The encounter between Jesus and Mary Magdalene in John 20 contains an urgency that is easy to overlook. Mary has just recognized Jesus. Her despair instantly turns into overwhelming relief, and naturally she clings to him. Yet Jesus does not allow the reunion to continue. He interrupts it almost immediately:
“Do not cling to me, for I have not yet ascended to the Father.”
Then he sends her to the disciples with a message about precisely that ascent.
Everything about the scene suggests movement. Jesus has somewhere to go. Mary has something she must do. Neither of them is invited to remain where they are.
This becomes difficult to explain if Jesus does not actually ascend until much later.
Why the Urgency?
If Jesus intended to remain on Earth for another forty days before ascending, what exactly was the urgency with Mary?
Why could she not hold him for another minute?
Why interrupt what must have been one of the most emotionally overwhelming moments of her life?
And why send her urgently to tell the disciples that he is ascending to the Father when Jesus himself will appear before those same disciples later that very day?
The words become strangely disproportionate if the ascent lies many weeks in the future.
There is nothing urgent about:
“Stop holding me because I will leave more than a month from now.”
But there is something very urgent about:
“Let me go. I have not yet ascended.”
The simplest reading is that Jesus means what his words naturally suggest. The ascension is imminent.
Mary has encountered him immediately before it.
Mary Was the Worst Possible Person to Ask to Let Go
This makes the scene much more poignant because Mary Magdalene was perhaps the person for whom letting Jesus go was most difficult.
Her relationship with Jesus was not merely intellectual discipleship. According to the Gospel tradition, Jesus had delivered her from seven demons. Within Logosian thinking, this makes her dependence upon his presence particularly serious. Jesus was not simply a beloved teacher whose company she enjoyed. His proximity represented security from the forces from which she had been delivered.
The danger of demonic return therefore gave her attachment an existential dimension.
This helps explain her behaviour at the tomb.
Other people leave.
Mary remains.
Even when she believes Jesus dead, she cannot detach herself from him. She searches for his body. She asks where it has been taken. She is prepared to retrieve it.
Even a dead Jesus is preferable to no Jesus at all.
Then Jesus suddenly calls her by name.
The person whose body she was desperately trying to recover is standing alive in front of her.
Of course she clings to him.
From Mary's perspective, she has just received back everything she feared she had permanently lost. The last thing she wants is another departure.
And yet Jesus tells precisely this woman:
You must let me go.
That is not a minor command.
For Mary, releasing Jesus means surrendering the very physical proximity upon which she has learned to depend.
But Jesus cannot remain merely because Mary desperately wants him to remain.
His promised departure must now take place.
Mary Has to Hurry
Jesus does not merely free himself from Mary's embrace and walk away. He immediately gives her work to do.
She must go to the disciples and tell them what is happening.
The whole scene invites a vivid picture.
Mary has been weeping at the tomb. Suddenly she sees Jesus alive. Moments later she is sent away carrying an extraordinary announcement. One can easily imagine her running toward the disciples, still emotionally overwhelmed, catching her breath as she tries to tell them that she has seen the Lord and that he is ascending to the Father.
And what does she receive for this effort?
Disbelief.
The resurrection traditions repeatedly preserve the inability of the disciples to accept the women's testimony. Even if John's own account does not dramatize their rejection of Mary in detail, the wider Gospel picture makes the situation painfully familiar.
Mary releases the person she most desperately wants to keep, hurries away at his command, and carries news that others are hardly prepared to believe.
This makes Jesus' request costly to her.
Yet the urgency makes sense if her departure and his departure have to happen almost simultaneously.
She must go to the disciples.
Jesus must go to the Father.
Why Did Jesus Meet Mary at All?
A reader may then ask another obvious question.
If Jesus needed to ascend so urgently, why was he wandering around the tomb instead of simply going directly to the Father?
Relocation provides an answer.
Within the Logosian reconstruction, Jesus awakens after Relocation in the Bethany area, east of Jerusalem. His burial place lies across toward Jerusalem. Before leaving the earthly scene altogether, it would be entirely natural for him to revisit the place where the event from which he has just been relocated occurred.
This corresponds to what I have elsewhere called the relocation glitch.
A relocated person may objectively inhabit the reality in which the fatal event no longer belongs to him, while still retaining some relation to the reality from which he has been transferred. The place of the event therefore draws him back. Until he sees it, something remains psychologically unfinished.
Jesus would have an especially compelling reason to visit his tomb.
He had been crucified.
He had been buried.
Yet now he stands alive in a reality in which death has not retained him.
It would be natural for him to go and inspect with his own eyes the place where something had happened to him and, through Relocation, had also ceased to belong to him.
The empty tomb is therefore not merely evidence for other people.
