Christ as the Gardener

Hi, I am delighted to introduce The Reverend Hannah Higgins, Rector at All Saints in Wokingham, my parish when Terri and I lived in England. I have treasured Hannah’s leadership in faith and creation care, both in word and action. Please enjoy her post below.

In John’s resurrection account – where Mary finds the empty tomb – she then mistakes Jesus for the gardener. Much has been made of this mistake by artists over the centuries – there are a number of paintings featuring Mary encountering Jesus, spade in hand, or a floppy hat to keep the sun off, as though the risen Christ has been out doing a spot of weeding. 

The poet Andrew Hudgins imagines this scene in his poem ‘Christ as a Gardener’ and this image is one of a recent painting by Joel Briggs called The Gardener (seen above), depicting Jesus at work in a world where there has been much destruction and despair. What if Mary’s mistake was no mistake – perhaps Jesus is in fact the gardener – the gardener who comes into the messy gardens of our lives to prune, to care, to plant, to nurture, and to help us flourish. This is not so unexpected. After all, in the book of Genesis it is God himself who planted the garden of Eden, and carefully formed man from the dust of the earth. Here is not a God who removes himself from us, who remains aloft and distant. Here is a God who comes down to our level, who gets his hands dirty, and is prepared to do the hard labour of cultivating the earth. 

That second garden, the scene of Jesus’ resurrection, reminding us of the first creation, is the setting for the new creation – that is the image that we are offered by John. And so, the resurrection is in fact not just the happy ending to the story of Jesus’ betrayal, death and crucifixion, rather it is, as Tom Wright has said, ‘the beginning of the new creation which has been made possible by the overcoming of the forces of corruption and decay in the death of Jesus’. Jesus, the gardener, invites us to join him in this new creation, to work with him in caring for the world and its people, to help all to flourish in this world, not just the next.