He Knows Your Name | A Resurrection for the Scarred, the Shut Out, and the Still Waiting

He is Risen. It is the most important sentence in human history. But we have treated it as the period at the end of the sentence when it was always meant to be the opening.

This episode slows down inside the actual resurrection accounts. We begin in the dark with Mary Magdalene coming to tend a body, so deep in grief she mistakes the risen Jesus for a gardener, until he says her name. Because resurrection didn't come as a press release to the powerful. It came as a name spoken to a grieving woman before sunrise.

We walk through the full messy spectrum of resurrection responses, confused disciples, locked doors, and Thomas making demands. Nobody was ready. And Jesus, scarred, present, and patient, found every single one of them exactly where they were.

We sit with the wounds that didn't disappear. The glorified body is the scarred body. And we ask what it means that the resurrection body of Jesus looked nothing like what anyone expected and was glorious anyway.

And then we go to the courts. The Temple was a system that decided who could come close to God. Jesus ended it with his body. The church that rebuilds those courts is not being faithful to the resurrection. It is undoing it.

This episode names that directly. For the woman told to sit down. For the doubter told their questions make them dangerous. For the poor person told their poverty is a sign of God's disapproval. For the immigrant told this God is determined by borders. For the person whose body doesn't fit the world's standard of whole. For the person whose love has been called incompatible with Christian community. For the person still asking God who they are.

The curtain is gone. And he knows your name.

SCRIPTURE: John 20:1-18 | John 10:3 | Matthew 27:51 | Hebrews 9:12 | Hebrews 10:1

RESOURCES: 

Dr. Brian Brock — Disability Theology 

Wondrously Wounded: Theology, Disability and the Body of Christ

All other books

Beyond Faith as Usual Reading List

For women who stayed small and called it faithfulness : a reading list to start finding your way back. Get it here!

If this episode was meaningful for you, the best way to help others find the show is to:

• Text this episode to a friend who might need it
• Leave a 5-star rating and review
• Subscribe so you don’t miss future episodes
• Wrestling with faith and justice and not sure where to start? 
• Grab my free theological reading list, Beyond Faith as Usual, HERE!

Here’s to a faith that tells the truth, refuses silence in the face of harm, and follows Jesus all the way into healing and justice.

RESOURCES:

www.kristenabrock.com

Justice Coaching options!

Transcript

He Knows Your Name: A Resurrection for the Scarred, the Shut Out, and the Still Waiting

What if "He is Risen" is not the end of the sentence, and the first word spoken on Easter morning wasn't a proclamation but a woman’s name?

Hey friend, welcome back to Jesus, Justice, and Mercy. We are moving into Eastertide, and I am so glad you are here for this one.

He is Risen. It is the most important sentence in human history. Everything we believe hinges on it. The empty tomb is not a footnote to the Christian faith; it is the foundation. Without resurrection, Paul tells us, our faith is worthless. The cross without Sunday is just tragedy. Just another prophet killed by empire. Just another story of power winning.

But Sunday happened. And I want to celebrate that today, fully and without apology. He is Risen is worth every church sign, every Instagram post, every text message between believers on Easter morning.

And yet. I keep coming back to the actual resurrection accounts. The ones in the text. And what I find there is not a triumphant conclusion where everything resolves and we exhale. What I find is something stranger, more honest, and more transformative than one Sunday celebration alone can hold. He is Risen was never meant to be the period at the end of the sentence. It was always the opening.

Especially for those of us who are Saturday people. Who are still carrying grief that hasn't resolved, faith that has been wounded, pain that the church told us to move past before we were ready. For us, the triumphant announcement can land like a demand. Stop grieving. It's Sunday now. Act like it.

So, this week I want to slow down inside the resurrection story. Because what actually happened is not a reversal of Friday. It's a reordering of everything

THE END OF THE SYSTEM, He Became the Sacrifice

Reading the Old Testament, we recognize that for centuries, the people of God lived inside a sacrificial system. It wasn't arbitrary. It was given. Carefully prescribed and deeply meaningful, it was woven through the entire life with the understanding that a holy God and a broken people needed a way to meet.

