.....remember

Jesus saith unto her, Mary. She turned herself, and saith unto him, Rabboni; which is to say, Master John 20:16

The thief asked only to be remembered. Three days later, a woman standing in a garden found out what it meant to be remembered by name. Mary Magdalene had been delivered from deep bondage. Jesus had cast seven devils out of her, and from that day she followed Him and served Him from what she had. She stayed near the cross when most of the disciples had fled. Before dawn on the first day of the week she came to the tomb, found it empty, and could think of only one thing: someone had taken His body. She stood outside weeping. When a man asked why she was crying, she took Him for the gardener.

One might ask, “Why didn’t she recognize Him?” Grief had narrowed her sight to a grave. She had come looking for a dead Master to care for, not a living Lord to worship. Her test was not whether she would obey, endure or confess. It was whether sorrow would keep her facing the tomb. Then Jesus said a single word: her name. He gave no explanation and no proof, only “Mary,” spoken the way He had always spoken it. She turned, and in that turning the empty tomb went from the worst news of her life to the best.

Ellen White explains why love, not duty, drives a heart like hers: “When, as erring, sinful beings, we come to Christ and become partakers of His pardoning grace, love springs up in the heart” Steps to Christ, p. 59. Mary’s tears at the tomb, her spices, her early rising were not religious obligation. They were the love that grace had planted in a woman who had been set free.

The thief shows that grace receives us with empty hands. Mary shows what grace grows in those hands: a love that seeks Jesus even when it thinks He is gone. And Jesus honors that love. The first person to see the risen Lord was not a priest or an apostle but a forgiven woman who refused to leave the garden.

The thief teaches us that Jesus remembers us. Mary teaches us that He knows us by name, and that when we are weeping toward the wrong place, one word from Him is enough to turn us around.