WAY back in 1.38, John reported Jesus’s query “What are you searching for?” On Easter morning, Jesus asks it in a latest way, in a latest world. It is not any longer “what” but “whom” — “Whom are you searching for?”
Matthew (7.7) and Luke (11.9) recorded the identical verb (zetein: “search”, “search for”) when Jesus promised: “Search and you’ll find.” Augustine set their promise at the top of his Confessions, an exhortation for all who’re searching, as he did, way back, for wisdom.
That wisdom will not be a top quality. It is an identity. We know that Christians saw Jesus in these terms from early times. Paul calls Christ “the facility of God and the wisdom of God” (1 Corinthians 1.21, 24). It will not be easy to see human individuals as embodying such identities. But, by the top of John’s Gospel, we’re used to pondering of Christ by way of abstracts and symbols: the true bread; the way in which, the reality, the life; the vine. Jesus himself taught us to see him in this fashion. But we may not yet realise the complete import of those apparent abstracts.
On Good Friday, I reflected on the Gospel-symbol of the garden. But that was only the start. John’s garden symbolism involves completion on Easter Day. Mary Magdalene, he tells us, got here to the garden, to the tomb, while it was still dark. Then she went to inform the disciples, they usually got here back together. After they witnessed the empty tomb, the disciples went home, leaving Mary behind.
Like every mourner who has ever stood at a graveside, or where a loved one’s ashes have been scattered, she knew that the one she loved was not “there”. But this was still as close as she felt she could now come to him. If she desired to feel that bond of affection, this was the one place to be. In that sense, every Christian burial is a cenotaph, an “empty tomb”. What lies inside is earth, ashes, dust. The person will not be there. But such is the facility of human love that even earth, ashes, and mud have power to awaken in us remembrance and connection.
Surely every reader of John’s Gospel has some inkling of this mystery, the presence of the absence of a loved one. But Mary was about to learn something further. It would change her mourning into gladness. It could make our lives something that they might not have been before. In this Easter-morning garden, all three of Paul’s “things that last for ever” are present: faith, hope, and love. Love shone in Mary: it found its reward in a blessing for her which also descends on all of us, who’re her descendants in line with the Spirit.
All this happened in a garden. Gardens, remember, aren’t natural. Let nature have its way, and also you soon have scrubby bushes and rampant weeds. A garden is an end-product, not of a battle against nature, but of a nurturing of nature. Tending, trimming, supporting; giving light where required; suiting each planting to its environment — why else is God, before he’s anything to us, a gardener?
Gardens don’t fight nature: they harness it. So, too, it’s with God and us. Where we could go wild and choke all other growth, he checks us. Where we might shrivel and quit for lack of sunshine and space, he gently promotes our ability to grow.
Now for the nice change that’s Easter Day. In his relationship with humankind, God has been a gardener from the start. What Easter Day reveals first will not be unexpected: the true identity of the person Jesus, who seems to be the Son of Man, God’s anointed, and his everlasting Word. But then it slips in a revelation, via a mere explanatory phrase: “supposing him to be the gardener”.
Mary will not be mistaken. Her perception is accurate. The being she encounters is, indeed, a gardener, like his Father before him. Anyone can work in a garden. But the gardener is the one who has responsibility for it, making it flourish, keeping it fruitful and in balance. Their sharing in being gardeners is one tiny pointer to the likeness of nature between the Father and the Son. It paves the way in which for the revelation of God’s complete nature as Holy Trinity.