Leviticus lays it out in painstaking detail. The burnt offerings, the sin offerings, the guilt offerings. Which animals. Which priests. Which days. Which rituals. But the writer of Hebrews looks back on all of it and says it was always a shadow, real, but pointing toward something it couldn't fully become by itself. Chapter 10:1 spells it out, “The law is only a shadow of the good things that are coming, not the realities themselves.” Year after year, the same sacrifices were offered. Year after year they had to be repeated. Because no animal, no ritual, no amount of blood shed on an altar could permanently close the distance between a holy God and a people who kept finding new ways to wander. I often find myself thankful that I live in the “after Sunday” period. 

At the center of the system was the Tabernacle, and later the Temple. And at the center of the Temple was the Holy of Holies, the dwelling place of the ark of the covenant and of God's presence on earth. It was separated from everything else by a thick curtain. Jewish rabbinic tradition describes it as four inches thick and sixty feet tall. It was embroidered with cherubim. And was not only symbolic but also physical, an architectural statement about the distance between holiness and humanity.

Only one person could enter. Once a year. The High Priest, on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. But only after days of ritual purification, wearing specific garments, carrying incense, and the blood of a sacrificed bull and goat. The distance between the people and God was carefully scripted.

This was the system. You accessed God through the correct procedure, through the correct people, on the correct days, if you were the correct kind of person to be allowed inside at all.

And then 1500 years after Moses came down from Sinai with stone tablets, something promised, but unexpected, walked into the story. Not through the Temple courts but through a feeding trough in Bethlehem. Not through the priesthood but through a carpenter's family in Galilee. Not with a crown but with blankets worn from a long journey. And for three years, Jesus steadily walked with everyone the system had placed furthest from the center.

Lepers who were declared unclean, and untouchable. Even required to cry out unclean wherever they went, so no one would accidentally make contact. He touched them anyway. He healed on the Sabbath, even though the religious leaders said God's own law forbade it. He ate with the tax collectors.  The Jewish people who had become collaborators with Rome and were socially and religiously expelled. They were also declared unclean. He stopped for a bleeding woman who had been hemorrhaging for twelve years, rendering everyone she touched ceremonially unclean. She touched just the hem of his garment in a crowd, and he stopped everything. Who touched me? Not to rebuke her but to see her. To tell her that her faith had made her well.

Every single one of these moments was a direct confrontation with the system they had religiously upheld for centuries. His actions said, “You don't have to be categorized as worthy to encounter God”. The barriers we created were being torn down one by one by the man who was supposed to be the overthrower of the government, not the one who sat with the unclean.

The cross was not a detour from everything he had been doing. It was its conclusion. But not the final chapter.

Jesus had been dismantling the system from the outside for three years. And then he literally walked into the center of it. He entered Jerusalem the week of Passover, the ancient feast remembering the night God refused to let power and empire have the last word, and then went to the cross as the final, unrepeatable act of everything his ministry had been saying.

Matthew tells us in chapter 27, verse 51, exactly what happened the moment he died. And behold, the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom.

Think about that. From top to bottom. Not from the bottom up, as if a human hand had torn it in frustration or grief. From top to bottom. This wasn’t an act of people. This was God, from inside the Holy of Holies, tearing down the barrier that had stood for centuries. Reaching through the curtain that was supposed to keep people out, and permanently destroying it, figuratively and literally.

The sacrificial system didn't fail. Its time was just over. Jesus became what the system was always pointing to. He was the final, complete, ultimate sacrifice. The writer of Hebrews again, says it plainly in Chapter 9, verse 12: he entered the Most Holy Place once for all by his own blood, thus obtaining eternal redemption. Not year after year. Not through the blood of animals. Once. For all. 

No more barriers. The distance between a holy God and our broken humanity, the distance the entire system had been built to carefully manage, was gone.

Not because holiness stopped mattering. But because God decided to close the gap himself. That was always the plan, and it changes everything.

Not just theologically. But also, practically. If Jesus is the sacrifice that ended all sacrifice, then there is no longer a category of people who are too far, too broken, too unclean to come close to God, no matter what anyone says otherwise. The curtain is gone. The system is finished. The God who tore it from top to bottom has always wanted to be closer than the system would allow.

THE RESURRECTION MORNING, Nobody Was READY

So, we arrive to this pivotal season. But here is what I want you to notice about Easter morning. Nobody was ready for it.

Put yourself in the scene. It is still dark.

