Easter Sunday.
“Mary Magdalene turned around and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not know it was Jesus. . .supposing him to be the gardener.” — John 20:14, 15
This text for years has fascinated me. It may be one of my favorite texts in the whole Bible. It has puzzled commentators for various readings. The first reason is it’s a detail found only in John’s Gospel. The second reason is it seems so random. Why does John mention Jesus being disguised as a gardener? And why is Jesus, post resurrection working the ground of the garden tomb? He could have been doing a lot of things as the resurrected king of the cosmos. But he chose to be found working the ground as a gardener.
Here’s why. It’s pretty simple if you read the Bible and a unified story.
Jesus is the Last Adam. He is the one who has come to put things to right by redeeming all of creation that was subjected to bondage in the fall of the First Adam.
This image is an image of the in-breaking of the Kingdom of God. It is an image of a new creation. It is literally, better than the beginning.
In the beginning, you had a man (Adam), you had a woman (Eve), you had a Garden, and you had a serpent. Here, you have a man (Jesus), you have a woman (Mary of Magdala), you have a Garden, but one detail is missing. You no longer have a serpent.
Why?
Because Jesus is the seed of the woman promised all the way back in Genesis 3:15. He is the One who was promised by God that would crush the serpents head.
That’s why there’s no serpent. Jesus has inaugurated the New Creation. It is not an end time reality only, it is a right here, right now reality. Jesus has all authority and power in heaven and in earth right now (Matt. 28). The nations and kingdoms of the world no longer belong to the dragon — they belong to the Lamb. The serpent does his work now as a flailing snake with a crushed head who awaits his last sundown.
On Easter Sunday, the eyes of Mary of Magdala that was more than acquainted with the ways of the old creation saw the first day of a New Creation. And in Christ, the same is true with us. The New Creation is here, and we’re participants in it in our cruciform way of life. Not only is He making us new in Him, but He is using us as His instrument to spread His Garden Kingdom to the ends of the earth.
He has made all things new, and is using us to participate in His redemptive work. In the same way that Adam participated in God’s creative work by naming the animals in the old creation, we do the same thing by marking all things redeemable as Christ’s.
“On the third day the friends of Christ coming at day-break to the place found the grave empty and the stone rolled away. In varying ways they realized the new wonder; the world had died in the night. What they were looking at was the first day of a new creation, with a new heaven and a new earth; and in a semblance of a gardener God walked again in the garden, not in the cool of the evening, but in the dawn.” — G.K. Chesterton