The Gardener
There is something about the way Jesus moves through the garden in John 20 that feels like a secret being whispered. Mary turns around and sees Him and she thinks He is the Gardener. She is not wrong. She is seeing the truth before her mind can catch it.
He is the Gardener.
He always has been.
The story starts in a garden. It ends in a garden. And in between, the Gardener never stops working the soil.When He said in John 15 that the Father is the husbandman, He was showing us the heart of God from the very beginning. The Father has His hands in the dirt. He is not a distant overseer. He is a present caretaker. He knows the smell of the soil. He feels the texture of the leaves. He knows which branch needs pruning and which vine needs lifting. The Father is not managing creation from a throne far away. He is walking among the rows, bending down low, breathing life into the ground.
Jesus watched Him do it. That is how the Son learned to love.
He said, “I am the true vine, and my Father is the husbandman.” He was saying, “I learned this from Him.” Everything about Jesus is a revelation of the Father. And when Jesus gets up from the grave, the first thing He looks like to someone who really loved Him is a Gardener.
That feels like more than a coincidence. That feels like prophecy fulfilled.
The Garden that Was and the Garden that Is
The first Adam was placed in a garden and given the same kind of assignment. Keep it. Tend it. Love it. Guard it. But he lost the posture of a gardener and took up the posture of a consumer. He stopped tending and started taking.
But Jesus, the last Adam, steps into another garden—Gethsemane first, and then the one with the tomb—and restores what was lost. He sweats blood into the soil that was cursed and redeems it with His tears. He goes into the ground like a seed and comes out again as the first fruits of a new creation.
When He rises, He is not just alive. He is gardening again.
Mary is looking for the body of the old thing, but the Gardener is already cultivating the new. She is searching for a corpse and standing in front of resurrection. She mistakes Him for the Gardener because that is what resurrection looks like. It looks like care. It looks like tenderness. It looks like hands willing to get dirty for love.
The Father and the Son at Work in the Dirt
When Jesus calls Himself the vine, He is revealing how intimacy with God works. Life flows through connection. The branch cannot make fruit on its own. It has to remain attached to the vine. Everything depends on the flow.
We live in a culture that celebrates production. We measure everything by how much fruit we can show. But the Gardener is not impressed by performance. He is after relationship. The fruit comes from abiding, not striving.
And the pruning—oh the pruning—is not punishment. It is proof that He still sees potential. He prunes what He intends to grow. Every cut is made by a hand that loves. If He were done with you, He would not touch you at all.
We need to learn to see the pruning seasons as the most intimate ones. That is when His face is closest. That is when His breath is on your branches. That is when He whispers things you could not hear when you were busy showing fruit.
The Gardener is not in a hurry. He knows the rhythm of growth. He knows that the same soil that hides a seed will one day reveal a tree.
The Way of the Gardener
Paul catches this in Romans 15 when he talks about bearing with the failings of the weak. He is describing the posture of the mature toward the immature. The strong do not show their strength by being loud or right. They show it by being patient. By nurturing. By holding space.
This is the way of the Gardener.
Christ did not please Himself. He did not come to dominate. He came to serve. He came to stoop down and dig around the roots of broken people until they could stand again. He did not trample the bruised reed. He did not snuff out the faint flame. He knelt beside it and breathed on it until it flickered back to life.
That is the nature of God. That is the family resemblance. The Father is a Gardener, and the Son has become just like Him.
When Mary Recognized His Voice
I think about that moment when Mary hears her name. The Gardener says, “Mary.” And in that one word everything changes.
Her grief turns into recognition. Her despair turns into encounter.
He calls her name the way the Father called to Adam in the cool of the day. The sound of love looking for its beloved. “Mary.” The voice that formed the world now speaks her name in a garden once again.
It is the reversal of the curse.
Adam hid in the trees when he heard the voice of God. Mary runs toward the voice when she hears it. That is what redemption sounds like. That is what the Gardener does. He keeps calling until we stop hiding.
The Dirt is Holy
Somewhere along the way we started thinking that God is interested only in the spiritual, but the story starts with God shaping dust. He breathes into it. He blesses it. The dirt is holy because His hands touched it.
He is still doing that.
He reaches into the mess of our hearts and does not flinch. He finds the places that are dry and hardened and begins to break them up. He does not shame the dirt. He transforms it.
The Gardener is never disgusted by the soil. He knows what can come out of it.
Every time you feel Him stirring something deep in you, that is the sound of His hands in the earth. Every time He exposes something you did not want to see, He is not trying to embarrass you. He is making space for something new to grow.
The kingdom is always like a seed. Small. Hidden. Growing in secret.
Learning to Garden with Him
If the Father is a Gardener and Jesus has become just like Him, then so must we. To follow Jesus is to take on the heart of the Gardener. To love like that. To care like that. To see people as soil instead of projects.
We stop cursing the ground and start blessing it. We stop seeing weeds and start seeing what could bloom if the light ever reached it.
We become patient again.
The Gardener knows how to wait. He knows that growth takes time and weather and seasons. We have to learn that too. We have to be willing to stay with people long enough to see them flower.
We have to carry the same kind of hope that believes something beautiful can still come out of broken ground.
The Final Garden
At the end of the story, there is another garden. The river flows from the throne of God and the Lamb. The trees line the banks, and their leaves are for the healing of the nations. There is no curse anymore because the Gardener has finished His work.
Everything has come full circle.
The first garden was lost. The second garden was redeemed. The final garden is eternal.
And here we are in between, still being tended, still being pruned, still being loved by the One who walks among the rows.
He is not just trying to get us to heaven. He is trying to make us whole.
He is the Gardener.
He knows your name.
He knows your soil.
He knows what fruit is still coming.
And He is not done yet.
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