Whoever thinks the bible is boring and old fashioned, probably hasn’t read very much of the bible. Today’s first reading for Mass from the Song of Songs is pretty racy:
“The bride says: On my bed at night I sought him whom my heart loves – I sought him but I did not find him. I will rise then and go about the city; in the streets and crossings I will seek Him whom my heart loves. I sought him but I did not find him. The watchmen came upon me, as they made their rounds of the city; Have you seen him whom my heart loves? I had hardly left them when I found him whom my heart loves.”
This reading is fitting because today is the Feast of Saint Mary Magdalene. Some people believe that she may have been a prostitute before her conversion. This reading depicts in a beautiful way, how Mary Magdalene found Jesus and came to love him. It is a beautiful reading.
Sometimes, women who are prostitutes or promiscuous actually have a very low self esteem. Jesus had this amazing way of looking beyond all of the superficial things about a person though, including the sins on their soul, and saw their inner beauty instead. If Mary Magdalene was indeed a prostitute, then Jesus was the only man that she had ever encountered that showed her what real love was. She didn’t know what genuine love really was, until she had a personal encounter with Jesus Christ.
We need to learn to do this better ourselves. Look through the sins and the surface aspects of people and see the inner beauty of their soul. That’s really hard to do sometimes, but those who succeed at doing this, become like Jesus Christ. Mother Theresa became a saint by doing this with the sick and dying. She looked through everything else; the dirt, filth, sins, religion, etc. and saw only Jesus reflected in the faces of the poor.
The morals in our modern world has also deteriorated a lot in the past 100 years. There are a lot of single men and women who do not really know what genuine love is, and they seek love in temporary, fleeting relationships. Some people spend their entire lives looking for love and never find it.
The definition of real love though, is to seek the ultimate good of another person. This was the absolute essence of Jesus Christ. This simple statement applies to every relationship in our lives today too, not just the romantic relationships. Do we really seek the good of the other person? Or mainly what is good for us?
We’ve all heard the story about Mary Magdalene going to Jesus’s tomb on Easter morning, crying her eyes out with grief over his death, many times. Her grief turned to joy when she realized Jesus was alive. But there might still be a little something we may have missed …
Remember when the gospel said that Mary thought the newly risen Christ was the gardener? She didn’t recognize him. All she saw was his outward, physical appearance, until he spoke to her.
The same thing happened with the disciples who encountered Christ when they were traveling to Emmaus. They didn’t recognize Jesus’s physical appearance either, but only knew him in the breaking of the bread.
And when Jesus appeared to his disciples on the shores of the lake of Tiberias, they didn’t recognize him either. They only knew it was Jesus when he told them to put their nets out, and they caught a huge net full of fish.
Today’s scriptures for Mass are a powerful lesson that people are not what they seem to be, by only looking at their outward appearance. We are all as different from one another as our fingerprints, but we are also a unique human being inside too. The beautiful and eternal part of our souls, is the true treasure each one of us carries within us. Jesus loves this part of us, the person that no one else really knows very well. You can live with a person a lifetime and still not really know them. One detail about their life, discovered many years down the road can change your entire perspective of who that person really is.
Jesus knows the entire story of our lives, and understands us, like no one else ever will. It is important to remember that Jesus sees through it all. He sees through the image that we project to others, our secrets, our brokenness, our faults and imperfections. But it is a beautiful thing that He loves us just as deeply as He did Mary Magdalene. That is the beautiful thing about Jesus’s apostles too, they were not perfect either. Perhaps Jesus chose them, including Mary Magdalene, for this reason, so we would know that we do not have to be perfect either, for Him to love us.
Jesus accepts us for who we are, right now in this very moment – and He loves us completely and unconditionally.
