Suppose Him To Be The Gardener
By Matt Miller
Spring has arrived, and I have work to do. Through the long autumn and mild winter, our vegetable beds have disappeared under a wave of clover, goosegrass, speedwell, plantain, and other rank weeds. Even the woodchip paths between beds have been overtaken by clumps of grass, leaving the whole area difficult to use and unpleasant to look at. I need to remove all this unwanted growth to plant my tomatoes, and to reclaim these beds as a usable and pleasant part of our garden. Since I am an advocate of hand tools—and also because chunks of limestone fill our Ozark soil—I won’t use a motorized tiller, but will work with an eight-inch wide potato fork, removing each weedy clump by hand. Digging out this three-hundred-square-foot area will cost me hours of bent-back labor.
When we moved into our home almost four years ago, grass and a few immature shade trees was about all that met us outdoors. If not ugly, the landscape offered little of interest. Since then, we have planted dozens of fruit trees and berry bushes and dug large portions of the lawn up for vegetables and flowers. Our garden today, of course, remains far from a paradise, as the task I have before me today testifies. When I leave off my digging, however, and rest on the bench I built under the peach tree, my gaze rests not upon grass alone, but beds of strawberry plants, tulips just going over, apple blossom, spreading thyme—all these gifts borne by the land in concert with my own offerings of labor.
I roll a wheelbarrow into place. I am working on a slope, and disastrous things can occur with an overloaded barrow on uneven ground. Even as I remake this site according to my own purposes, I must adjust my work to the constraints of the site. Gardens are the place above all others where this encounter between nature and culture occurs. Much even in the most well-managed garden remains outside human control—we can no more force a plant to grow than we can insist that the rain fall. And yet human beings design and plant gardens, tending them with great effort and a concern that borders upon the parental. We tidy and manage, pull weeds and plant trees, lay paths and erect fences, even as much in the life of the garden escapes our comprehension and control.
But what if, when we imagine this moment of resurrection, we consider the task of growing a garden?
In the resurrection narrative in the Gospel of John, a mystery appears in a garden. It is one of the most dramatic scenes in the Gospels, and fittingly so. Mary Magdalene, abandoned by the apostles, stands weeping alone outside the Lord’s tomb. And with that laconic diction which characterizes biblical literature, John records that “as she wept she stooped to look into the tomb, and she saw two angels in white, sitting where the body of Jesus had lain.” Rather than giving comfort, the angels question her: “Woman, why are you weeping?” In the depth of her grief, Mary doesn’t assume that these supernatural beings might tell her where they have lain her Lord. Instead, she turns away from the tomb, and, seeing a strange man, begins to question him, “supposing him to be the gardener.” She does not mistake him for another angel, nor, as the disciples will later, for a ghost, but for “the gardener.”
Interpreters have usually understood Mary’s confusion typologically. In his Tractates on the Gospel of John, St. Augustine refers to “that gardener in her heart, as it were,” understanding Christ’s work as a spiritual cultivation. Similarly, St. Gregory the Great comments, “Perhaps this woman was not as mistaken as she appeared to be when she believed that Jesus was a gardener. Was he not spiritually a gardener for her when he planted the fruitful seeds of virtue in her heart by the force of his love?” In the most notable recent interpretation of this passage, Charles Spurgeon dedicates a whole sermon to a typological explication of Christ as the gardener and the church as the garden: “Behold, the church is Christ’s Eden, watered by the river of life, and so fertilized that all manner of fruits are brought forth unto God; and he, our second Adam, walks in this spiritual Eden to dress it and to keep it; and so by a type we see that we are right in ‘supposing him to be the gardener.’”
I’m appreciative of all these spiritual readings of the text. And yet, without in any way denigrating the typological reading of this passage, I would also appreciate a reading more bloody-minded and literal—that in the garden of the resurrection, Christ looked like a gardener. I am not a theologian or a New Testament scholar, and I am not making a claim here about how we ought to interpret the Gospel of John. But what if, when we imagine this moment of resurrection, we consider the task of growing a garden?
Christ does not lean away from Mary, but hovers over her, dressed as a gardener should be—spade in hand, knife in belt, wearing a large, floppy gardening hat.
I lever my fork up and down, the tines grating against subterranean rock, and hoist another forkful of grass from a path. Its roots leave the ground with a tearing gasp and a layer of yellow subsoil clay flips whole to face the sun. I heave the grass into my barrow, take a step to the left into the vegetable bed proper, and begin to dig up a clump of clover. Here, my fork enters more easily thanks to the compost I have added over the past few growing seasons. The clover lifts easily from the ground, and a fine mist of soil coats my legs.
***
Artists have traditionally depicted Mary’s encounter with Christ by stressing the “Noli me tangere” theme, the moment when Christ spurns Mary’s touch, accentuating the distance between Mary’s earthiness and Christ’s new, spiritual reality. Though Christ often holds a shovel in such images, gesturing to his appearance as a gardener, he’s also dressed in loose, open robes, not suitable for gardening, and he’s turning away from Mary and up, as if already preparing for his Ascension. Though these images have their place—they are particularly powerful in stressing the quasi-erotic tension Mary experiences as she longs for union with the Christ who must return to his father—they do not depict a Christ who might be mistaken for one who tills the land.
I prefer Rembrandt’s 1638 painting “Christ and St Mary Magdalen at the Tomb.” In that painting, Christ does not lean away from Mary, but hovers over her, dressed as a gardener should be—spade in hand, knife in belt, wearing a large, floppy gardening hat. The angels on the tomb recede into the background beneath a massive tree, while hedges and ornamental plantings fill the foreground. Dominated by earth tones and blues, the image is somber but warm, depicting the garden as a place of ordered rest, a thing made. The resurrection garden here is a place I could love, tended by a gardener who knows something of the labor it takes to keep it up.
