Dwelling in Dissonance: Are You the Gardener?
Easter Sunday - John 20:1-18
Introduction: Resuscitation or Resurrection?
Have you ever witnessed a moment when everything suddenly shifts? When a situation moves from calm to crisis in an instant? Perhaps you have seen it in an emergency setting, where a steady rhythm suddenly flatlines and the entire room springs into action. Voices rise, equipment is rushed in, and every effort is focused on one goal: to bring that person back, to restore life as it was before. That is what we call resuscitation. That instinct runs deep within us, not only in medicine, but in life. When something important is lost, we want it back. When something is broken, we want it fixed. When a relationship ends or a dream collapses, we long for things to return to the way they were. But as Ronald Rolheiser writes:
“Resuscitated life is when one is restored to one’s former life and health, as is the case with someone who has been clinically dead and is brought back to life. Resurrected life is not this. It is not a restoration of one’s old life but the reception of a radically new life.”
In other words, resurrection is not returning to what was, but a transformation. That distinction matters when we come to John 20. The question is not simply whether life has returned, but what kind of life we are witnessing. Is this a restoration of the old, or the beginning of something entirely new? And if it is new, then perhaps the deeper question is not just what happened in the tomb, but what God is growing in the garden.
Running, Seeing, and Not Yet Understanding
The resurrection account in John 20 is filled with movement. Mary Magdalene comes to the tomb early, while it is still dark, and sees that the stone has been moved. Her immediate conclusion is not resurrection, but loss. “They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we don’t know where they have put him.” She runs to tell Peter and the other disciple, and they run to the tomb. Everything is urgent, driven by confusion and the need to understand what has happened. But when they arrive, what they find only deepens the mystery. The linen wrappings are still there, and yet the body is gone. John tells us something striking. They saw and believed, but they still did not understand. There is a gap between seeing and perceiving. Their experience has outpaced their understanding. And then the focus shifts. Mary remains. While the others leave, she lingers, standing outside the tomb, weeping. She looks in and sees angels. She turns and sees Jesus standing there, but does not recognize him. Instead, she asks a question that seems mistaken but is closer to the truth than she realizes: “Are you the gardener?”
The Garden: The Story of Scripture
That question invites us to step back and see the larger story unfolding across Scripture. This is not the first garden in the biblical story. The story of the bible begins in a garden.
In Genesis, God plants a garden in Eden and places humanity within it. It is a place of life, abundance, and communion with God. Humanity is given both identity and vocation, to live with God and tend what he has made as his good creation.
And yet, it is in that garden that everything begins to unravel. Humanity reaches for what is not theirs to take, and the consequences ripple outward. The ground is cursed, thorns emerge, and death enters the world. The garden that began as the place of life becomes the place of the fall. But the story does not end there.
In John’s Gospel, Jesus enters another garden, Gethsemane. Here, he faces what lies ahead. Where Adam disobeyed, Jesus obeys. This garden becomes the place where redemption is embraced.
Then there is another garden, the garden tomb. John tells us that at the place where Jesus was crucified, there was a garden, and in that garden a new tomb. It is here that Jesus is buried, and it is here that he is raised. This is the garden of resurrection, where death is undone not by returning to what was, but by bringing forth something new. What is planted in death emerges in life. This is not resuscitation. It is new creation. But the story continues. In Revelation, we are given a vision of a renewed world where the tree of life appears again and the curse is no more. The garden returns, now as a garden-city, where God dwells fully with his people and everything is made new. From beginning to end, the story of Scripture is the story of the gardener at work.
The Gardener and the Seed
When Mary mistakes Jesus for the gardener, she is wrong in one sense, but profoundly right in another. Jesus is both the gardener and the seed. He is the one who enters into death, and the one who brings forth life from it. Earlier in John’s Gospel, Jesus said that unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it remains alone. But if it dies, it produces many seeds (cf. John 12:24) That is what we see in the resurrection. Jesus is not brought back to the same life. He is raised into a new kind of life, one that multiplies and transforms. And as the gardener, he continues to bring life out of what appears to be barren ground. The new life we long for cannot be recovered from what we have lost. It can only be received from the one who has gone into death and come out the other side. We may not be looking for the gardener, but the gardener is looking for us.
Practicing Resurrection
The question for us is not only what happened then, but how we respond now? If we are honest, many of us are still living as though we are waiting for resuscitation. We are asking God to give us our old life back, to restore what we have lost. And when that does not happen, we struggle to recognize what he is doing instead. We continue to interpret our lives through the lens of loss, searching for what has been taken, rather than asking what God might be growing. But resurrection invites a different posture. It calls us to trust that God is at work in ways we do not yet understand. It invites us to believe that what feels like an ending may be the beginning of something new. It asks us to loosen our grip on what was so that we can receive what is being given. As Wendell Berry writes: “Practice resurrection.”
Individually, this may mean listening for the voice of Jesus in confusion. It may mean releasing control, extending forgiveness, or remaining faithful in a place that feels fruitless. It may mean naming where we have been asking for resuscitation instead of resurrection. Corporately, it means becoming a community shaped by this new life. It means embodying hope in a world marked by loss. It means practicing forgiveness when it is difficult, and courage when it would be easier to withdraw. It means becoming a people who do not simply talk about resurrection, but live in light of it.
Conclusion: What Is God Growing?
The resurrection is not a return to what was. It is the beginning of something new. The question is not simply whether the tomb is empty. The question is what God is doing now, what he is growing in the places that feel empty or beyond hope. Because the gardener is still at work. And to follow him is to trust that what he is growing is more real than what we have lost, and to live each day as though new life is not only possible, but already breaking through.