John 20:17 Meaning Jesus Said to Her

The plea to cling is gently refused, not because love withholds itself but because a mind that grasps at form still believes the treasure lives in the body. What is real cannot be held by the hand; it can only be shared. So the one who is found is at once sent outward, told to carry the news to others, because love kept private is not yet understood.

The joining named here undoes every belief in separation: one Father, held in common, makes every brother the same self. A mind that would truly keep its beloved learns it cannot possess him, only recognize the one Source they share and go tell the rest that they share it too.

The brethren: the parts of the one mind still waiting to hear that separation is undone, the brothers who must be told. The Father: the single Source held in common, in which no one is apart from another and nothing can be owned.

Mary reaches to hold the form she loved and thought she had lost. He asks her not to grip it. What has risen in him cannot be kept by hands, and clutching at the shape would miss the presence pouring out of it.

So he turns her outward with news to carry. The same ground he is returning to belongs to them all, my Father and your Father. What she cannot hold in her hands she can live in, and that ground is nearer than the body she was reaching for.

She reaches for the man she buried, and he stops her, because that man is gone. What stands before her is the risen power waking in him as his own deeper awareness, the imagination he names Father. To seize him by the old form would drag a birth back into the grave it just left. His rising is not finished. Saying he ascends to his Father, he means God is being born within this man at an appointed inner hour. The same Father belongs to them, one awareness coming awake in each. The linen left behind in the tomb marks that a birth occurred there. What rises is God, waking up inside a living person.

Risen awareness cannot be gripped by the senses while it is still rising toward its source at the crown; to clutch it below is to hold it in the body it is leaving. Mary Magdalene is the emotional nature that would keep the awakened self close and touchable, and she is turned outward instead. The ascent to the Father is consciousness returning up the spine to the one origin shared by every inner faculty. What has woken in a person rises and cannot be held down in the flesh that birthed it.

Mary Magdalene: the emotional nature that clings to the awakened self and would keep it near. Father: the single source at the crown to which risen awareness returns. Brethren: the inner faculties that share one origin.