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Jesus the Gardener: Mary Was Right the First Time

Jesus the Gardener: Mary Was Right the First Time

Last updated on: April 4, 2026 at 7:44 pm by Jeff Hood

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Jesus the Gardener: Mary Was Right the First Time 2026-04-04T19:44:00-06:00 Jeff Hood

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Jesus the Gardener

Mary Magadelene is standing outside the empty tomb. She has already looked inside. She has already seen the angels. She has already wept. And now she turns around…there he is, standing in the early morning half-light, and she does not know who he is.

She makes the most reasonable assumption she can. This man, in a garden, at dawn…he must work here. He must be the one who tends this place. He must be the gardener.

She wasn’t wrong.

The Least of These: Jesus the Gardener

We have met this gardener before. Not in a garden… In a courthouse. In a prison. At the border. At the bedside of the dying.

Matthew 25.

“I was hungry and you gave me food. I was a stranger and you welcomed me. I was in prison and you came to me.”

When did we see you?

Whatever you did for one of the least of these…you did for me.

Most of us learned to read that as a motivation for compassion. Jesus telling us to be kind. A beautiful thing to say.

But sit with it longer and something cracks wide open.

He is not saying the least of these remind him of himself. He is not speaking in metaphor. He is saying he is actually there. That when you look into the face of the hungry stranger, the prisoner, the sick, the forgotten…you are looking at him. Not a symbol of him. Him.

Which means the gardener was, is and will forever be…Jesus the Christ.

Think about what that means right now, in this country, in this moment. Most often, the farmworkers who pick the food that we place on on our tables have no legal status. They rise before dawn. They work in the heat. They tend the gardens that feed a nation…and right now many of them are hiding in their homes, terrified, while their crops go untended and their children wonder if their parents are coming home. Think about it, agents in unmarked vehicles rounding up field workers at the height of harvest season…leaving acres of unpicked crops roasting in the sun.

Our food is rotting… because the gardeners were gone.

And I am standing here on Easter morning telling you…those were not just farmworkers. According to Matthew 25, they were Jesus. Taken from the garden before sunrise. Disappeared by the powerful. Buried somewhere the people who loved them couldn’t find them.

If it was up to us, Jesus would have been picked up by ICE before Mary ever got the chance to recognize him.

Thankfully, there is a force in the moral universe that can raise the dead and open the eyes of the blind.

The Empty Tomb

Unfortunately, we are so damn smart that we have forgotten the place of spirituality and mystery in our pursuit of justice.

You see, if resurrection is not real…if bodies do not actually rise…then the bodies of the least of these do not ultimately matter. The farmworker who dies young. The refugee who drowns at sea. The prisoner who grows old without a single visitor. If death is the last word, then the work of tending to them is a brief kindness in an indifferent universe. Noble, maybe. But ultimately…futile.

But if resurrection is real…if God’s answer to the tomb is a body walking out of it…then every single body matters. Permanently. Cosmically. The least of these are not disposable. They are the location of the risen Christ. And feeding them, welcoming them, visiting them, fighting for them…that is not charity…it is the epicenter of faith.

We are called to be participants in the resurrection…not just skeptics or observers.

The tomb had to be empty. Not just as a miracle to be believed, but as a declaration about what God does with bodies when the world discards them. The empty tomb is God’s answer to every attempt to make a person disappear. Every sealed tomb. Every locked detention center. Every acre of rotting fruit left behind by people who were taken before the sun came up.

If we soften the resurrection into metaphor…if we let it become a feeling, an inspiration, a spiritual concept…we lose the only ground we have to stand on when we say the least of these matter.

Mary wept at the tomb because she thought the body was simply gone.

She didn’t yet know that the body in front of her was the whole point.

Resurrection Work

Every gardener knows what the philosophers have spent centuries trying to prove. You know it in your hands, in your knees, in the dirt under your fingernails:

Death is not the end of the story.

A seed goes into the dark. It breaks open. It becomes something the ground cannot hold. Jesus said it himself: Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain. But if it is buried, it can bear much fruit.

He was talking about himself. He was talking about every person this world buries in the ground and walks away from. He was pointing to something God stitched into creation before there were words for it…that what goes down into the ground does not have to stay there. That the gardener who shows up before dawn, who works in the heat, who tends what everyone else has written off…that gardener is not just doing labor…that gardner is doing spiritual work that can redeem us all.

Indeed, that gardener is doing the work of the resurrection.

Mary recognized something true when she looked at him. She just didn’t yet know she was looking at the source of all amazement…a gardener.

And then he said her name.

The illustration became a person. The sermon became a Savior. And two thousand years later we are still learning to see what she saw in that garden…that the risen Christ does not appear in the halls of power. He appears where the labor is hard…the hours are early…and the people doing the work are the ones everyone else has decided do not matter.

Go, Find Jesus the Gardener

Do you believe in the empty tomb?

If you do…if you are brave enough to believe the risen Christ is actually present in the hungry, the stranger, the prisoner, the sick…then you cannot look at the ones this world buries and walk away. You cannot seal the tomb and call it policy. You cannot leave the crops rotting in the field and call it order. You cannot pretend that people are not being executed. You cannot be oblivious to the despair all around you.

Where is your garden? What broken ground has God placed in your hands? What seeds are you willing to plant that you may never see bloom?

The gardener is already there. He was there before you arrived. He will be there after. Already kneeling in the soil. Already at work in the bodies of the least…waiting for you to look up, recognize him and say:

I know who you are.

The risen Christ is not found among those who seal tombs.

He is found among those who tend gardens.

Catholic

Politics and Religion

About The Rev. Dr. Jeff Hood

The Rev. Dr. Jeff Hood is a theologian, writer and activist who has spent years ministering to people on death row. As a spiritual advisor and witness to executions, he speaks out against state violence and calls for a society rooted in justice, mercy and the sacredness of life. You can read more about the author here.

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