March 30, 2008 | 8:00 a.m. and 6:30 p.m.

Supposing Him to Be the Gardener

Adam H. Fronczek
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 16
John 20:19–31

[In the telling of the resurrection narratives,]
the boundary between past and present becomes indistinct.
One cannot tell stories about the risen Jesus without them
becoming also stories about how to follow him.

William Placher

A funny thing about Easter, I think, is that while it is clearly the Sunday of the year when the greatest number of people go to church, it is also a day that, rationally speaking, many Christians would like to do without. The reason I say this is, of all of the different things that happen in the Bible, the resurrection, the actual defeating of death by a human being, is the most improbable thing that happens. It is the thing that is furthest from our experience—none of us have died, much less risen from the dead—and it is therefore the thing in the Bible that we know the least about. If we are to believe it, it demands the most of us. The resurrection is, therefore, one of the greatest challenges to our faith; it absolutely begs the question, how did this happen?

If you don’t know how the resurrection happened, the passage that we read today in the Gospel of John is helpful, because it seems to indicate that we have something in common with the people who were there when Jesus was raised: they didn’t understand how it happened, either.

Think back to the passage we read last week.

You remember the story: Mary finds the stone rolled away from the tomb, and as she turns from the tomb, weeping, Jesus is standing there waiting for her. Jesus asks Mary, “Woman, why are you weeping?” and as the story goes, Mary begins to tell him that someone has stolen Jesus. Mary says this to Jesus himself, because she mistakes him for the gardener.

That passage got me thinking about a few things. About faith. About expectations. About gardeners. It occurs to me that most encounters people have with their faith—at least the encounters that are worthwhile—are those that happen in a way that is different from what people expect and often different from what people are able to understand. I would argue that, as a general rule, the encounters we have with faith that are different from what we expect, the ones that make us stop and think, the ones that are difficult to understand—these are the experiences that are actually the most helpful to us. These are the encounters that help us to grow.

This shouldn’t be too foreign an idea. Psychologists suggest that it is in encountering something new and uncomfortable that we are most likely to grow. I was talking through this sermon with a friend last week who is in finance, and he agreed that even when doing something as concrete as working a math problem, you don’t learn much until you come to the point that you don’t understand. Does it work this way for faith? In order to explore that idea, let’s look more closely at some of the other people in the resurrection narratives who are surprised by Jesus.

The story that immediately follows the one about Mary’s encounter with Jesus is also a story about the unexpected and about a misunderstanding. Jesus appears to the disciples in a house, a house where they’re hiding out. They are hiding, presumably, because their subversive leader has been crucified and they are scared of what might happen to them. Some of the gospels suggest that the disciples scattered, some say the disciples left Jerusalem for the country, but John says that they stay and go into hiding. So the door is locked and bolted. But suddenly Jesus appears in the room and greets the disciples. Scholars can go on and on with their questions about this passage: How did Jesus get in the room? Why don’t the disciples recognize him at first? What kind of a resurrected body does he have such that people don’t recognize him and such that he can move through locked doors? Is it some kind of heavenly body? A perfected body? He still has the wounds, though?

As the story moves ahead, we find out that Thomas wasn’t present that night in the house, and so there’s an additional story about his encounter with Jesus. Thomas doesn’t take the disciples at their word; he claims he will not believe it until he puts his hands in the wound in Jesus’ side. We can understand where Thomas is coming from, I think, because none of us have seen the risen Christ as the disciples did. It would be nice, wouldn’t it, to have some proof. Yet even if you had been there, there are parts of this story that don’t make much sense either. The disciples tell Thomas what they’ve seen, but then, as John tells it, Thomas doesn’t see Jesus again for a week. Where was Thomas? Where was Jesus? What was Thomas doing that week that was so important that he couldn’t go meet his teacher, who had defeated death? And when they do meet each other, we’re never told if Thomas actually touches Jesus the way he says that he said he would need to. But we know he believes. What does Jesus do to make him believe?

There is a lot we don’t understand. Clearly there is a lot that the disciples don’t understand either. Mostly they’re just caught by surprise; Mary is a representative for them all, mistaking Jesus to be the gardener.

In the midst of all of these unanswered questions, it occurs to me that if this is supposed to be a story about how Jesus is raised from the dead, it’s not a very good story. So I started thinking about something else. I started thinking, as I said, about gardening.

