to the way we've always thought before. That morning, what Mary Magdalene thought outside the tomb would change her life forever!

ALL ABOUT MARY MAGDALENE
Who was Mary Magdalene? After another Mary, the mother of Jesus, Mary Magdalene is the most famous woman in the New Testament.

Mary's life had been turned around by Jesus. Her life had been a disaster, lived in the shadowy, frightening, bizarre world of the demonic. Luke, a physician who wrote a gospel account of Jesus' life, referred to “Mary (called Magdalene) from whom seven demons had come out;” (Luke 8:2). Luke went on to state (referring to Jesus and His disciples) that Mary Magdalene, with several other women, “were helping to support them out of their own means.” (Luke 8:3) As an itinerant preacher, Jesus and His disciples apparently were supported financially in a significant way by contributions from Mary Magdalene and some other women.

Mary was one of the people who witnessed Jesus' crucifixion and death: “Some women were watching from a distance. Among them were Mary Magdalene, . . .” (Mark 15:40) She was also a witness to His burial, knowing what was to be His final resting place: ”Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of Joses saw where he was laid.” (Mark 15:47)

Mary Magdalene went down in history as the first human to see Jesus alive again after His crucifixion and burial. It’s interesting that a woman was the first person to witness the resurrected Jesus. When I mentioned in last Wednesday's mid-week E-mail Update that I’d be speaking today about Mary Magdalene’s seeing the resurrected Jesus, one of our deaconesses e-mailed me back: “The first person to see Him alive again – a woman. He knew the news would travel fast.” (I didn't write that; a sister in Christ did!)

The fact that Mary Magdalene, a woman, was the first witness of the resurrection is another piece of the proof that the gospels are authentic, historically accurate accounts — not just some fanciful story. Anyone who made up a story about someone’s being raised from the dead — and who wanted people to believe it — would never have said that a woman was the first witness, because women weren't considered legal (or at least not reputable) witnesses in those days. It’s recorded that a woman named Mary Magdalene was the first person to see the resurrected Jesus because that's the way it happened!

MARY THOUGHT OUTSIDE THE TOMB
At one point on what we call Easter morning, Mary Magdalene found herself alone at the empty tomb. She and the other women had seen the empty tomb and had gotten the disciples and they too had seen it. Everyone had left the tomb area except Mary. She stood there, weeping; then she glanced back into the empty tomb and saw two angelic visitors in it. She turned and saw a man standing by her. Through tear-filled eyes and with grief-stricken thinking, she thought the man was the gardener when in fact it was Jesus. She still wasn't truly thinking outside the tomb!

Then Jesus called her by name: “Mary.”

She suddenly recognized Him, and apparently she reached out to embrace Him. Jesus said something to her that at first seems strange: “Do not hold on to me, for I have not yet returned to the Father. Go instead to my brothers and tell them, 'I am returning to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’” (John 20:17)

Why wouldn’t Jesus want Mary to embrace Him like a long-lost brother? A week later He invited doubting Thomas to touch Him; why not Mary? Most scholars agree that Jesus wanted Mary to understand that things had changed: He had changed and so had His relationship with her and all His followers. The old ways of relating to Jesus no longer applied; He was now in His resurrected form.

Jesus continued to relate to His followers for the next forty days, until He ascended to heaven, but He didn’t relate to them in the same old, familiar ways. Before, He had lived among them; He had slept under the stars with His disciples. He had needed to rest and sleep, like they did. He traveled from place to place as they did: by putting one sandaled foot ahead of the other.

In one post-resurrection appearance, Jesus suddenly appeared in a locked room where His disciples had gathered privately out of fear of the authorities, and He disappeared as quickly as He had appeared. He didn’t just “hang around” with the disciples. He made very specific appearances, but He was absent from their presence a majority of the time, apparently shuttling back and forth between earth and heaven until His final ascension, which all of the disciples witnessed, at the end of forty days.

Things were different now. Jesus was alive again; He had risen and He was gloriously different! His life on the other side of the tomb had been a life incarnated in human flesh, like our flesh. Now He was resurrected with a new body: the same type that we'll have someday as His followers. Jesus wasn’t just back to His old self! Mary had to think outside the box. Jesus’ body wasn’t confined to a tomb, as a physical body would have to be. This was His resurrected body! Mary had to start thinking outside the tomb, and so do we!

