A Life Transforming Encounter Series

So as soon as she recognizes Jesus, Mary holds on to Him for dear life. In verse 17, we see that Jesus responds by literally commanding her to stop clinging to Him. Unfortunately, there is a lot of confusion about what Jesus means here. Some of that occurs because of the KJV translation which renders Jesus’s command “Touch me not.” But we know from other Biblical accounts of the events after the resurrection that Jesus did not have a problem with people touching His resurrected body. In Matthew’s account of the resurrection, Jesus allowed a group of women to take hold of His feet and worship Him. And He invites Thomas to touch His hands and His side.

The verb that John uses here can mean to touch, but it more literally means “to fasten to”. So the picture than John paints for us here is that Mary is hanging on tight to Jesus because she doesn’t want to be separated from Him again. I think any of us would have probably felt that same way if we were in Mary’s shoes. But the problem here is that Mary is trying to cling to the pre-resurrection Jesus, which is clearly indicated by the fact that she calls Him “Teacher” and not “Savior” or “Lord”. Like many of Jesus’s followers, she had never understood that Jesus’ purpose in coming to this earth was to overcome sin and guilt, not to overcome the Roman government. So she wanted to hang on to the kind of relationship that she had with Jesus prior to His death and resurrection – one where He was primarily her teacher.

In that regard, she is a lot like many people today who are willing to cling to the Jesus that they consider to be a wise man or a good teacher, but who are not willing to embrace Him as their resurrected Savior and Lord.

But the resurrection had created the possibility for a completely new kind of relationship – both for Mary and for us, too. No longer would Jesus be physically present with His disciples because was going to ascend to heaven to be present with His heavenly Father where He would intercede constantly for them. And, as He had promised them earlier, once He ascended to His Father, He would send the Holy Spirit to dwell permanently in the life of very disciple. Although Mary, and many of the other disciples did not understand that at the time, that is actually better than Jesus being physically present on earth because as long as He was here, he was limited to being in one place at one time. But the Holy Spirit is always present in the life of every disciple.

That new kind of relationship is evidenced here by the way Jesus refers to His disciples in verse 17. He tells Mary to “go to my brothers…” This is the first time in John’s gospel where Jesus calls His disciples “brothers”. Right before His crucifixion, He told His disciples that He would no longer call them servants, but “friends” (John 15:15), but now He calls them brothers, which indicates a whole new kind of relationship. And He further reinforces the nature of that new relationship by calling God the Father “your Father” and “your God”.