In his gospel, John is specific about this detail, and I don't think it's incidental. It is still dark when Mary Magdalene makes her way to the tomb. The city is eerily quiet. The Sabbath has ended. And she is moving through the pre-dawn hours, carrying the only thing she has left to give, spices to anoint his body. This is what love does when hope is gone. It shows up anyway, and it tends to what remains.

Mary is not coming in faith that resurrection is possible. Nothing in her tradition has prepared her for that. And the one person who brought someone back from the dead is in the tomb. Prophets have been killed before. Teachers have been executed before. The Romans are efficient, thorough, and final. She watched him die. She watched them take him down. She watched where they laid him.

She is coming in grief. Because that is the only honest thing she has left to do.

When she arrives, the stone is moved.

I want to slow down here because we know how this story ends, but she doesn't. Think about the disorientation of that moment, what that must have felt like. She wasn't expecting an empty tomb; she was expecting a sealed one. The stone being moved doesn't read to her as a miracle. It reads as a violation. Someone has been here. Someone has taken him. All she can think to do is turn and run.

When she tells Peter and the beloved disciple, they take off toward the tomb. John includes a detail that I love: he notes that the other disciple outran Peter. It may even have been John doing a self-reveal. He got there first. He is telling on himself and on Peter simultaneously, and I like to think there was some good-natured grief about that detail later. Two grown men sprinting through Jerusalem before sunrise because everything they believed in might be either gone or transformed, and they don't yet know which.

They arrive, and they look in. They see the burial cloths lying there, not scattered on the cold floor, John says, but folded. Deliberately placed. And then they go home.

They went home.

They didn't know what they had just seen. The text says the beloved disciple saw and believed but then clarifies that they still didn't understand the Scripture that said he must rise from the dead. They believed something had happened. They just didn't know what. And so, they went home, carrying that not-knowing back with them into a locked room where the rest of the disciples were waiting.

But Mary doesn't go home.

She stays. Outside the tomb. Weeping.

I want to stay with her for a moment because what happens next is the hinge of the entire Easter story, and it happens so quietly that we almost miss it.

She is alone. It is still early, and I like to think that the sky had the pinkish hue indicative of the moment just before sunrise. Her grief is physical, the kind that disorients us, that makes the world around us feel strangeand distant. She stoops to look into the tomb one more time, maybe because she needs to see it again to believe it herself. And there are two figures in white sitting where the body had been. One at the head, one at the feet.

Woman, why are you weeping?

Because they have taken my Lord and I don't know where they have put him.

Then she turns around. Maybe she heard a rustle, or maybe she just knew. There is a man standing there. The garden is coming into early morning light, maybe. Shapes are emerging from the shadows. And she looks at this man and thinks, gardener. Of course. Who else would be here at this hour? She is so deep in grief that her eyes cannot organize what they are seeing into anything that makes sense. She has already decided what is and isn't possible on this morning. And so, the only person who could be standing in this garden is a gardener.  How often do we do the same? Decide what is and isn't possible with God and then miss him standing right in front of us.

Still deep in her grief, she summons her strength and asks, Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have put him, and I will get him.

She will go get him. This is what love does when hope is completely gone. It makes practical arrangements. It figures out the next step, but it does not stop showing up.

And then, he says her name.

Mary.

One word.

And everything, every wall grief had built around her ability to see and hear and know comes down.

Just her name, in a voice she knew better than almost any other voice in the world, spoken in a garden before sunrise by someone she had watched die three days before.

This is John 10:3 made real. He calls his own sheep by name and leads them out. Jesus had said it himself. And here, in the most broken and unexpected moment, he proves it. The shepherd who promised to call his own by name shows up in a garden at dawn and does exactly that.

Resurrection didn't come as a press release. It didn't come to the Sanhedrin, to Pilate, or to the crowds who had shouted "Hosanna" and then "Crucify him" in the same week. It came as a single name spoken to a grieving woman in the dark who had come only to tend what she thought was permanently, irreversibly dead.

Mary.

And that, is where Easter begins.

THE DISCIPLES, THE FULL MESSY SPECTRUM

If the story ended with Mary, we could rest in that intimate moment. But it doesn’t.