Here’s another story about a gardener: Alex Trebek, the host of Jeopardy, is a gardener. I know this only because, A. J. Jacobs, an author I love to read, interviewed Trebek and wrote an account of it in one of his books. A. J. is a very smart guy, and he loves trivia, so he tells a great story about how excited he was when Esquire magazine sent him out to California to interview Alex Trebek. A. J. figured that interviewing the host of Jeopardy would be one of the best possible opportunities to go head-to-head with someone who really knows a lot of trivia and see if he could keep up—or prove that he knew even more. A. J. writes that he was sure Trebek would be arrogant and hyperintellectual, quick to prove how smart he was; A. J. was all geared up for a know-it-all showdown with Trebek. And so he was taken by surprise when the stone-faced host of Jeopardy turned out to be a kind, easygoing, regular guy, a pleasure to interview, and even highly emotional in his thoughts on life. I could tell you a lot of stories about people who turn out to be different than we expect. But the reason I chose this one is because of the way A. J.’s story begins. When he arrives at Alex Trebek’s house, he is told that he will find Alex outside. It’s a big backyard, and A.J. finds a number of men, stooped down, working. He walks around, asking them, “Have you seen Alex Trebek; I’m looking for Alex Trebek. Donde esta Alex Trebek?” Suddenly one of those gardeners stands up and turns around and says, “You’ve found him.” The whole story of A. J. being taken by surprise begins when A. J. mistakes Alex Trebek for the gardener (The Know-It-All, pp. 99–101).

I read this story a few weeks ago, and I thought of it again on Easter because of that one line in the Gospel of John that caught my attention: Mary Magdalene mistakes Jesus for the gardener. Now the story about Jesus and the one about Alex Trebek have little in common, but for some reason it just caught my attention that in both cases, a well-told story about surprise and growth and understanding begins with a gardener.

I come from a long line of gardeners: my father and uncle and grandfather are all gardeners. I know that a garden is a place where we have a general idea of what to do, but we still wrestle with unknowns. How much will it rain this year? Will the bugs or the birds or the rabbits find their way in? How long will this patch of dirt be fertile? How long until that tree gets too tall and blocks out the sun. It’s in the midst of those unknowns, those moments of not quite knowing where things are headed, that a gardener labors, and most of the time, by the grace of God, something grows, even though we never quite wrestle nature to the ground. Most avid gardeners will tell you that the real joy of gardening is in that struggle with nature that you never completely figure out. Thomas Jefferson, in his later years, used to say, “Though an old man, I am but a young gardener.”

There’s something poetic about mistaking Jesus for the gardener. We don’t understand, we’re not yet fully grown, but Jesus is cultivating something within us. He’s raising up within us the ability to be and do something different, to see and take part in something even though we don’t fully understand.

It’s my hunch that the point of all of this is that there are a lot of things about how the resurrection took place that we’re not supposed to figure out. It’s contrary to the way the Bible tells the story of the resurrection to expect to understand it. The people who were there don’t understand it; why should we? But look at what happens to the people who encounter the risen Jesus.

Mary goes to the disciples and tells them that Jesus has been raised. She becomes the bearer of that good news; she is the one who is bold enough to share it. She goes from weeping in despair to bearing the joyful news.

As for the rest of the disciples, they don’t understand either, but Jesus breathes on them, giving them the Holy Spirit, and then he tells them to continue his ministry. He tells them to go out and to do among other people the things they have seen him do.

In each case we are never told how it is that Jesus appears. We can’t sit in on the conversation, and we are never given a reasonable explanation for what has taken place. But there is one thing that is common to all the stories. If you read this story again yourself and read it carefully, you’ll see that Jesus keeps saying, “Peace be with you,” as if to suggest, yes, I know you do not understand, but don’t be afraid; I have defeated even death. Perhaps that is the point—that even though you don’t understand, you need not be afraid.

The end of today’s reading fascinates me because there John seems to come right out and say that we don’t need to understand everything about the resurrection. John admits that he could tell us much, much more, but he chooses not to because he has told us enough. Enough to surprise us, enough to disturb us, enough to cause us to grow. Enough to give us peace. And so I close with John’s conclusion:

Now, Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book. But these are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing, you may have life in his name.

Amen.