John 20:13-14
And they say unto her, Woman, why weepest thou? She saith unto them, Because they have taken away my Lord, and I know not where they have laid him.  And when she had thus said, she turned herself back, and saw Jesus standing, and knew not that it was Jesus.

Mary had gone early to the tomb expecting a dead body, expecting to properly tend to it and mourn the loss of Jesus.  Then the extreme loss she feels is only magnified when she discovers that the body is gone and she doesn’t know where it is.  And this is the idea that Mary gets stuck in her head when she is confronted with the confounding fact of that empty tomb—that someone had come and taken Him away.  It was the only reasonable explanation she could come up with to account for a missing body, and so it is also the narrative that she tells the disciples.

We can so easily deceive ourselves and mislead others when we don’t understand something or we don’t have all the facts.  This even shows, in a way, how easily the Pharisees could have convinced people that the disciples had stolen away the body of Jesus.  It was a logical and reasonable assumption to make based on the evidence.  But it was still just an assumption.  And it wasn’t true at all, because Jesus’ time in the grave was always meant to be temporary.

What we need, then, in order to be corrected of these wrong ideas is the Word of Jesus, the truth straight from the Truth Himself.  He can cast away all of our misinformation.  He can help us to get wrong ideas and false assumptions out of our heads.  When Jesus reveals the truth to Mary, He removes her sorrow and replaces it with that joyful truth that He is alive.  It changes everything for Mary to now understand the reality of the situation instead of what she thought was true.

What kinds of wrong ideas do we have in our heads that are leading us astray or keeping us in that sad state?  How might we have been misled by assumptions we or others have made about things that aren’t really true?  Let us allow Jesus to meet us where we are and remove our doubts and those untruths that we believe.  May we seek His help in dealing with these ideas that get stuck in our head that may not be accurate.  May we trust His Word to guide us into truth.  It just might change everything about our situation.