Judith 9:1, 11-14

We encounter tonight two very different women.

The first prays to God for the success of her plan of deception to save her besieged city.

The other, a young woman, stands weeping by an empty tomb.

What connects these two women—the one, daring all to save her people; the other, alone and bereft, met in the garden by her savior?

Faith, for sure. But something else—courage.

This is of course obvious with Judith. During the siege of her city, she goes out alone, seduces the Assyrian general Holophernes, and while he sleeps uses his sword to strike off his head. Hers is a story of plotting and brutal action.

Courage is less obvious with Mary Magdalene, whom we remember today. But if we let ourselves encounter this familiar passage anew, we will find it there, too. On that first Sunday, Mary has come to the tomb and found the stone removed. “They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we do not know where they have laid him,” she cries to the other disciples (Jn 20:2). We can imagine Mary following behind Peter and John as they race to the tomb, confused and grief-stricken. The other disciples leave, “but Mary stood weeping outside the tomb” (Jn 20:11).

And this is where I see her courage. Not the courage to take up a sword, but to stand, to remain in her grief and loss and fear. To simply be in the hurt and uncertainty. This is also courage, a common, unheroic kind of courage—the vulnerable courage of waiting and trusting when hope seems gone, when we have no other hope than that God will provide.

Judith, too, displays this courage, in her prayer to God: “you are the God of the lowly, the helper of the oppressed, the upholder of the weak, protector of the forsaken, savior of those without hope. Please, please, God my father . . . hear my prayer” (Jth 9:11-12). Please, please, God, hear my prayer. It is the courage of the psalmist: “I pour out my soul when I think on these things. . . . Put your trust in God” (Ps 42:4, 7). And it is the courage of Mary, standing weeping in the garden, and hoping that this man who comes up to her may know where Jesus’s body has gone.

Some of us may be called to uncommon courageous actions like Judith’s. I expect that many of us will not. But all of us are called to exhibit the Mary’s common courage of simple faith, hope, and trust—the common, vulnerable courage to stand in our grief, to wait in the face of the unknown and uncertain. To simply be, abiding, waiting to find God—and assured that God is already meeting us there, calling us by name.