JESUS the GARDENER
JUNE 01, 2022
John 20:11-16
11Now Mary stood outside the tomb crying. As she wept, she bent over to look into the tomb 12and saw two angels in white, seated where Jesus’ body had been, one at the head and the other at the foot. 13They asked her, “Woman, why are you crying?” “They have taken my Lord away,” she said, “and I don’t know where they have put him.” 14At this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not realize that it was Jesus. 15He asked her, “Woman, why are you crying? Who is it you are looking for?” Thinking he was the gardener, she said, “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have put him, and I will get him.” 16Jesus said to her, “Mary.” She turned toward him and cried out in Aramaic, “Rabboni!” (which means “Teacher”).
Genesis 2:8-15
8Now the Lord God had planted a garden in the east, in Eden; and there he put the man he had formed. 9The Lord God made all kinds of trees grow out of the ground—trees that were pleasing to the eye and good for food. In the middle of the garden were the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. 10A river watering the garden flowed from Eden; from there it was separated into four headwaters. 11The name of the first is the Pishon; it winds through the entire land of Havilah, where there is gold. 12(The gold of that land is good; aromatic resin and onyx are also there.) 13The name of the second river is the Gihon; it winds through the entire land of Cush. 14The name of the third river is the Tigris; it runs along the east side of Ashur. And the fourth river is the Euphrates. 15The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it.
Genesis 3:17-19
17To Adam he said, “Because you listened to your wife and ate fruit from the tree about which I commanded you, ‘You must not eat from it,’ “Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat food from it all the days of your life. 18It will produce thorns and thistles for you, and you will eat the plants of the field. 19By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return.”
In the article She Mistook Him for the Gardener, Victoria Emily Jones, points out that paintings from the European Renaissance and Baroque periods frequently depict Jesus greeting Mary Magdalene on Easter morning while toting gardening tools or leaning on a shovel—even wearing a floppy gardening hat—as if he had gotten
You’ve probably read today's passage dozens, maybe hundreds of times. And if you’re like me, you’ve likely always thought of the fact that Mary mistook Jesus as “the gardener” as some odd but insignificant detail of Scripture. Just a case of mistaken identity. After all, someone in a garden at an early hour makes sense that individual may be a gardener. Sometimes I have these strange questions that pop into mind when I read scripture, perhaps you do to. In this case the question I had was why a gardener? Why not a fellow mourner like herself? Is this detail pointing to something more noteworthy than I noticed at first read?
Perhaps, to understand the story, we must first go back to Genesis where God created Adam and Eve and put them in the Garden of Eden to work and “fill the earth.” Remember according to Genesis 3, Sin did not yet exist, and working in the garden was an act of worship.
However, a few verses later, sin enters the world. Now work is still worship, but it is now also tiring and difficult. We hear that “through painful toil you will eat food from it all the days of your life.” Sin’s outcome becomes the reason for the “Word to become flesh”. The reason that God will through him “crush the serpents head”.
The story of Easter reveals that renewal is on the way. The resurrection resets the world as Jesus inaugurates the coming of the Kingdom of Heaven. And in his first appearance to humanity post-resurrection, Jesus reveals himself to Mary looking like a gardener. Why? Here’s what N.T. Wright says in his terrific book Surprised by Hope: “In the new creation, the ancient human mandate to look after the garden is dramatically reaffirmed as John hints in his resurrection story, where Mary supposes Jesus is the gardener. The resurrection of Jesus is the reaffirmation of the goodness of creation.”
By appearing as a gardener, Jesus is deliberately pointing us back to Adam and Eve, the world’s first gardeners and workers. Adam was to "garden" the whole earth for the glory of God. But he failed. John's Gospel records what happened on the morning of Jesus' resurrection. He was "the beginning [of the new creation], the firstborn from the dead." Jesus is showing us that it is time to garden again, working to till the earth, to “fill the earth” with signs of the new life that began to spring to life that first Easter morning when God turned "Graves into Gardens."
Maybe it is just me but I find it interesting that the last book of the Bible the closing scenes of the book of Revelation, John saw the new earth coming down from heaven. Remember what it looked like? A garden in which the tree of life stands!
“Believing in the resurrection of Christ is a little bit easier when you’re standing in the middle of a garden.” Debra Reistra
https://artandtheology.org/2016/04/05/she-mistook-him-for-the-gardener/
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