Happy Easter!
This Sunday, Christians will celebrate the resurrection of a… gardener?
Let me explain…
When Mary Magdalene goes to the tomb to visit Jesus’s body, she confuses him with the gardener.
According to the book of John: “He 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.’”
For years, this struck me as one of many confusing and seemingly random things in the Bible. I mean, of all things, why would she think Jesus was the gardener?
“If you think about it, it’s kind of unlikely,” agrees Dr. Jim Baucom, senior pastor of Columbia Baptist Church in Falls Church, Virginia. “Mary knew him better than anyone. She is said to be the apostle to the apostles by Augustine. She knew who Jesus was, and I don’t care how disheveled she was in that moment, she would have recognized him.”
“So I think what John wants us to see,” Baucom continues, “is that the new gardener is come—the new keeper of Eden. There’s a new Eden, if you will. And Mary’s the first to witness Him.”
“God plants the first man—the first Adam in the garden—and he is to tend the garden,” explains Christopher Esget, pastor of Immanuel Lutheran Church in Alexandria, Virginia. “It is paradise, specifically in that garden, but he is to take care of the Earth…and so, this is precisely what Jesus is… He’s the new gardener, He’s the new Adam, and He’s come to remake the earth.”
Instead of being a weird, random, or extraneous thing to include in scripture, Mary confusing Jesus with the gardener turns out to be a poetic and symbolic theme of the Bible.
Continuing this narrative, when the Bible says Jesus was hung on a “tree” (rather than on a cross) some theologians see this is an allusion to the tree of the knowledge of good and evil in the Garden of Eden. Adam fell because of that tree, and Jesus redeemed us through it.
While some people may think dwelling on these secondary literary themes are a distraction, in my mind, it simply adds another beautiful layer to what is already the greatest story ever told.
“I hold that the Bible is true,” Pastor Esget tells me. “It’s never just literature, but it is always literature.”
Don’t miss my full podcast conversation with Pastor Esget and Dr. Baucom.
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