Peter and the beloved disciple ran to the tomb and went home confused. John explicitly tells us that the disciples were behind locked doors for fear. Not celebrating. They were hiding. Even after Mary has told them. Even after they have seen an empty tomb. Maybe this is the first time “Believe women” came into the lexicon. 

Anyway, when Thomas hears, he says plainly: unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my finger where the nails were, I will not believe. He is not a villain in this story. He is a man whose grief has made any hope feel dangerous. He has been disappointed before, and He isn’t going to let himself be undone by a story he can't verify.

Jesus comes to him anyway. Shows him the hands. Offers his side and meets Thomas there.

This is what resurrection actually looked like in real time. Not triumph or the equivalent of a brightly colored social media post. Not a choir of believers singing. But a grieving woman. A group of confused men going home. Disciples in hiding. A doubter making demands that feel like the only safe way to absorb what might be happening. And Jesus, still scarred, present, and patient, finding every single one of them exactly where they were.

SCARRED, THE WOUNDS THAT DIDN'T DISAPPEAR

There is something I don't want us to rush past, and I never really thought about it beyond the Sunday School pictures I saw as a kid.

The risen Jesus still has wounds.

He could have come back with a fully healed body. Jesus chose to be resurrected with his wounds intact. He could have had a glorified, unmarked body, and he didn't. Or rather, the glorified body is the scarred body. I think that's the point.

Disability theology pushes this even further: the resurrected body of Jesus destabilizes every assumption we make about what a "whole" or "healed" or "perfected" body looks like. If the resurrected body of the Son of God still bears wounds, if that is what glorified looks like, then our entire framework for what bodies should be gets reordered along with everything else.

Sit with that. God didn't fix Jesus into an able-bodied norm. God raised him as he was, marked, scarred, recognizable by his wounds. Which means the kingdom of God is not a place where broken bodies get corrected into some idealized standard. It's a place where every body belongs.

I hesitate to dive too deeply into disability theology. My cousin, Dr. Brian Brock, is an expert and has written some beautiful books grounded in his experience raising his oldest son, who has Down syndrome and is autistic. I remember him telling me once that people will say Adam will be healed in heaven, and his response is always that Adam is God’s beloved exactly as he is. He is whole and moves through the world in a way that most of us could learn from. This is a whole field of theology that is worth exploring another time, but I will share some of his books in the notes.

That story stays with me. Adam is whole. Not despite who he is, but as who he is. And I think that is precisely what the resurrection is trying to tell us, if we are willing to hear it.

Because look at what the text actually shows us.

Thomas touches the wounds. Mary recognizes a voice. The disciples see his hands, his back, his side. These are not erased. They are not explained away. They are not the unfortunate remnant of something that has now been overcome. They are present, real, and part of who the risen Jesus is.

Resurrection is not a reset. It is a reordering.

The harm happened, and it wasn’t ignored. The cross was real. His death was real. The Saturday of profound grief was real. And the new thing that broke open on Sunday morning didn't erase any of it, it transformed it. It said this wound is now part of the story of what God can do. Not despite what happened. Through it. Because of it. Marked by it forever.

This matters more than I can say for those of us who are Saturday people. Because we have been told, implicitly and explicitly, that resurrection means getting back to normal. That healing means the wound disappears. That forgiveness means acting like harm didn't happen. That reconciliation means skipping the repair.

But the risen Jesus didn't skip anything. He showed up with his wounds intact and let the people who loved him touch them. In fact, I wonder whether Thomas would have believed it was Jesus if he had not been able to touch those wounds. This is not a God who is asking you to pretend. This is a God who took the worst thing that happened and carried it forward into new life. Still marked. Still real. Still his.

So, what does resurrection mean for Saturday people? For those of us whose grief is long, whose wounds haven't closed, whose faith is held with trembling hands.

It means hope is not the absence of scars. It means new life doesn't require pretending the harm didn't happen. It means nothing and no one stands between us and the God who calls us by name.

The resurrection Jesus brings is not a return to before. It is something entirely new, reordered, transformed, marked by everything that came before it. And it is still present, calling our name in the garden before sunrise when we came only to tend what we thought was dead.

He is Risen is not wrong. It's just the beginning of the sentence, not the end.

The rest of it goes: he still has the wounds, he came to the hiding places, he spoke to the grieving woman first, he let the doubter touch the scars, he cooked breakfast on the beach for the one who denied him three times, and he knows your name.

