She Thought He Was the Gardener

John 20:1-16
4.5.26 Easter
Matt Goodale

I don’t know how many of you are gardeners…but I’ve learned there are basically two types of people in the world: people who are good at gardening…and people who are really good at accidentally killing plants.

And the frustrating thing about gardening is this: you can do everything right—plant the seed, water it, make sure it has enough sun. And then you just…wait.

And for a long time it looks like absolutely nothing is happening. It just looks like dirt.

And that’s exactly where our Easter story begins. Not in a palace or in a place of power.

But in a garden where there’s a whole bunch of dirt.

It’s early in the morning. We can imagine it’s quiet outside, maybe the sun hasn’t even peeked over the horizon yet. And we find Mary, Jesus’ friend and follower weeping on her way to the tomb.

We don’t know why she’s on her way there. Other gospel writers tell us she’s bringing oils and spices to anoint Jesus’ body. John doesn’t tell us here though, and so we are left wondering. Maybe she is going for closure. Maybe she needs to see the body one more time to grieve properly; maybe she heads there because she doesn’t know where else to go.

Because in the tomb Mary is on her way to visit, it is not just her friend who is buried there, but it is her hopes and dreams for a new world. As Jesus died, so did a movement that believed the world could more effectively be changed through love than by violence. But in the end on the cross, violence won, and Jesus’ body was broken, along with any hope of a new kingdom—a new dream for humanity.

I can imagine not just the grief she carries, but the disorientation as well. When you’ve put your hope in something or someone only to watch it fail, it can leave you unanchored, unsure how to steady yourself again.

Everything Mary hoped for feels like it’s been buried. It now lies dead under the dirt.

So when she arrives at the tomb and finds the stone rolled away and Jesus’ body gone, she’s stunned.

She immediately runs to tell Peter and John who won’t believe her unless they see it for themselves. They check it out and eventually depart leaving Mary alone by herself again, and she weeps some more. Because if it wasn’t enough to kill her friend, someone has gone and taken his body. It feels so wrong.

And as she’s weeping and looking in the tomb, she turns and sees a man standing there—we know he’s Jesus, but she doesn’t recognize him. He asks her “Why are you weeping? Whom are you looking for?”

And John is a brilliant author, because he gives us this small almost throwaway detail: she thought he was the gardener.

She thought he was the gardener.

And maybe she’s not wrong.

Because when you hear that Jesus was buried in a garden, does it remind you of another garden in God’s story?

The Garden of Eden. That very first garden where life began. But we know as beautiful as that first garden was…we know what happened next. Brokenness and death entered the story, and humans were exiled from the garden.

And John is so brilliant in making the connection to that first garden, because it’s his way of saying: you thought the story was over, but God is a gardener, and he’s not finished with the garden.

In the beginning God planted a garden. And on Easter morning he started it again. Jesus the gardener is bringing new life to places we’ve thought dead and buried.

And the thing about gardens is that they don’t look like much at first. They look like dirt.

And I think that’s why this Easter story matters so much, because a lot of life feels like that. It just looks like dirt—a whole lot of nothing happening.

It looks like showing up every day to a job that drains you and wondering if anything you do actually matters.

It looks like trying to repair a relationship and feeling like it’s too far gone or you’re the only one trying.

It looks like sitting in grief that doesn’t go away, even when everyone else has moved on.

It looks like doing your best as a parent and still feeling like you’re getting it wrong.

It looks like growing older and wondering what you have to show for your life or if anything worthwhile still lies ahead.

It just looks like dirt.

Nothing growing. It’s kindof messy. Nothing changing or really happening;. At least, nothing you can see.

And that’s exactly where Mary is. Standing in a garden surrounded by loss, absolutely certain she knows how the story ends. Dead things stay dead. Dreams don’t come back. Once it’s buried, that’s it.

And I wonder how many of us have stories like that.

