An encouragement to the withdrawn waiting at the grave of our heart, until Jesus appears to us there in spirit.

What this letter is. An Eastertide letter to a sick "sister," written just after the Easter feast-days and finished when her own letter arrived. Instead of dwelling on her illness, Tersteegen gives her a picture to live inside: the pattern of Mary Magdalene at the empty tomb (John 20). It is one of his gentlest teachings on waiting — on not running anxiously to and from "the grave of our heart," but staying until Christ Himself is found there.

Its argument. He wishes her "the blessed form and meeting of Mary Magdalene." Mary sought her Beloved "with much love-diligence," and then waited at the grave "with patience and with a withdrawnness from all things, even from the angels" — she would not be content even with angelic comfort, only with Him. And so "she found Him whom her soul loved… far nearer and more glorious than she had supposed." One word from Him — "Mary" — revealed His presence and took away all her grief; and she could answer only "Rabboni, my Master!" Against her stands the haste of the other disciples: "so many run quickly to the grave, and away from the grave again, and, just because they do not wait, also do not find" (Peter and John, who ran to the tomb and went home). So the counsel: "Let us work where love makes us work, but… also not neglect the resigned waiting at the grave of our heart." Nothing less than Jesus Himself will satisfy — "nothing creaturely, nothing sensory, nothing of feeling, nothing angelic" — for "when Jesus Himself appears to the soul in spirit… a single word of the eternal Word gives all that one desires." He closes by folding her sickness into the Easter pattern: "the Passion too belongs to Easter — if we do not suffer and die along with Him, we cannot live along with Him" — trusting that in her "sick-room" the Saviour will bless "both the sweet and the bitter" to the one end of purifying and uniting the soul with Himself.

A few words and echoes.

• "Him whom her soul loved." The words are John 20's Magdalene, but the phrase is the Bride's in the Song of Solomon 3:1–4 — "by night on my bed I sought him whom my soul loveth… I found him whom my soul loveth." Tersteegen reads Mary at the tomb through the searching love of the Canticles.
• "Even from the angels." At the tomb Mary is questioned by two angels but is not satisfied by them, turning past them to seek Jesus (John 20:11–14). Tersteegen makes her refusal to stop even at angelic consolation the model of pure, undistracted longing — hence "nothing angelic must detain us." (The 1773's "Englisches" is the old German word for angelic, from Engel.)
• "A single word, Mary… Rabboni, my Master!" John 20:16 — "Jesus saith unto her, Mary. She turned herself, and saith unto him, Rabboni; which is to say, Master." The whole meeting turns on two words: His naming of her, and her naming of Him.
• "Peter and John… run quickly to the grave." John 20:3–4 — the two disciples run to the tomb, see, and "went away again unto their own home" (v. 10), while Mary stays and weeps and is the first to see the Lord. Waiting, not running, is what finds Him.
• "The eternal Word." John 1:1 — Christ the Word; His single spoken word "Mary" is a word "of the eternal Word."
• "The Passion too belongs to Easter… if we do not suffer and die along with Him, we cannot live along with Him." Romans 6:8 and 2 Timothy 2:11 — "if we be dead with him, we shall also live with him." Her illness is set within the dying-and-rising of Easter, not outside it.