The people that the church puts in the outer courts are not strangers to Saturday. They have been living there. Not for one day but for years. Told to wait outside until they qualify. Until they change. Until they become something the system can accept. They came anyway, tending what they thought was dead.

Maybe that is you.

You are Mary, weeping in the garden. You came anyway, to tend what you thought was dead. Your faith, maybe. Your sense of belonging. The belief that the church could ever be a safe place. The hope that God still sees you. Not knowing you were one conversation away from hearing your name spoken in the dark.

THE COURTS ARE GONE, Resurrection and the End of Exclusion

Before I land this, I want to take you back inside the Temple one more moment. Because what happened there makes everything we've been talking about tangible.

The Temple had courts, literal, architectural courts that marked your status and determined how close to God you were allowed to get. The outermost court was the Court of the Gentiles, you could come this far, but no further. Then the Court of Women, Jewish women could enter here, but this was their limit. Then the Court of Israel, Jewish men. Then the priests. And at the center, behind the curtain, the Holy of Holies. The very presence of God. Accessible to exactly one person, once a year, after extensive ritual purification.

The whole architecture was a theology. It said: God is at the center, and your access to God is determined by who you are and whether you qualify.

Jesus ended that system with his body. He rose from the dead to confirm it. And then the church claimed his name and rebuilt the courts anyway. Deciding there are still categories of people who must stand in the outer ring until they qualify. This is not being faithful to resurrection. It is undoing it. It is re-hanging the curtain that Jesus tore down with his own hands.

And I want to be specific about what that looks like.

The woman who has been told to be quiet, to submit, to let the men lead, to sit down, to vote as her husband… Resurrection was announced first to a woman whose testimony the disciples didn't believe. Mary Magdalene was the first preacher of the resurrection. The risen Jesus sent her out. The church has spent two thousand years trying to put her back in the outer court. 

Or the person who has been told their questions make them dangerous, their doubts make them faithless, their deconstruction makes them lost, Thomas made demands before he believed, and Jesus showed up anyway. Not to scold him. Not to require him to get his theology straight first. To offer his hands. To say here. Look. Touch. I am real, and I am not afraid of your questions.

The poor person who has been told that prosperity is a sign of God's blessing and therefore poverty must be a sign of something else, the disciples Jesus chose were working people. The crowds who followed him were hungry. The ones he fed, healed, and restored were the ones the system had already decided God had forgotten. And when God raised him from the dead, he was putting his full weight behind everything Jesus had done and everyone Jesus had chosen. The resurrection was God's yes to the poor, the hungry, the overlooked. It always has been.

The immigrant, the undocumented, the refugee who has been told this land and this church and this God are for citizens, the Temple had a court for you too. The Court of the Gentiles. The furthest out. And Jesus walked straight to it. The resurrection belongs to every nation, every tongue, every people, even in, or especially in, the United States. The risen Jesus appeared first in a garden to a Jewish woman and commissioned her to go tell. The borders of empires, of countries, of oceans, have never been the borders of the resurrection.

The person whose body doesn't work the way the world says it should, who has been prayed over, told to have more faith, treated as a problem to be solved rather than a person to be known, God did not fix Jesus into an unmarked, normalized body before deeming him worthy of resurrection. He rose scarred. He rose wounded. And God is not waiting for you to be fixed either.

The person who is gay, lesbian, bisexual, queer, who grew up in a church that told them the way they love is an abomination. Who sat in pews and sang the songs and prayed the prayers and begged God to make them different because the people who claimed to speak for God said who they are is incompatible with his love. Who may have spent years in conversion therapy or celibacy mandates or performative straightness, trying to earn their way to the center. Who finally stopped coming because the cost of staying was their own soul.

The system that told you that you were too broken, too wrong, too sinful in your very nature to come close, that system was dismantled by the one whose name is being used to exclude you. He is not standing at the door of the Holy of Holies, checking a list before he lets you through. That door doesn't exist anymore. He tore it down. With his body. For you.

I want to say something else with care. And I ask you to stay with me even if your first instinct is to push back.

There is a phrase that gets used a lot in these conversations. God doesn't make mistakes. And I believe that. Fully. But I want to ask an honest question about what we mean when we say it, because I think we sometimes use it as a conclusion when it might actually be an invitation.

