On 7/22, Vicky G. provides an interesting and thoughtful take on Mary Magdalene hanging around Jesus’ tomb that fateful Sunday morning:
I have pondered the “letting go”passage many times. The Bible tells us it is wrong to go to fortune tellers and spiritualists. We are not to know the future or attempt to contact the dead. In the Old Testament, Saul goes to the departed Samuel through a “fortune teller” who can contact the dead. I think that passage has a direct relation to what Jesus is saying here. Mary wasn’t using a tarot card reader or spiritualist, but she was “not letting go.” Maybe she was convinced Jesus would pop out of the grave like Lazarus and life would go on as before, or maybe she was determined to hang about the tomb for as long as it took for her to have Jesus back in the same form and life that He had just given up. She needed to “let Him go” and move onto the next step, not live in the past and expectation of yesterday returning. For her sake, she needed to put that part of her life in the “experience box” or the “gift box” of her mind and accept the new path God was offering her. None of us know the path ahead no matter what our past has been or who it has been with, but we need to use it toward a Godly future. Letting go of our desire to “have” our past and not pining over the life and feelings of what was with the people no longer sharing it here on this earth allows us to take their memory and the memory of what we learned from with them into a future that will be very different than our past. If we use what we’ve learned and felt in the right way, not in a blind search for what was, our future can be a new relationship with our past, and ultimately our future for the Glory of God.
How are we not “letting go” in our lives? What might we do not to dwell so much in the past, looking forward instead to our glorious future in communion with God?
