When I was about eight years old, my paternal grandfather teased me playfully with a question: Did Adam have a belly button? He—Val, my grandfather—was neither a philosopher nor theologian, but his question travelled with me for years. I long ago gave up the quest for the Adamic Umbilicus, but I took up the invitation to go on the occasional flight of fancy, to speculate a little when it came to matters of life and faith and belief.
We all do this, I imagine: wonder about what was, or what will be. Not that it proves anything, but top-of-the-line in the speculation stakes (based only on my unscientific research) is the question of what it’s like to die. It’s unanswerable, of course, because near enough is not good enough: being under anaesthetic for hours or being successfully resuscitated don’t count because the situation was reversible. For some people, this is where speculation and wondering end. If God is eliminated from the equation, and all that is, is now, then that’s the end of the enquiry. Anything further is a waste of time. Adam’s navel is neither here nor there. It simply doesn’t matter.
However: I maintain that our wondering, and our speculation are authorised, even encouraged by the scriptures that we hold dear, without which there is nothing to say. Even stronger, that our pondering and imagining are required, because we have been invited into the open mystery that is the Gospel, not to solve it or tame it, but to experience its power.
St John’s Easter narrative is spare, a bit light on detail, yet profound nonetheless. The cast of characters is limited: Mary Magdalene, the enigmatic and often misrepresented figure who steps in and out of various stories in all four Gospels; Peter and the ‘Beloved Disciple’, the latter the faster runner of the two, the former, more impetuous; two-bit players, ‘angels in white’ (not seen by Peter and the BD); and The Gardener. The very setting—‘a garden in the place where he was crucified…[where] there was a new tomb’—is deeply symbolic when the detail is examined. This wondering, this exploration, is after all, an invitation found at the start of this Gospel: ‘Come and see’ (two key verbs in John’s Gospel) is Jesus’ invitation in chapter 1 to Andrew and Simon Peter, an invitation soon repeated by Philip to Nathanael. It seems to me that we’re meant to speculate, informed and guided by the scriptures and traditions held dear by the Church. If we don’t test the waters using the measures we have been given, then other voices will prevail.
Sometimes the speculation can be very basic, almost banal: did Mary think Jesus was ‘the gardener’ (the perfectly ordinary ancient and modern Greek word for the same, κηπουρός) because of the way he was dressed (straw hat and all)? Because of the garden setting? Or because her vision was blurred? All of the above? Or was there more to it, a genuine confusion, a collapse of confidence and a lack of recognition? What turned the situation around?
Whatever ‘heaven’ may—once we have jettisoned all of the clutter and rubbish that have distorted our understanding and even made the idea repellent to some—at its most fundamental it must be where/with the living person of Jesus Christ. (The ‘where’ question remains a difficulty for many, no doubt.) While the destination may be uncertain and lacking in detail (‘place’ is so important to us as embodied creatures), the company we shall keep is not in doubt: ‘In my Father’s house’, said Jesus, ‘there are many dwelling places. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you?’ The proposition goes on: ‘And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, so that where I am, there you may be also.’
But if there is room for all, how will I fare in the company of so many, the vast, unnumbered redeemed? Will I, in this myriad of people, all of whom have been welcomed by the risen Christ, recognise him, or will I mistake him for some other worthy? After all, I have only a lifetime’s worth of collected mental images of the Jesus of history (as some scholars like to style him), ranging from the Nordic Jesus (blond, blue-eyed) through to squat, unprepossessing figures generated by computer algorithms. Will I be lost in the crowd? And how will I recognise those whom I love and for whom I hope to seek; what will they—and I—look like? These are all real questions that I have heard (and there will be others), but ultimately, they are misconceived because they rely on what I think I know and the ways in which I have shaped both reality and expectation.
But let’s return to Mary: what enabled the moment of recognition and in an instant upended her world, and the world itself? It was not sight—she thought him the gardener, quite reasonably, after all. It was the calling of her name that shifted the ground. The moment is recorded by John with great economy: ‘Jesus said to her, “Mariam”.’ We’re free to try to speak her name in a variety of ways—there is no need to be bound by the editors’ decision to end the sentence with an exclamation mark, which could suggest that it was spoken with a degree of abruptness, like a slap to a hysterical person. (There is no such punctuation mark in the ancient texts.) My speculation, however, is that it was an almost-whispered, tender shaping of her name, nobody else’s. Mary—Mariam—responded to the risen Jesus’s speaking her name, to his knowing who she was; not the other way around. Only then did the mistaken identity fall away and the cry of recognition followed: Rabbouni! (which does, perhaps, warrant an exclamation mark).
The risen Jesus, whom John carefully describes as raised from the dead, embodied, the same yet different, but still bearing the marks of his passion (proudly, I conclude), is no mere metaphor, no ‘spiritual’ or ‘psychic’ or ‘symbolic’ experience, but the one returned from amongst the dead, having shared completely our condition in order to take us to his Father’s house. How, then, will it go when the time comes? My poor speculation is that I and you, and all for whom we long to be reunited in Christ—will, like Mariam, be ‘called by name’ and we will ‘know his voice’, just as he promised when describing himself as the Good Shepherd. We, the sheep of his pasture, will follow him ‘because they—we—know his voice’. The Magdalene was misled by her ability to see, but by means of the calling of her name attained to recognition. In the end, I speculate that Christ’s knowing of us is far more important than our as-yet imperfect knowledge of him.
Martin Luther, when contemplating his death, made a confident and compelling (if speculative) statement: ‘On the Last Day’, he said, ‘Christ shall knock upon my headstone and say, “Awake, brother Martin—be up and doing!”’.
Adam’s navel aside, I speculate that, when the moment comes, Christ will speak to each of us by name, with joyous, loving and unquestionable recognition to follow.