Sermon on April 5, 2026
“Jesus the Gardener”
By: The Very Rev. Pamela Dolan
A few months ago, I did something I’d never done before and bought a piece of art for myself. It is an icon of Jesus the Gardener, and I first saw it on the Facebook page of the artist, Kristen Wheeler. The primary image is of a dark-haired, dark-skinned, slightly dishevelled-looking Jesus, holding in his cupped hands a big scoop of rich brown soil with a plant in full flower at its center.
I love gardening, and I’m convinced that soil is one of the most miraculous things on this planet, and that was all it really took to sell me on this particular work of art. It wasn’t until it was shipped to me and I looked at it in person that I noticed the most glaringly obvious thing: it’s an Easter icon, full of symbols meant to evoke new life and the experience of that first Easter morning. On the right side of Jesus, below the watering can and the gardening tools, in front of a palm branch there is a white Easter lily springing up, not unlike the lilies around our altar this morning. And if that weren’t enough, on the other side of Jesus, just behind his left shoulder, is the empty tomb.
How I missed all this when I first saw the image on Facebook, I’ll never know. The more I see it the more moved I am by it all. especially by an artist taking the time to imagine what Jesus might have looked like that morning in the garden, perhaps just moments before Mary arrived. It speaks to me of vitality and something close to exuberance, with its rich reds and greens and golds, and its energetic shapes that almost leap off the canvas.
Can you imagine yourself in that picture for a moment? Can you imagine yourself in the Gospel story, standing like Mary Magdalene in front of the tomb, with the stone rolled away, not certain what was happening to you or even to reality itself?
There are so many clues to the new life that is emerging in this earth-shattering, history-changing moment, and yet it is easy to gloss over them. Let’s stop and consider some more of the imagery and symbolism in the icon. The three large drops of liquid falling from the watering can remind me of the tears of Mary Magdalene, and the earlier tears of Martha and Mary and Jesus himself. And then too they remind me of the promise that when we die with Christ in the waters of baptism, we will also be raised with him at his resurrection. The water honors our own tears, those we shed in joy and awe as well as in sorrow.
And then those flowers! In some legends about the Crucifixion, lilies grew up under Jesus while he was still hanging on the Cross, fed by his blood. And the passion flower is rife with symbolism, said to represent everything from the crown of thorns to Christ’s five wounds to the whips used against him during his torment. I know, this all sounds pretty gruesome to our ears. Maybe it’s because I was an academic medievalist before I was a priest, but I think there is something so helpful in the way our ancestors in the faith were willing to see the “both/and” in everything. They were adept at the spiritual practice of looking at and appreciating something beautiful while still acknowledging its connection to pain and suffering; likewise, they had the skill to look at something tragic and not let it negate the beauty that lives side by side with the pain. Deacon Margaret said in her sermon last night that joy and fear can co-exist, and there’s so much wisdom in that.
It’s like that Frederick Buechner quote: “Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don’t be afraid.”
Beautiful and terrible things are happening today, and beautiful and terrible things were happening on that first Easter morning. The hands that hold that passion flower plant, seeming to offer it to the viewer, are the same hands so recently pierced by nails. Life and death, creation and destruction, live side by side in nature; seeds need to be buried or sometimes burned and broken apart before they can create new life. The disciples closest to Jesus needed to see that tomb, to see evidence that he really had died and been buried. Easter is not about make-believe or denial; it is about a deep wrestling with complexity and authenticity, with the beautiful and the terrible, with life and with death, and the ultimate truth that in the end it is love that triumphs over all.
One more thing about the icon of Jesus the Gardener. According to the artist, she was inspired to paint this icon after reading a book by Lutheran pastor Nadia Bolz-Weber, who said, “Perhaps Mary Magdalene saw Jesus as a gardener because he still had dirt from his own tomb under his nails. God helps us out of the graves we dig ourselves and pulls us into love. Like Jesus, resurrected bodies are in rough shape.” I love these reminders that healing is messy work and that we are invited to get as dirty and roughed up as Jesus was when we enter into the work of healing ourselves and the world.
I often say that Jesus was the most fully human of all human beings. And the Creation stories in Genesis teach us that it is the original vocation of humankind to tend to the earth, to till it and keep it, just as gardeners do today. So, although Jesus never owned a home or had a nice little plot in the backyard, he almost certainly knew something about growing food. After all, man cannot live on fish alone! And he had a gardener’s eye, constantly pointing out things about the trees and plants around him, using mustard seeds and fig trees and grains of wheat as metaphors, insisting that a simple lily is more beautiful than anything that could have been purchased by the great wealth of Solomon.
Mary doesn’t mistake Jesus for a gardener. Mary, one of his closest companions, intuitively knows the truth of who Jesus is. Drawing on the lessons of physics, we might even say that for a split second, she both does and does not recognize Jesus. When both beautiful and terrible things are happening, it is often our heart that gains understanding before our thinking mind arrives in the same place. Mary sees Jesus. Mary sees a gardener. In other words, in seeing the gardener, Mary sees something essential about who Jesus really is.
The resurrection takes place in a garden in John’s Gospel for a reason, and the reason is more theological than aesthetic. In Christian teaching, Jesus is the firstborn of all creation and the one through whom all things were made. Salvation history began in a garden, and salvation will be fulfilled in a garden. When God promises to make all things new, God is not just talking about us, about humanity. God is talking about us and all things, all of creation, of which we are one precious and irreplaceable part.
Christians, especially progressive Christians, often assert that the first witness to the Resurrection was a woman, Mary Magdalene. True enough, as far as it goes. But what I am pondering today is that it might be more accurate to say that Jesus first shared his new life with the more-than-human creation. There were no people present at the moment that Jesus rose from the dead. But there were elements of creation. The soil. The stone. The water. The plants. The trees. The sky. And on and on.
It was Creation that first witnessed the Resurrection, and Creation that continues to witness to the reality of renewal and restoration, showing us over and over again the glory of the Creator, and the persistence and profusion of life.
Why is this important? In a world both terrible and beautiful, we need to be clear that Easter is about much more than our own individual salvation, or even the salvation of others who call themselves Christian. There is so much more at stake in this story. In her book Liturgies for Resisting Empire, Kat Armas explains it this way: “To live into Easter is to align ourselves with life in the face of systems that produce death. It is to practice restoration where there is harm, to cultivate hope where despair has taken root, and to extend care in places long marked by neglect. Easter asks something of us—not just what we believe, but how we live, what we resist, and who we choose to stand with. Salvation is a call to take part in the ongoing work of renewal.”
Easter asks something of us. It asks us to find new ways of living, ways that will restore and renew, heal and make whole. There are so many terrible things happening in the world that feel beyond our control. But what is in our control is how we respond, starting with how we tend to the patch of earth right under our feet and to all the creatures that inhabit it. We can resist any efforts to demean and diminish the goodness of Creation. We can stand with those who are giving their all for the renewal of the earth, for peace and equity and justice. We can tell new stories, sharing good news, not to turn away from the terrible, but to lean in to the beautiful that still exists right along side it.
In the beginning, God proclaimed that it was all good, and very good. And in the fullness of time Jesus came to be with us and be one of us because God so loved the world—all of it, from mustard seed to mountaintop and beyond. God so loved the world, the cosmos, the everything. And now it is our turn to love the world, in all its terrible and wondrous beauty, to proclaim its goodness on this day of salvation, and to rejoice and be glad in it indeed. So let’s enjoy the beauty and the wonder, and then let’s get our hands dirty and get to work. Amen.
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