With the disclaimer that this is subjective, I am not a man prone to flights of emotion. With that said, there is one and only one Gospel verse that I sometimes have trouble reading out loud, because I get a little choked up every time:
Jesus Appears to Mary Magdalene
11 But Mary stood weeping outside the tomb. As she wept, she bent over to look[a] into the tomb; 12 and she saw two angels in white, sitting where the body of Jesus had been lying, one at the head and the other at the feet. 13 They said to her, “Woman, why are you weeping?” She said to them, “They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him.” 14 When she had said this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not know that it was Jesus. 15 Jesus said to her, “Woman, why are you weeping? Whom are you looking for?” Supposing him to be the gardener, she said to him, “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away.” 16 Jesus said to her, “Mary!” She turned and said to him in Hebrew,[b] “Rabbouni!” (which means Teacher).
This is John 20:11-16. And man, this passage gets me every time.
In a sense, this verse is everything, isn’t it? One day, at the end of this vale of tears, we want Jesus to turn to us and say these words:
Why are you weeping? Whom are you looking for?
And we hear Him say our name, and realize that all of the things that ever harmed us, ever worried us or scared us or hurt us were a shadow, a passing thing, a brief nightmare, a rainstorm before the bursting forth of the sun.
For Mary Magdalene, this moment must have been what it felt like to see death itself die: All was lost, and suddenly, in a single moment, the world was more wonderful than you ever could have dreamed.
And isn’t this the crux of the entire superversive project? It is what Aslan says in “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe”: The devil defeats Christ with the deep magic from the dawn of time, but God returns more glorious than before with deeper magic from before the dawn of time. It’s that hope that all will be well and all manner of things will be well, \no matter how bad or hopeless or terrible things get. It is that reminder that God is real and there is a happy ending.
Woman, why are you weeping?
It’s also a reminder of how spoiled we are. You think things are bad? Imagine watching the Messiah get stripped, beaten, crucified, stabbed, and then to top it all off, his body has been removed from the tomb.
And then…
Woman why are you weeping?
Gotta go. Something in my eye.
The Mechanical Dragon 