It may also represent a point of orientation for the relocated Jesus himself.
He goes there.
He finds the tomb empty.
And nearby he finds Mary.
That explains why the meeting occurs at all.
Jesus has not delayed his ascension because he intends to linger around Earth indefinitely. He has returned to the location of the relocation glitch, completed that necessary encounter with the place of his burial, encountered Mary unexpectedly, and now has no reason to remain.
The next movement is upward.
Death Was Not the Departure
This distinction is crucial.
Jesus' death should not be treated as though it were originally supposed to accomplish his departure from the world and Ascension became necessary only because resurrection ruined the plan.
Nothing requires such a reading.
Jesus already speaks of having come from above and of returning to the Father. Ascension is therefore the most natural form of his departure.
He descended.
He will ascend.
Death belongs to what happens in between.
Jesus also speaks with confidence about resurrection and possesses direct experience of the power later called Relocation. He has already raised Lazarus. He knows the Scriptures upon which he relies. There is no reason to portray him as someone expecting to disappear permanently through death and then being surprised to discover himself alive.
The Cross and the departure solve different problems.
The Cross is the ordeal.
Relocation overcomes its final consequence.
Ascension is the departure.
Therefore, once Jesus has revisited the burial place and encountered Mary, he proceeds toward what had been intended all along.
He goes to the Father.
The Relaxed Jesus Who Appears Later
This is where the contrast with the later appearances becomes particularly important.
The Jesus with Mary is urgent.
Do not cling to me.
I have not yet ascended.
Go quickly and tell them.
Everything points forward.
Yet the Jesus who appears afterward displays almost the opposite atmosphere.
Later that day he comes among the disciples and gives them peace.
Eight days later he appears again for Thomas.
Later still he meets the disciples by the lake.
There is no frantic movement.
No urgency.
No repeated announcement that he must hurry away to the Father.
No concern that every additional minute on Earth is delaying something essential.
At the lake he even prepares food.
The atmosphere is almost leisurely.
This difference requires explanation.
If the Jesus speaking to Mary still has forty days before his actual ascent, then his urgency toward her becomes extremely strange. Why cut short Mary's embrace while subsequently spending abundant time with the others?
But if Jesus ascends immediately after Mary and the later appearances occur after that ascent, the contrast becomes natural.
The urgent task has already been completed.
Jesus has gone to the Father.
The necessary departure has happened.
The Paraclete condition can now begin.
The Jesus appearing afterward is therefore free to come and go without the pressure visible in the encounter with Mary.
The urgency belongs before Ascension.
The peace belongs after it.
John's Unseen Ascension
This is one reason I find John's account particularly compelling as biography.
John frequently feels less like a constructed sequence of public religious tableaux and more like memories of peculiar events that actually happened: awkward conversations, unexplained movements, incomplete information, people misunderstanding one another, and details that are not neatly resolved for the reader.
His treatment of the Ascension fits this character beautifully.
John gives no grand public farewell.
There is no assembled audience looking upward.
There is no ceremonial departure.
Jesus simply tells Mary:
I have not yet ascended.
I am ascending to my Father.
And then he disappears from the narrative.
When he appears later, something has changed.
That feels strangely natural.
Jesus entered this world without a public spectacle announcing the physical arrival of the Logos. His final departure from ordinary earthly existence need not become a theatrical event either.
He comes unexpectedly.
He leaves unexpectedly.
There is an attractive symmetry in that.
The Gospel does not pretend that the disciples must witness everything important in order for it to happen.
Mary receives the announcement.
The Ascension itself belongs to Jesus and the Father.
No human witness is required.
The Other Ascension Traditions
This does not mean that every Gospel account must be forced into John's sequence.
The texts should be allowed to retain their own presentations.
Matthew does not actually narrate an ascension. Luke gives a witnessed departure near Bethany, Acts expands that event, and the longer ending of Mark also speaks of Jesus being taken up after appearing to the disciples.
Logosian thinking can understand these witnessed bodily departures differently.
If the first true ascent occurs after Mary, then the later witnessed departure need not be the same event.
It can be the bodily departure of the Paraclete Jesus after his period of appearances among the disciples.
This preserves the distinction.
First comes the unwitnessed Ascension of the relocated Jesus to the Father.
Then comes the Paraclete Jesus from the Father.
He appears repeatedly among the disciples.
Eventually that bodily mode of appearance also ends in front of them.
The witnessed departure therefore belongs to the conclusion of the Paraclete appearances, not necessarily to the first ascent announced to Mary.
And the Second Coming remains something else again.
It has not yet happened (at least to the knowledge of whole world).
There is therefore no need to compress every ascent, departure, appearance and return into one event.