Essays From West of 98: The Gardener
A perpetual, intentional calling
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Resurrection Sunday is a powerful scene in each of the four Gospels. They each share a slightly different perspective, but the event is the same. Jesus was crucified on Friday and buried in a tomb, but his followers discover that he is no longer there.
The Gospel of John recounts a particularly interesting version of the story from the perspective of Mary Magdalene. After she discovers Jesus’s missing body, she runs to tell some others and then returns to the site of the tomb. There, she encounters a man during her great shock and sadness:
“Now when she had said this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing there, and did not know that it was Jesus. Jesus said to her, “Woman, why are you weeping? Whom are you seeking?”
She, supposing Him to be the gardener, said to Him, “Sir, if You have carried Him away, tell me where You have laid Him, and I will take Him away.”
If you read on, Jesus quickly identifies himself and Mary discovers her mistake.
Or *was* it a mistake?
The history of man opens in a garden. Man is entrusted with a beautiful responsibility to tend and keep the garden and Creation. Of course, man’s arrogance soon gets him banished from the garden. In that banishment, though, his responsibility to tend and keep Creation is never withdrawn. Quite the opposite, in fact. God would later make a covenant with man about the Promised Land and in that covenant, the orderly care of the land is essential and integral. God’s people struggle to uphold that covenant, so much suffering and bondage ensues as a result.
Jesus came to restore the connection between God and Man. He came to restore a connection that was originally made in Eden and lost and then re-made and lost again in the Promised Land. It was a connection in which tending and keeping the land was an essential part of the connection. Old Testament scholar Ellen Davis has described God’s covenant with the Israelites in the Promised Land as a triangular covenant between God, man, and the land, in which all three parties are essential to the covenant.1
It is with this historical backdrop that Mary Magdalene sees Jesus and takes him for the gardener. It is a backdrop in which Man had been entrusted as God’s gardener of Creation and which he had failed spectacularly. Was John trying to tell us something about the innate nature of Jesus and the calling of his followers?
Pastor and author Brian Zahnd views this as an express message about Jesus’s nature. He writes, “Jesus is the gardener who turns blighted wastelands into verdant gardens” and he contrasts this image of Jesus with the distorted views of a more transactional nature: a train conductor punching tickets for a ride to heaven, a lawyer getting a child out of a legal jam, or a banker making loans of salvation.
My friend Kyle Childress preached a sermon on this very topic over 20 years ago and he was kind enough to offer that sermon to me as a reference for this essay. Kyle mused:
“I’m just wondering. I wonder if Mary mistook Jesus for the gardener because he was gardening? Have you ever thought about that? Maybe Jesus had a garden hoe and was doing a little cultivating around some plants or he was down on his knees planting something in the ground and was scooping dirt around it as they started talking to one another? Who knows?”2
John does not give much detail about Mary’s thought process, but you wonder why her mind immediately ran to the notion that he was the gardener. Surely the gardener was not the only person who might be around at that time of day! What about his presence made her think that he was the gardener? Kyle might be on to something.
Kyle also makes a reference to Jeremiah 29 which, through no fault with the scripture, is seemingly one of the most-quoted scriptures in modern Christianity. “For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord…” appears in a truly limitless number of settings. Children memorize it at Sunday School. It’s a verse that Christians look upon when they are troubled. If there was a competition to determine which Bible verse appeared on the most knick-knacks and pieces of home décor, this one would be on the short list. Unfortunately, though, the modern use of Jeremiah 29:11 often omits the full context. It’s a small piece of a larger letter to Israelites who have been exiled in Babylon. It is intended to encourage those exiles to live within their circumstances as God would intend them to. And what does it say in verse 5? “Build houses and settle down; plant gardens and eat what they produce.” There it is again. Eden has been lost, but following God by tending and keeping Creation has not. It also gives the exiles a measure of independence from their captors, as they grow and eat their own food and in doing so, they contribute to the peace and prosperity of the city in which they live.
Over recent years, I’ve been bothered by the idea that modern Christianity can focus too much time and energy on Heaven. This is not to suggest that salvation is unimportant. It is not. But beginning with the command in Genesis 2:15 to tend and keep the garden,3 man has been instructed by God to make an impact on the Earth during his life, not merely wait for the next life to come. God reinforced this by making a covenant with the Israelites for the care of the Promised Land. Even after that fell apart, prophets like Jeremiah continue to reinforce the idea of positively influencing the place in which you live. Being exiled in the foreign land of Babylon, when their rights as citizens were likely dubious at best, was still not enough to waive man’s obligation to tend and keep the land, enjoy its bounty, and improve their place.