I’ve shared often about my experience working in a state psychiatric hospital and I return to that place often because it is the one place I have most doubted God.

And I remember walking the grounds, wondering if anything good could possibly grow in a place where suffering felt so constant. The grounds themselves were littered with dilapidated buildings that had been shut and abandoned for decades, kind of like the patients in the units who had been locked up and abandoned by the rest of society.

But one day, I started to notice something I hadn’t seen before. Life was growing. Vines were climbing the broken walls of these abandoned buildings. Grass was pushing through cracks and creation was slowly reclaiming what looked dead.

And then, slowly, I started to see it in the people too. Not dramatic transformations, but small, stubborn signs of new life.

There was Lori, who couldn’t remember most of her life but could still play the piano beautifully. There was Patti who little by little began to trust again after deep trauma. There was Mattias who had once been on the most securely locked unit and now freely walked the halls, helping others rediscover purpose and hope.

On the whole, it still looked like a place of despair, but as I began to look closer I noticed small sprouts of new life pushing through.

Mary thought she was standing at the end. But she was standing in a garden…where new life had already begun. She just couldn’t see it yet.

Because it turns out, dirt is exactly where God loves to work.

From the very beginning, God forms humanity out of dirt. In Latin, the root for humanity…humus literally means, the ground, dirt, soil.

And now in Jesus, God enters fully into that same earth. Jesus is buried and placed in the ground. And for several days it looks like the story is over. Like nothing is happening. Like death and the oppressive powers have won.

But anyone who has ever planted a seed knows: buried is not the same thing as dead. For a gardener, buried is where life begins.

A seed has to go into the darkness of the ground. It has to break open and come apart before it becomes anything new. And while all of that is happening, you can’t see it. It’s hidden and quiet and unnoticed.

That’s what resurrection looks like at first.

At our old home the backyard was a mess of dirt and buried cement and rocks. It was ugly. I spent a lot of energy moving all that buried cement and giant river rock and then carefully leveled the dirt and scattered grass seed. I watered it faithfully for one week and then two weeks.

And after two weeks of doing my best gardener impression there was still nothing to show for it. I thought the seeds had died and so I stopped watering. But one morning in the third week, coincidentally it was Easter week, as I was leaving on my way to work, I noticed something other than dirt catch the sun’s light. I stopped and bent down looking closer, and I noticed first dozens and then hundreds of tiny blades of grass bursting from the dirt.

And I had almost missed it. Because the new life was so small at first and easy to overlook if you weren’t paying attention. It was easy to dismiss if you’d already decided nothing was happening. But something was happening.

Eventually that grass would grow into a lush lawn that my kids would soon run and play on, but I that moment, it was just these tiny, fragile shoots pushing up through the dirt.

And I wonder how often that’s true for us. How often something new is already beginning, but it’s so small, so quiet and easy to miss that we assume nothing is growing. So we stop looking or hoping or showing up.

But beneath the surface, out of sight, life is already at work.

And Jesus’ seeds of resurrection that hold new life within them are scattered and buried in the dirt of our lives and our world…in the places we think are dead or beyond healing.

And it turns out these are the very places where something new is beginning.

And part of following Jesus is to become gardeners in a world that is yearning for new life. We are called to plant, to tend, to keep showing up in love even when everything looks like a pile of dirt and nothing is happening.

And that’s exactly where Mary was.

Mary thought it was just a garden with a dead body. Just a whole bunch of dirt and loss. Just the place where everything had ended.

But it turns out it was the very place where everything was beginning again. Because the gardener was there.

So if you find yourself in a place right now that feels like…dirt—like nothing is growing. If every time you check the news it feels like everything good is buried and you can see what’s been lost.

Hear this: it might look like dirt. But that doesn’t mean nothing is happening.

Because the gardener is still at work. Bringing life out of death. Hope out of grief. Something new out of what looked like nothing.

Mary thought he was the gardener. And she was right.