The Resurrection of Our Lord
Texts: John 20:1-18;
Isa 65:17-25; Acts 10:34-43
YouTube: https://youtu.be/7O5UhWZBA34
WAY TO GO, MARY!
“Supposing him to be the gardener, Mary said . . .” Wait, what? Supposing Jesus to be the gardener? That seems like a dumb mistake. She’s there mourning Jesus’ death and doesn’t even recognize him? (Sarcastically:) Way to go, Mary!
Taken by itself, it does seem an unfortunate error. Jesus as the gardener. But I’d like to suggest that, in the bigger picture, perhaps it’s not so unfortunate. First of all, the bigger picture of the resurrection appearances in the Gospels is that almost everyone is slow to recognize Jesus. He apparently has undergone some change in appearance. The most famous example are the two disciples who walk seven miles with Jesus, from Jerusalem to Emmaus, failing to recognize him. He explains the whole Bible to them, and they still don’t recognize him. It isn’t until he breaks bread with them that they finally see it’s Jesus.
So maybe Mary’s mistake isn’t so bad, after all. Maybe it’s even a prophetic mistake. Maybe we are meant to recall another man and woman in a garden — the first man and woman who were put in the paradisial garden to garden it and ended up failing. John tells us poignantly that it’s the first day of a new week. Some scholars tell us that John structures his whole Gospel in terms of the prophecies of New Creation — like the one in today’s First Reading from Isaiah. Easter morning, the first day of a new week, is the first day of a New Creation — a New Creation where Jesus finally gets us fellow siblings to fulfill our original mission. In short, he’s there, he’s here, to help us to finally be the gardeners we were created to be. “Supposing him to be the gardener . . .” (Approvingly:) Way to go, Mary!1
We are here this morning to celebrate a wondrous thing! That in raising Jesus from the dead, God has vanquished death for us! Yes, we are still mortal. These earthly bodies will ultimately fail us. But there are new bodies waiting for us when we pass through the death of these earthly bodies. We will have resurrection bodies like Jesus — bodies recognizable as human but also somehow changed. The mortality of our earthly bodies will be swapped for the immortality of resurrection bodies.
We might ask, however, why bodies are even necessary in the afterlife. There’s certainly a popular way of thinking that we won’t have bodies in the afterlife. It will only be our souls that survive. Even much of Christian history has talked that way, that our mission is to ‘save souls’ for the afterlife. Our souls leave this dreary earthly home behind for the eternal bliss of our souls in a new heavenly home. Isn’t this a familiar way of picturing the afterlife?
But this has been a colossal and tragic mistake — on multiple levels. First of all, it doesn’t take its cue from our biblical tradition of the Easter stories we read on this day and during this season. Jesus does not come back as a disembodied soul who will someday guide our souls into the afterlife. Jesus returns as a resurrected body who will guide us someday into not just the afterlife but into the New Creation. That’s the key here.
My dear siblings in Christ, this difference between afterlife and New Creation is crucial! It marks the true significance of our heritage with the Jewish faith of Jesus and the apostles. Because the Jewish faith is not fundamentally about a god who simply rescues us from the sin-corrupted creation. No, the Jewish faith of our founders is fundamentally about a Creator God who means to save the entire sin-corrupted creation. God doesn’t give up on what God has created. That’s why we don’t just talk about souls in the afterlife. We talk about bodies in the New Creation, the creation which God is saving from the consequences of our sin.
What is that sin? We need to make the same prophetic mistake as Mary, to recognize Jesus first and foremost as the gardener — the gardener we human beings were created to be but failed to be. What is our sin? We have failed to be gardeners, caretakers with God of creation. We have failed to care for this earth and for one another as God planned us to be. So when Mary in the Easter garden supposes Jesus to be the gardener, it is a fortuitous mistake. A prophetic mistake. A beautiful mistake. Way to go, Mary!
Let’s ponder this sin of failing to be gardeners for just a few moments. The story of sin in Genesis 2-3 shows the man and woman in a garden with many trees — including the Tree of Life itself. They have more than enough, an abundance, of trees there to sustain their lives. But, through the temptation of the serpent, they come to focus on the one forbidden tree, the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Today, as humankind faces the terrible consequences of climate change, scientists are calling this “overreach.”2 Instead of being satisfied with the abundance of resources that can sustain our lives, we focus on what we don’t have, seeing the world in terms of scarcity instead of abundance. Overreach.
