After his Resurrection, Jesus showed himself first to Mary of Magdala. But his disconcerting words to her are usually misunderstood. In fact, they reveal the heart of the Easter mystery
Scholarship has rescued the reputation of Mary of Magdala from repentant prostitute to Apostle to the Apostles, and Pope Francis has elevated the memorial of St Mary Magdalene, traditionally observed on 22 July, to the status of a feast day. But few have probed into one aspect of her story, the puzzling words of Jesus to her when she discovers him risen from the tomb, usually repeated in their Latin form, Noli me tangere (John 20:17). That was Jerome’s translation in the Vulgate, rendered “Touch me not” in the King James version, and so perpetuated in popular memory. We tend to slide over the phrase, because of the difficulty of making sense of it.
Jesus continues: “… for I have not yet ascended to the Father; but go to my brethren and say to them, I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.” With these words, we are so carried away with joy and relief that we overlook the enigma of the preceding words. But is it not a surprising thing to say “Touch me not”, at a moment of such tender intimacy? When I invited a group of Catholic theologians to write down what they thought it meant, one scribbled: “It’s kind of brutal – surely all we would want to do is cling to him.”
It is all the more surprising considering that just 10 verses later Jesus says to Thomas exactly the opposite: “Reach out your hand and put it in my side.” Why should Thomas be urged to touch him, and Mary of Magdala forbidden to do so? It is all very well for Raymond Brown, Catholicism’s eminent Scripture scholar, to claim that these two sayings of Jesus “have nothing to do with each other”. They occur in the same gospel, in the same chapter, in the same context of turning the despair of bereavement into the joy of recovery. The fifteenth-century artist Martin Schongauer, whose painting of the Noli me tangere features on our cover, placed a parallel painting of Doubting Thomas next to it on his altarpiece.
