Daily Devotion for Thursday 1st May 2025

This is one of approximately eighty watercolour illustrations to the Bible produced by William Blake for his loyal patron Thomas Butts between 1800 and about 1805.  It is not clear how these designs originally functioned as illustrations: they may have extra-illustrated a large Bible or they might have been kept in their own portfolio or volume as a Bible in pictures.  The design is from c.1805 and depicts Mary Magdalene at the tomb (or sepulchre) of Jesus; it is probably an illustration to John 20, because in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke, there are others with Mary when she goes to the tomb, and it is John that mentions Mary seeing ‘two angels in white sitting, the one at the head, and the other at the feet, where the body of Jesus had lain’, which Blake has included in the design (v. 12). However, Blake has compressed several moments in the narrative together in a single frame: in John’s account Mary stays ‘without’ the tomb and stoops to look inside (v. 11); she then turns around and sees Jesus but mistakes him for a gardener (v. 14). Although Blake has placed Mary on the threshold of the tomb, she is at the bottom of a flight of steps leading down to it, and so she is not stooping; Jesus stands at the top of the steps above her.

St John 14. 18-20
 
I will not leave you orphaned; I am coming to you.  In a little while the world will no longer see me, but you will see me; because I live, you also will live.  On that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you.
 
Reflection
 
In this beautiful visionary sketch, Blake captures the moment when Mary recognises the risen Christ.  It’s startling.  His approach is far from conventional.  Typically artists who tackle this subject set Mary and Jesus, whom they see as two very human beings, in the garden outside the tomb; and they portray Mary being repudiated by Jesus.  In representing the first realisation by a human being that Christ had risen from the dead as a moment of rejection, they fail entirely to convey the spiritual intensity of the account in John’s gospel.
 
Blake on the other hand, does.  His emphasis is different.  He conveys not rejection, but relationship.  We catch the vision from inside the sepulchre, as we watch from the other side of the empty tomb.  We see Mary kneeling in her mourning dress at the bottom of the steps, turning her face, flushed with grieving, from the grave clothes and the jar of spices, looking back over her shoulder in amazement at the manifestation behind her.  The figure is insubstantial yet real.  There is no doubt about it. Still dressed in a burial gown, this is the risen Christ.  It is a moment of bewilderment and of transformation, illumined not by natural light but by visionary radiance.  The two angels, their heads inclined in a posture of reverence, are bright with heavenly light; likewise Mary – as if it had been bestowed on her by Christ.  Her outstretched arms parallel those of her Lord, she too is changed.  In this remarkable sketch, Blake succeeds in conveying the new relationship between God, the risen Christ and the faithful disciple.
 
As Mary participates in this moment of Resurrection, she is filled with hope and joy, so too are those disciples to whom she will tell the good news, so too through their witness is the church.  So too, in all the challenges of life, are we today.
 
Prayer
 
Everlasting God,
in you are found
new life and hope.
Open my eyes that I may see you in the world you have made.
Let all lovely things fill me with gladness
and lift my mind to your everlasting loveliness,
through Jesus Christ your Son our Saviour.  Amen