25. Jesus the Gardner

John 20:11

“But Mary stood weeping outside the tomb, and as she wept she stooped to look into the tomb.”

There’s a funny moment in this story when Mary mistakes Jesus for a gardener. It seems funny anyway. But the bit about Mary thinking Jesus is a gardener isn’t an irrelevant detail. John intentionally included this in his retelling of the resurrection story because he knew it was important. And it is. The reason Mary thought Jesus was a gardener was because the tomb where Jesus was buried was in a garden. When Jesus stepped out of the tomb and into His resurrected life, He stepped out into a garden. This is not just a biographical detail. This is central to the story.

As we saw last week, Jesus entered into His suffering and death through the garden of Gethsemane. After He was crucified and died, He stepped out of a tomb and into a garden. The idea of the garden is foundational to our human story. We see at the beginning of Genesis that a garden was God’s ultimate plan for the place where mankind and God would dwell together. The garden represents the place where the human and divine commune. After mankind fell and was expelled from the garden, the temple became the new place where humans could dwell with God. Solomon’s temple was designed to resemble a garden. The walls, pillars and furnishing were decorated with palm trees, pomegranates, gourds, lilies, almond blossoms, and flowers. The temple was like a miniature Eden—but it was a place that required following a complicated set of rules and offering continual sacrifices to gain limited access to the presence of God. The temple was a temporary solution, while the world waited for a Savior who would rescue them and whose sacrifice would make a way for them back into God’s presence once and for all.

And that’s what happened when Jesus defeated sin and death and emerged from the tomb. His death and resurrection means that all of creation is reconciled to its Creator God. Jesus opens the way back into the garden presence of the Father—Jesus is the doorway.  His resurrection doesn’t mean that we get to go to heaven when we die, His resurrection means that heaven comes down to earth here and now, in the midst of our broken lives. It means that Jesus, the gardener, is now with us through the Holy Spirit, cultivating Eden in the very dust of our flesh. 

And here’s the thing about well-tended gardens; well-tended gardens grow and spread. They produce fruit that drops seeds, resulting in more life and more seeds. They grown into barren and desolate places and fill them with new life. In Revelation 21:5 we hear Jesus say, “Behold, I am making all things new.” This “new” that Jesus talks about is a new kind of new. It’s not just a new that takes us back to square one. It’s a new that’s even better than the original. The ancient Japanese art of kintsugi explains this kind of newness. In kintsugi, a ceramic artist takes a broken vessel and mends it by filling the cracks with gold. The finished product is no longer just a vessel, it has become a work of art. And this is the significance of Jesus’ death and resurrection. He chose to pour out His life in order to take all that we have shattered, all of broken creation, and make it new.

Somehow, in His infinite goodness and perfection, God takes our brokenness and the mess we made and makes it even better than it was before we broke it. This is the miracle of the resurrection—that God weaves the broken threads into our story in such a way that it is more beautiful and whole in its restored state than it ever was before. How can this be? Only by the blood of Jesus.

Today, when you hear Him call your name, as He called out to Mary, respond the same way she did. Cry out to Him and invite Him into your life. Invite Him to begin tilling the soil of your broken flesh and to begin cultivating a beautiful flourishing life that will spill over into all the barren and empty spaces around you, and in all the lives you touch. This is the resurrected life.