Sometimes, when I read gospel narratives such as this, I think, “If only I had been there and seen Jesus and his great works with my own eyes, I would have greater faith, or better yet, I would know that he is the Lord, the Son of God, who has power over nature and even over death itself.” But in today’s gospel, the risen Lord appears to Mary Magdalene, and she fails to recognize him until Jesus calls her by name. This suggests an important corrective to my assumption: even though his earliest followers may have seen Jesus perform miracles or even saw Jesus himself having risen from the dead, they still required faith.

The great medieval scholastic theologian St. Thomas Aquinas makes this point in commenting on the appearance of the risen Christ to “doubting Thomas” and the other disciples gathered in the house behind closed doors, which is recounted later in this same chapter of John. (Jn. 20:26-31)

Mary is commanded not to “hold on.” Aquinas develops a mystical interpretation of these words based on Augustine’s notion that touch is a latter, more perfect stage of human knowing beyond the mere seeing of a sensible object. Thus, when the risen Christ enjoins Mary, “Stop holding on to me, for I have not yet ascended to the Father,” what he intends to teach her, according to Aquinas, is that she should not remain satisfied with the moderate degree of faith that she had, believing Jesus to be “a holy man,” rather, she must strive to grow in faith such that she might reach the point, in Aquinas’ words, “of believing that he [Christ] was equal to the Father and one with God.” (lecture 3 on Jn. 20)

Whereas doubting Thomas saw one thing and believed another, we might say, based on Aquinas’s reading, that Mary Magdalene saw and believed one thing and was called to a greater faith. We, too, are called to this greater faith today. Allelujah.