English theologian N.T. Wright penned an essay at Plough on this very point that I consider to be one of the most important things I have ever read. He writes that the resurrection of Jesus and gift of the Holy Spirit call us to “bring forth real and effective signs of God’s renewed creation” and that if we fail to do so, then we engage in a heretical Gnosticism that colludes with the forces of sin and death. Gnosticism, an attempt to transcend into pure spiritual thinking without regard for the people and world around you, was targeted by Paul as a dangerous mistake in the early years of the Church and it is no less dangerous today.
I am no theologian. I am but a country mayor armed with a legal pad and a belief that we were not put here to wait for Heaven, but instead to do God’s good work while we are here on Earth. I probably fall in line with Jayber Crow’s idea of the Christian faith on more than a few points:
“I am, maybe, the ultimate Protestant, the man at the end of the Protestant road, for as I have read the Gospels over the years, the belief has grown in me that Christ did not come to found an organized religion but came instead to found an unorganized one. He seems to have come to carry religion out of the temples into the fields and sheep pastures, onto the roadsides and the banks of rivers, into the houses of sinners and publicans, into the town and the wilderness, toward the membership of all that is here. Well, you can read and see what you think.”
That’s how I feel, that we are not called to sit around waiting for Heaven or to transcend Earth into some disembodied spiritual thinking for the remainder of our lives. We are called to bring forth and live out God’s calling in all the places in which we live our lives.
So when Mary Magdalene mistakes Jesus for the gardener on Easter Sunday, I do not think it was mere mistaken identity or confusion by a troubled and grieving follower of Jesus. I believe it was very specifically intended to make a point to those of us who would come after Jesus’s resurrection. Since the very dawn of time, God has attempted to put man in charge of the Earth, to tend and keep it in a manner that would make God proud. Man dropped the ball on that one pretty early and God gave his people another chance with the Promised Land. They continued to fail but God continued to speak through every available channel about the value of caring for the land as a manner of worship, no matter man’s prosperity or lack thereof. Ultimately, God had to send his Son to redeem the world. When he did, he used the imagery of a gardener amid the Resurrection as a tool to emphasize what God has envisioned for us all along.
The gardener does not offer a transactional salvation. The gardener turns the blighted wasteland of man’s life into a verdant garden, just as we were called to tend and keep the verdant gardens of Creation on God’s behalf. That instruction has never been withdrawn and the imagery of Jesus as a gardener reinforces our calling to do just that. So, too, should we pursue that calling in our lives, in the lives of the people around us, and in our places. Just as the Israelite exiles were instructed in Babylon, may we tend our gardens, eat from them, and bring forth the peace and prosperity of the city in which we live.
James Decker is the Mayor of Stamford, Texas and the creator of the West of 98 website and the “Rural Church and State” and “West of 98” podcasts. Contact James and subscribe to these essays at westof98.substack.com and subscribe to him wherever podcasts are found. Check out the West of 98 Bookstore with book lists for essential reads here.
I cannot overemphasize the manner in which Davis’s “Scripture, Culture, and Agriculture” has helped me understand the Old Testament and view it with an entirely new purpose and energy. This is not mere trendy writing by a Christian author playing to an audience. Davis is one of the world’s foremost living Old Testament scholars and her writing is based on her own work translating the original text. She brings receipts and knows that from which she speaks.
Kyle is a Stamford native who has pastored Austin Heights Baptist Church in Nacogdoches, Texas for the better part of three full decades, but this sermon was given on October 19, 2003 at Highland Baptist Church in Louisville, Kentucky.
Ellen Davis distinguishes the original language of this Scripture to delineate the actual calling as one of man working and tending the land *with* nature rather than an extractive exercise of dominion.
Beautiful words James, you are so dedicated in your writings for us to be a better gardener in our daily lives🙏 Thank you🙏
I read Ellen Davis' book a number of years ago, and still refer to it. I had felt for a very long time that care for the land was a missing piece of western faith. My studies have led me to the point where your puece here is a capstone on my belief. Thank you.
As a side note, i am a scholar of pre-Christian Ireland. There is a reoccurring thread of care and honor for the land that runs through out ancient Irish myth. One of the reasons, i believe, that Ireland was peacefully converted.