Catholic Commentary
Mary Magdalene Discovers the Empty Tomb
1Now on the first day of the week, Mary Magdalene went early, while it was still dark, to the tomb, and saw that the stone had been taken away from the tomb.2Therefore she ran and came to Simon Peter and to the other disciple whom Jesus loved, and said to them, “They have taken away the Lord out of the tomb, and we don’t know where they have laid him!”
John 20:1–2 describes Mary Magdalene discovering the empty tomb early on the first day of the week and reporting to Peter and the Beloved Disciple that Jesus's body has been removed. Mary's discovery marks the beginning of the resurrection accounts, though she initially interprets the missing body as theft rather than resurrection.
Love reaches for Christ in darkness before faith can see him — and God chooses a grieving woman to be the first herald of new creation.
Mary's words — "we don't know where they have laid him" — use the plural "we," suggesting, as the Synoptic accounts confirm (cf. Mark 16:1; Luke 24:1), that other women were present at the tomb, though John's narrative has narrowed the spotlight onto Mary alone. Her not-knowing (ouk oidamen) is the spiritual condition of the entire community at this moment: the disciples are without understanding, without the Risen Christ, without the Spirit. These verses capture the Church in embryo — gathered by love, but not yet illuminated by Easter faith.
The Typological Sense
The Fathers read Mary's frantic search as an echo of the Bride in the Song of Songs (3:1–4; 5:6–8), who searches by night for her beloved. Origen and St. Gregory the Great both draw this connection explicitly: Mary's love is spousal in its intensity, making her the type of the soul that seeks Christ even through the night of desolation. Gregory writes in his Homilies on the Gospels that "she who had been a sinner now became the first witness of the Resurrection, because love is stronger than sin and stronger than death."
Catholic tradition identifies Mary Magdalene with a layered dignity that these verses bring into sharpest relief. The ancient title Apostola Apostolorum — "Apostle to the Apostles" — conferred on her by St. Thomas Aquinas (In Ioannem, c. 20) and reaffirmed by Pope Francis in his 2016 decree elevating her feast to the rank of feast day (previously a memorial), honors precisely what begins in these verses: her mission to carry the news of the empty tomb to the Twelve. She becomes the first herald of Easter, not because of office, but because of love.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that "Mary Magdalene and the holy women… were the first to encounter the Risen One" and that their testimony, initially disbelieved (cf. Luke 24:11), is a sign of the paradoxical way God chooses to reveal himself — through the marginalized, through women whose legal testimony was discounted in first-century Jewish courts, through grief rather than triumph (CCC 641).
St. Augustine sees in the "darkness" of verse 1 a figure of the Church's condition between the Ascension and the Parousia: we seek Christ in the darkness of faith, without the full vision of God, led forward by love (In Evangelium Johannis Tractatus, Tract. 120). Pope Benedict XVI, in Deus Caritas Est (§1), echoes this when he describes Christian love as fundamentally a response to having been loved first — Mary's darkness-piercing love for Christ is the paradigm of every Christian's orientation toward God.
The "first day of the week" carries direct Eucharistic significance in Catholic tradition. The early Church gathered on the "Lord's Day" (Dies Dominica) — the first day, Sunday — specifically to commemorate the Resurrection (cf. Didache 14; CCC 1166–1167). Every Sunday Mass is a return to this tomb-garden at dawn: the Church gathers in the darkness of mortal life to encounter the Risen Christ in Word and Sacrament.
Mary's experience in these verses maps precisely onto what the spiritual tradition calls desolation — the dark night in which God seems absent, the tabernacle seems empty, and the only honest prayer is "I don't know where they have laid him." Contemporary Catholics face this experience in seasons of grief, spiritual dryness, or the disorientation brought by scandal or doubt within the Church itself.
The practical lesson is in Mary's movement: she does not remain at the empty tomb paralyzed. She runs. She seeks community — she goes to Peter and to the disciple of love. She speaks her confusion aloud rather than nursing it in isolation. This is the template for navigating spiritual darkness: keep moving toward the community of the Church, bring your confusion to those who hold both authority (Peter) and contemplative faith (the Beloved Disciple), and trust that love — even love without understanding — is the right posture before a mystery not yet revealed.
Additionally, Catholics can examine whether they visit Christ with Mary's totality of devotion — coming "early," before the demands of the day crowd in, in an interior stillness that makes encounter possible. The empty tomb found at the wrong hour is still the place of Resurrection.
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Commentary
John 20:1 — "On the first day of the week… while it was still dark"
John's chronological precision here is theologically loaded. The phrase "first day of the week" (Greek: tē mia tōn sabbatōn) deliberately echoes the creation narrative of Genesis 1, where God begins his creative work on the first day. John, whose Gospel opens with the unmistakable allusion "In the beginning…" (1:1), now signals that this morning inaugurates nothing less than a new creation. The Resurrection is not merely a resuscitation; it is the beginning of an entirely new order of existence.
The detail that "it was still dark" (skotias eti ousēs) is not simply meteorological. Darkness in John's Gospel is a charged theological symbol — it is the realm of unbelief, death, and ignorance of God (cf. 1:5; 3:19; 13:30, where Judas goes out into the night). Mary moves through this darkness propelled entirely by love, not yet illuminated by faith. She has come to anoint a corpse; her journey is an act of devotion without expectation of miracle. This darkness within the narrative will only be fully dispelled when she hears her name spoken by the Risen Lord in verse 16.
The stone "taken away" (ērmenon) from the tomb is a passive construction John uses with deliberate care. No agent is named. The stone has been removed by a power Mary cannot yet identify. For the reader, this grammatical passivity hints at divine action — the same divine passive used throughout Scripture when God acts but is not yet recognized.
John 20:2 — "She ran and came to Simon Peter and to the other disciple whom Jesus loved"
Mary's immediate response is not contemplation but urgent, running motion. The Greek trechei ("she ran") conveys alarm, even panic. Her interpretation of events — "They have taken away the Lord" — reflects not a failure of intelligence but a failure yet of revelation. She is reasoning from the known world: tombs are violated, bodies are stolen, the powerful desecrate the dead. She does not yet have the category of Resurrection available to her.
The deliberate sequencing of names — "Simon Peter and the other disciple whom Jesus loved" — is significant. Peter is named first, preserving his primacy among the Twelve even in this moment of confusion and despite his recent denial. The "Beloved Disciple," traditionally identified as John the Evangelist and understood by the Church as a figure of ideal discipleship, is named second but will outrun Peter (v. 4) and will be the first to believe upon seeing the burial cloths (v. 8). The interplay between Peter (authority, institutional primacy) and the Beloved Disciple (contemplative faith, love) is a persistent Johannine motif.