We are people who believe that the resurrected body of Jesus, the glorified, eternal, fully redeemed body of the Son of God, still bore wounds. Still carried the marks of suffering and struggle and everything that happened to him in his earthly life. And it was glorious anyway. Not despite the marks. With them.

Which means our certainty about what a "correctly made" body looks like might be smaller than we think.

There are people, real people, not theological abstractions, who have experienced their entire lives a profound sense that something is misaligned between who they are and the body they inhabit. They are not making a political statement. They are describing an experience of themselves that is as real and as painful as anything I have ever heard. And the church's primary response has been to tell them that their experience is impossible. That God wouldn't allow it. That they must be wrong about themselves.

I am not asking you to resolve every theological question about any of this today. I am just asking you to consider whether "God doesn't make mistakes" is something we say to protect our certainty, or whether it's something we're willing to sit with as a genuinely open question about the mystery of bodies, souls, and what it means to be fully known and fully loved by a God whose ways are higher than ours.

Whatever you believe about the complexity of these questions, the person walking through it deserves to know that God is not standing on the other side of that, turning them away while the debate continues.

This isn’t politics or a progressive agenda dressed up in Bible verses.

This is the direct, unavoidable theological implication of Easter morning.

The curtain is gone. The courts have been demolished. The system that decided who was quiet enough, certain enough, prosperous enough, documented enough, able-bodied enough, straight enough, and the person still asking God who they are, Jesus ended it.

With his body.

And then rose from the dead still bearing the marks of what it cost him to do it.

He is Risen is not a bumper sticker. It is the most subversive announcement in human history. Because it means the system lost. The empire lost. The religious establishment that rebuilt its power by deciding who belongs lost.

And every single person we place in the outer courts gets to walk straight through the curtain that no longer exists.

That is Easter. That is resurrection. That is what He is Risen actually means.

CLOSE

I want to leave you somewhere specific today.

Not a to-do list or three steps to a better Easter season. That isn’t what this story asks of us.

I want to leave you in a garden. Before sunrise. When the world is still quiet, and the grief is still real, and the only thing you came to do is the last act of love available to you.

Because here is what I know about the God we have been talking about today. He did not wait for Mary to get herself together before he spoke to her. He did not wait for Thomas to resolve his doubts. He did not wait for the disciples to unlock the doors and come out of hiding. He did not wait for Peter to finish grieving his own failure.

He went to them. Scarred and present and patient. He went to them exactly where they were.

And he called them by name.

That is not a metaphor. That is not a theological concept to be filed away and reflected on later. That is the most personal thing that has ever happened in human history, the risen Jesus, still bearing the marks of everything it cost him, showing up in the specific place where specific grieving people were doing the only thing they had left to do.

And he knew their names.

He knows yours.

Whatever you came carrying today, whatever faith you are tending that feels more like a body than a living thing, whatever belonging you lost, whatever door closed on you, whatever court you were told to stand outside of until you qualified, the curtain is gone. The system that decided you weren't close enough, weren't clean enough, weren't certain enough, is finished.

And the one who finished it is standing in your garden this morning.

Saying your name.

You don't have to have it resolved. You don't have to have it figured out. You don't have to perform certainty you don't feel or joy that hasn't arrived yet. Mary came to tend a body and left as the first witness of resurrection. Not because she had great faith. Because she stayed. Because she came anyway. Because love showed up even when hope was gone.

That is enough. It has always been enough.

Here is your challenge this week, and I mean this as an invitation not an assignment. Find one person who is living in the outer courts. Not to fix them or explain resurrection to them or hand them a theological framework. Just to say, I see you. You are not outside the story. The curtain is gone and it was torn for you too.

Be the voice that speaks their name in the dark.

Next week, we begin a series I have been looking forward to— Everyday Prophets. Conversations with women, theologians, and leaders who are shaping the way I think about faith and justice. Voices that have cost something. Wisdom that has been forged, not just studied. I think you are going to find yourself in their stories in ways you don't expect.

Until then, you are not outside the reach of the one who tears curtains from top to bottom and shows up in gardens before sunrise and calls grieving people by name.

He is Risen. And he knows your name.

Jesus. Justice. No apologies.