A kind of heavenly astonishment

The diarist John Evelyn was delighted to spend four days in 1680 locked up with Charles II’S library in the private apartments of Whitehall palace. He saw paintings there, too, by Raphael and Titian, but admired none more than a panel painted by Hans Holbein of Mary Magdalen encountering Jesus after his Resurrection. “I never saw so much reverence and a kind of heavenly astonishment in a picture,” he declared.

We can tell what he means by contemplating the same picture, which is now on show at the Royal Academy in London as part of its blockbuster Charles I exhibition. It is there because it had belonged to Charles I’s wife Henrietta Maria. A painting of a modest size, 2ft 6in across, it would have been easy to accommodate in a private bedchamber as an aid to devotion. The picture was added by their son Charles to his own collection after the Restoration. It now belongs to the Queen.

Even the detail, below, hints at what Evelyn meant. Mary Magdalen is caught in the act of turning round, taken by surprise. Her face is half in shadow for she had come to this place early in the day, while it was still dark, according to St John the Evangelist, who gives a narrative as full of feeling as any painter could wish. She is in a garden, as indicated by the tree behind her, a hawthorn, as Evelyn, an expert on trees, would have been able to tell. In this garden Jesus had been buried the day before last, in a tomb sealed by a big stone.

Mary is upset. She has been through a series of bewildering events since the crucifixion of the man she had learnt to love and follow. Crucifixion, we need no telling, is a loathsome and distressing sight to witness. But Mary had come to anoint the dead body of Jesus, which is why she is carrying the handsome pot that Holbein clearly enjoyed depicting. Yet she has found the stone taken away from the sepulchre and no sign of Jesus. After running to tell Peter and John, “They have taken away the Lord out of the sepulchre, and we know not where they have laid him,” she has returned to the tomb weeping. This time she sees two angels sitting inside, who ask why she is crying. “They have taken away my Lord,” she says again. One can hear her grief and frustration.

It is at this moment, the moment caught by Holbein, that “she turned herself back” and saw Jesus standing there, alive. She does not recognise him at once, taking him for the gardener. It is only when he speaks her name, “Mary”, that she knows him and answers: “Rabboni.” It is a word, meaning master or teacher, that the Evangelist leaves in the Aramaic in which it was spoken.

Mary Magdalen is the first person recorded to have seen Jesus alive again after his death on the cross. As a story it possesses beguiling power. But Christians, when tomorrow they hear the account by St John read in church, will take it as more than a story. For them it is the essence of Easter.

Certainly other tellings of Mary Magdalen’s story have fallen lamentably short of the Gospel’s force. Holbein would hardly have been inspired to paint the Magdalen of Jesus Christ Superstar, or even of Garth Davis’s new film, let alone the farragoes of the Dan Brown tendency. It seems the sparer the narrative, the more space there is for the central “heavenly astonishment” of the Resurrection to breath.

For the world that does not believe as Mary Magdalen did, there are still truths that hold. That it is good to be a woman who stays bravely when the men have run away. That it is not hoping against hope that wins through but doing what can be done: just bringing a jar to anoint a dead body. We grow used to the renewal of life in spring and new generations. We should not grow used to the idea that horrors such as those of Syria, the prime example now, can never give way to a resurrection. If something can be done for its people and refugees, we must do it, though it is still dark.

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