Can you see how grasping for godlike knowledge and power would be a way of rejecting our place as human creatures, with bodies, who must live as part of our environment, within its limits?3 Can you see how refusing to live within limits, playing Creator rather than creature, would lead to the dominating civilizations as we know it? Civilizations that we’ve broadly called “nationalism” this past year. We were put here as gardeners, to be caretakers of the earth and each other, but instead we wanted to be gods who dominate the earth and one another.
The prohibition comes with a warning, a consequence: in the day you eat of it, you will die. In other words, if you leave your place as one beloved creature among other beloved creatures in a sacred creation, you will experience suffering, sweat, tears, violence, and, in the end, extinction. You will no longer fit in with your environment. You will compete with it, to master it. In your bid to live as immortal gods, the story suggests, you will die like dogs (no insult to dogs intended).
So Jesus wasn’t raised on Easter morning to simply conquer death in the simplest terms of allowing some human beings a chance at the afterlife. No, Jesus is raised on Easter morning to overturn the enormously deadly consequences of our Overreach. As we read last week from Philippians 29:5-11), Jesus the Messiah, who is equal to God, chooses not to grasp after that godlikeness but to empty himself into human likeness. He is here to show us the true way to be human. It’s not about a religious conversion; it’s about a human conversion. He is here to show us how to be gardeners. How to truly care for this earth-home and each other as self-giving stewards of your creation. As proper gardeners.
So in recognizing Jesus as the gardener, we also get sent out like Mary to tell the Good News of God’s victory over death. Not just a victory over the mortality of these earthly bodies. But the victory over the deadly consequences of our sin of our overreach, of trying to be gods instead of gardeners. We are sent out like Mary to proclaim the Good News not just of an afterlife but of a New Creation where we receive new resurrection bodies and then finally take our proper places as gardeners, following our brother Jesus.
Until then, we are called like Mary to spread the news, so that we can begin to live into that New Creation which has already been launched on that first Easter. We don’t have to wait for the afterlife or for New Creation to be finished. We can join in with what’s already begun. In doing so, we will be opposing movements of continuing overreach, like the nationalism we’ve been talking about this past year. But the best criticism of the bad is the practice of the better.4 Jesus has already shown us how to be proper gardeners through the way he lived his life and in the way he died, suffering the violence rather than dishing it out. In his Spirit, we are now his body in the world to answer our original calling of caring for the earth and for one another.
Supposing him to be the gardener? Yes! Yes! Yes! Way to go, Mary! Now it’s our turn! Amen
Paul J. Nuechterlein
Bethania Lutheran Church,
Racine, WI, April 20, 2025
YouTube: https://youtu.be/7O5UhWZBA34
Notes
1. I first stumbled upon the idea of Mary’s mistake to be a fortunate one in N.T. Wright, Twelve Months of Sundays: Reflections on Bible Readings, Year A (SPCK, 2001), 54-55, which I first used for an Easter sermon in 2008. For more on the thesis about New Creation in the Gospel of John, see N.T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God (Fortress Press, 2003), 440ff, 668ff.
2. In using the word “overreach,” I was mistakenly seeking to use a word used throughout Brian McLaren’s, Life after Doom: Wisdom and Courage for a World Falling Apart (St Martin’s Essentials, 2024), the word “overshoot.” I think I used “overreach” with Phil 2:5-11 prominent in my mind, where Jesus does not grasp after, ‘reaching for,’ godlikeness. McLaren does use the word “overreach” in my favorite chapter, “Find the Flow” (ch. 24), of Do I Stay Christian? (St Martin’s Essentials, 2022), 190.
3. This paragraph and the next are borrowed from McLaren, Life after Doom, 114.
4. This sentence is one of my favorite sayings from Richard Rohr. See for example The Universal Christ (Convergent, 2019), 67; Falling Upward (Jossey-Bass, 2011), 124; Things Hidden (St Anthony Messenger Press, 2008), 152,