***
The heat of the day is upon me now, and the dirt on my skin begins to itch. The wheelbarrow has grown full of vegetation, so I roll it gingerly down the hill to the compost pile, then toil my way back up to the garden. My back grows tired and my hands sore. I have finished one bed, and have one more—a labor of some hours still—to go.
Christ rose in a garden and as a gardener, bringing to salvation God’s workmanship in flesh and earth.
The heat of the day is upon me now, and the dirt on my skin begins to itch. The wheelbarrow has grown full of vegetation, so I roll it gingerly down the hill to the compost pile, then toil my way back up to the garden. My back grows tired and my hands sore. I have finished one bed, and have one more—a labor of some hours still—to go.
***
The garden in which the resurrection takes place is, clearly, an echo and inversion of Eden. Whereas Adam sinned in a garden, becoming subject to the law of sin and death, Christ conquers these powers in a garden. As the new Adam, he is the new and better gardener, the one who succeeds where Adam failed in bringing the Creation under the law of God. Adam was charged to work and keep the garden, a charge at which he failed; the resurrected Christ will indeed work and keep the garden of Creation, having been himself planted in the earth and then risen to new life.
If we were telling the story of human origins again today, our impulse might be to locate the first people in some untouched wilderness, some ancient forest or savannah. For us, such landscapes would seem to lie at the origin, to express what is truly natural. The human work of cultivation, in our imagination, is secondary, parasitic upon the initial work of nature. Not so for scripture: God prepares a garden for human beings to live in, a place of cultivation, something made. And Christ emerges from the tomb, a firstfruit of new creation, into a cultivated place as well. Creation is a work of God, resurrection is the same, and so Scripture images these works in a place shaped by the attention of a gardener rather than some site more purely natural.
***
I have removed the last patch of clover and the last clump of grass. I empty the wheelbarrow once more on my now-burgeoning compost pile, and fill it again with woodchips to form paths among my redug beds. The paths will redefine this patch of land, shaping how my body moves through and around the garden. With paths laid down, I will cultivate the planting beds between them, digging and raking to make fit places to receive the new plants I want growing here.
***
In On the Incarnation, St. Athanasius accounts for Christ’s incarnation—and so, by extension, his bodily resurrection—by reference to the cultivating work of God. God took on a body because “It was not worthy of the goodness of God that those created by him should be corrupted through the deceit wrought by the devil upon human beings. And it was supremely improper that the workmanship of God in human beings should disappear.” Christ redeems our sinful bodies with his sinless body in order that God’s works should be preserved. The resurrection garden testifies to this work of God through the work of human beings. Christ takes up his new body, not in a wilderness, but in a place that echoes the workmanship he performed and sustained through his incarnation and resurrection. Christ appears in a garden, because the qualities of a garden best testify to the shaping work of God in creating the physical human body and the good physical creation.
Moreover, he appears—if only momentarily—as a gardener. That is to say, as John Updike’s poem “Seven Stanzas at Easter” asserts, he rises “as His body.” Mary does not mistake him for an angel: that would be too celestial a form for such an earthy resurrection. Partaking of our flesh, Christ looks like a gardener because he looks like a human being. Although we do not all garden, all human beings in some fashion make a home for ourselves in the natural world, inhabiting cultivated places rather than wilderness. We mow lawns and clear space around our dwellings to make a habitation for ourselves. Christ’s appearance as a gardener therefore tells us something about his humanity, and ours. We are creatures who belong in gardens, working and keeping a place formed by human will as much as by the natural order. As such, the resurrected Christ helps us understand the relationship between our work on the earth and the Lord’s work above, as St. Athanasius stresses: “Being human and thinking all things in human terms, on whatever [human beings] cast their sense perception there they saw themselves being drawn and taught the truth from all sides: for if they were struck by creation, yet they saw it confessing Christ as Lord.” Accordingly, Mary’s understanding of Christ as a gardener reflects a true understanding of Christ’s presence in a human body.
With Updike, I would not “mock God with metaphor / analogy, sidestepping, transcendence,” making of Christ the gardener merely a type and a symbol. No. Christ rose in a garden and as a gardener, bringing to salvation God’s workmanship in flesh and earth.
My garden is no Eden. But in its small way, it is a pleasant place.
My paths laid and beds cultivated, I dig trenches—now comparatively easy with the weeds cleared away—and put my tomato plants in, two neat rows of green vines bright on the dark earth. Over the course of the summer, the plants will become ungainly and ragged things, as heirloom tomatoes do, twelve feet long or more, shedding dead leaves continuously. I will put up wood-and-wire supports as well, no aesthetic marvels themselves. But for now, my work has yielded a garden orderly yet alive, new life growing according to its own ways and yet responsive to my plans and purposes. It is no Eden. But in its small way, it is a pleasant place.
In his “Verses on the Resurrection,” the ancient poet Venantius Fortunatus sees the earth in spring as a sign of the resurrection:
The verdant wood, whose mane of leaves was torn away in the season of winter, renews its leafy canopy; myrtle willow, fir, hazel, brook willow, maple—each tree applauds in the loveliness of its own locks. . . . See, the beauty of the regenerate earth declares that all blessings have returned with their Lord. For now on all sides the woods hail Christ with their foliage and the meadows with their flowers as he proceeds in triumph after the woes of hell. . . . Hail, festal day, to be held in honor for all time—day on which God overwhelmed the netherworld and makes the stars his seat.
My garden offers only the very smallest taste of this regeneration, and yet sore as I am, grimy with sweat and soil, when I turn toward my new tomato vines, I think I can see their foliage lifting in praise.