Jesus' New Gardening
Joining Jesus in Resurrection Gardening
[What follows is an excerpt adapted from my book The Pastor as Gardener: A Renewed Vision for Ministry.]
After his resurrection, Jesus, whose physical body lay still and dead, now stands resurrected before Mary in the garden near where the crucifixion took place. He has burst forth from the grave, a seed now breaking forth with life above ground. “Three days after his crucifixion, [those] who wept as he hung on the Cross and anointed our Lord’s body returned to that garden to find that the seed which they had longingly prepared for planting had already borne a sweet and fragrant fruit.”[1] This Jesus is the firstfruits of resurrection life, but the author of John’s Gospel is telling us that Jesus is also something more. Jesus is a seed sown by God into our world to go down deep into the tomblike soil of death. Jesus is the vine rising up from death bearing many branches with seed-bearing fruitfulness. But Jesus also now stands resurrected upon Earth as the new gardener bringing resurrection life into the beautiful and broken garden of our world. Hidden within that subtle description of Jesus as the gardener is a density of theological significance revealing first that the resurrected Jesus is God the Gardener upon Earth and, second, that Jesus’s followers will join him by resurrection power in God’s gardening work in the world. Victoria Emily Jones writes of Mary’s resurrection encounter with Jesus by saying Jesus’ resurrection “broke ground in this garden marking the beginning of a massive restoration project.”[2] We might well want to say to Mary, “You are right, dear Mary. There is no mistake. Jesus is the gardener—a resurrection gardener bringing new creation to the garden of our lives and the garden of our world marked by death, destruction, and pain.”
And so, Jesus begins to work as a resurrection gardener first in the lives of his followers. With Mary Magdalene, we see Jesus plant seeds of dignity and identity into the soil of her life. She is the first disciple to see the risen Jesus, and it might have been shocking in that day and culture for a woman to have such an honor. Yet Jesus displaces any weeds of shame or dishonor in her life, honoring her and commissioning her as the first emissary of his resurrection (John 20:17). Next, Jesus continues his resurrection gardening work in the lives of his disciples hidden away in a locked room, overcome with fear (20:19), perhaps lingering in clouded atmosphere of what we might today call PTSD. Yet it is in that locked room that Jesus suddenly appears to them resurrected and speaks a resounding word of life-giving peace. Amid the chaos, Jesus pulls the weeds of fear out of these disciples’ lives and plants seeds of courage and hope through the indwelling gift of the Holy Spirit (20:21–22, perhaps another Genesis echo here in John’s Gospel). Later, with one disciple who was not present, Thomas, Jesus appears again to replace the weeds of doubt with seeds of belief and recognition. Jesus does not reject him because of his doubts but invites Thomas to bring his doubts close, to push his hands into the scars of Jesus’s wounded but resurrected body. Later, when a small cluster of disciples go north to Galilee, Jesus suddenly appears to them onshore amid their fruitless fishing. As they return to shore, Jesus has a one-on-one conversation with Peter, whose last interaction with Jesus was hiding in shadows at his rabbi’s nighttime trial and shockingly denying he even knew Jesus. Caught in the briars of shame and creeping weeds of self-doubt, Peter interacts with Jesus, but Jesus slowly and steadily restores Peter, pulling the weeds crowding his life and planting in their place resurrection seed of forgiveness, restoration, and a renewed calling. The resurrected Jesus of the new kingdom, Jesus the resurrection gardener, sows seeds of resurrection power into the lives of his followers.
But this is merely the beginning of what Jesus the resurrection gardener wants to do. We cannot deny the power of Jesus’s new creation gardening in what he did to his first followers, but we soon begin to see that Jesus also wants to bring something through them into the world. The story of the early church—Mary, Thomas, Peter, and so many more—is a story of lives transformed through Jesus and then becoming more like Jesus in thought, word, and deed. The early Christians, as they lived in resurrection power and grew to become more like Jesus, were, perhaps not surprisingly, also mistaken as gardeners. They went forth pulling weeds and sowing Jesus’s resurrection seeds wherever they went.
As mentioned above, Mary Magdalene was the first to be sent by Jesus with a message of hope to his disciples. And they, too, were met by him behind the doors of fear with a message of hope and peace, before they, too, would be sent forth: “As the Father has sent me, I am sending you” (John 20:21). And even as Thomas is reassured by personally and intimately encountering Jesus in his doubts, Jesus couples Thomas’s comfort with a word pointing beyond that room and those disciples: “Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed” (20:29). The gardening work Jesus was doing in each person was paired with an outward movement to join in the resurrection gardening work begun in him. Perhaps the first disciples heard within all these invitations words Jesus had spoken at various times while they stood before harvest fields while traveling together: “Open your eyes and look at the fields! They are ripe for the harvest” (John 4:35) and “Ask the Lord of the harvest, therefore, to send out workers into his harvest field” (Matt. 9:38). God is doing a new gardening work in Jesus, and now he is not only gathering branches into his new vine to bring life into them but also assembling a veritable army of gardeners who will enter into the fields of the Lord, sowing seeds of resurrection and cultivating God’s fruitful work wherever God might take them.
[1] Guroian, Inheriting Paradise, 72.
[2] Victoria Emily Jones, as quoted in Debra Rienstra, Refugia Faith: Seeking Hidden Shelters, Ordinary Wonders, and the Healing of the Earth (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2022), 156.