THINKING OUTSIDE THE TOMB
One of our greatest challenges when it comes to Jesus is thinking outside the box: outside the tomb. He’s much, much more than we can possibly imagine. There’s no way we can fully embrace all that He is, yet we try to confine Jesus to our small way of thinking.

Throughout the last two thousand years people have tried to portray Jesus in paintings, and artists have come up with an amazing the variety of looks for Him. We have paintings where He has a Middle-Ages look because the paintings were done during the Middle Ages. We have paintings where Jesus has light skin and brown hair, like those of us of European descent. There are paintings of Him as a black or Asian man, when in fact He was 100% Jewish and undoubtedly had a fairly dark complexion and black hair.

We imagine Him to be — well, the way it’s most convenient for Him to be for us! Philip Yancey, in his book The Jesus I Never Knew, wrote, “The Cuban government distributes a painting of Jesus with a carbine slung over his shoulder. During the wars of religion with France, the English used to shout, ‘The pope is French but Jesus Christ is English!’” Yancey went on, “Athletes come up with creative portrayals of Jesus that elude modern scholarship. Norm Evans, a former Miami Dolphins lineman, wrote in his book On God’s Squad, ‘I guarantee you Christ would be the toughest guy who ever played this game. . . . If He were alive today I would picture a six-foot-six-inch 260-pound defensive tackle who would always make the big plays and would be hard to keep out of the backfield for offensive linemen like myself. . . .’ Fritz Peterson, a former New York Yankee, more easily fancies Jesus in a baseball uniform: ‘I firmly believe that if Jesus Christ was sliding into second base, He would knock the second baseman into left field to break up the double play. Christ might not throw a spitball, but He would play hard within the rules.’” (The Jesus I Never Knew, Philip Yancey, p.19)

Imagining what Jesus is like turns out to be the ultimate Rorschach ink blot test: the test where you look at an ink blot and imagine what it is. It's really nothing in and of itself; what you say it is tells the counselor a lot more about who you are than what the ink blot is, and that's the point. When someone says, “I imagine Jesus to be . . .” you can rest assured that you're getting a much clearer idea of who that person is than of what Jesus is! Jesus isn’t who we imagine Him to be; He is who He is!

We can’t put Jesus into a box! We can’t contain Him by our thoughts of Him. He’s wild! In C.S. Lewis' classic book The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe the lion Aslan is the allegorical Christ figure. In the story Susan and Lucy talk to Mr. and Mrs. Beaver (who were real beavers) about Aslan.

“Ooh!” said Susan, “I'd thought he was a man. Is he – quite safe? I shall feel rather nervous about meeting a lion.”

“That you will, Dearie, and no mistake,” said Mrs. Beaver. “If there's anyone who can appear before Aslan without their knees knocking, they're either braver than most or else silly.”

“Then he isn't safe?” said Lucy.

“Safe?” said Mr. Beaver. “Don't you hear what Mrs. Beaver tells you? Who said anything about safe? 'Course he isn't safe. But he's good. He's the King, I tell you.”

We can’t tame Jesus, confining who He is to our thoughts of Him. He won’t conform to our image of Him; He demands that we conform to who He really is!

GRASPING THE TRUTH
Jesus didn't want Mary Magdalene to embrace Him. She thought she had her old Jesus back, but that was something she couldn't have. She wanted to hold on to the old Jesus, the Jesus she knew on the other side of that tomb. He was risen now, on this side of the tomb, and He was much more than she could possibly imagine! She had seen Jesus as her healer, her friend, her teacher, and maybe her Messiah. However, Jesus didn't end up being some dead teacher or long-gone model of how to live. He’s risen! He’s alive! Like Mary Magdalene and Jesus' other followers, we need to try to grasp what it all means now that He’s risen.

There’s a story about a young psychiatrist who was making his first rounds in a psychiatric hospital. He visited a man who told him, “I’m Napoleon.”

“That’s very interesting,” said the psychiatrist. “Who told you that?”

“God told me,” replied the patient.

Immediately the patient in the next bed exclaimed, “I most certainly did not!”

When Jesus was raised from the dead He authenticated who He had claimed to be during His three years of active ministry: the Savior of the world, the Lord of all. He was a great teacher, healer, and model of a human being, but now that He has risen everyone needs to grasp that He’s much, much more!

He’s our way to God. He died for us, and we’re to accept Him as our Savior. He’s the rightful ruler of the universe, and He deserves to rule our lives, too. He is to be our Lord. When it comes to Jesus, we need to think outside the box; we need to think outside the tomb!