She Thought He Was The Gardener

He asked for one thing that year and he asked for it properly.

Not a wish. He is not that kind of man and it was not that kind of year. His father was ill and the business was going and there was a specific outcome he needed, and he asked for it every morning at the same table for about fourteen months.

He did not get it.

His father died in the October. The business went in the following spring and it went badly and there are people he still cannot look at properly at family things.

That was six years ago.

And in those six years, several things have happened that he can list.

His brother came back. Not dramatically, over about two years, and they now speak most weeks after eleven years of Christmases and nothing else. His daughter, who was fifteen and in trouble, is twenty-one and is not. He himself does something entirely different now and is, by any measure anybody in that family would use, a better man than he was at forty-one.

People say things to him about it. They say it worked out. They say God had something else in mind.

And he smiles and agrees, and something goes tight in him every single time, and he has never once said what it is.

Which is: I asked for my father. And you are telling me about my brother.

The first person there did not recognize Him

Let me put the tight thing where it belongs before anything else, because it has been called ingratitude for six years and it is not.

What people say to you is well meant and it is also a trade. It worked out means: accept these things and stop grieving that one. Nobody says it that way and everybody means it, and something in you goes tight because you are being asked to sign a receipt for a delivery you did not order. Nothing written asks that of anybody, and the Holy Spirit has never once traded one grief for another gift.

You do not have to sign it. Gratitude for what came is not the same as agreement that it was a fair exchange, and the two have been welded together in six years of kind conversations.

Now hear this, and take it as settled rather than as comfort: the account keeps the moment where the answer arrived and was not recognized. That is not my kind reading of six years, it is what stands written in the twentieth chapter of John, and the same Holy Spirit who preserved it has been at your table every morning of those fourteen months.

Read it. She is standing outside the tomb crying.

At this, she turned round and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not realize that it was Jesus. He asked her, Woman, why are you crying? Who is it you are looking for? Thinking He was the gardener, she said, Sir, if you have carried Him away, tell me where you have put Him, and I will get Him.John 20:14-16

Thinking He was the gardener. That is what is written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who kept the mistake in the middle of the morning.

She is looking for a body. That is what she came for, that is what she is grieving, and she has a plan involving where they have put Him and what she will do about it.

And He is standing in front of her, and she is asking Him for directions to Himself.

Now notice that the account keeps this. Nobody had to record that the first person there mistook Him for a groundsman. It is not flattering to anybody and it makes the central moment awkward, and it is on the page.

So this is yours right now rather than pending a resolution of six years: the answer arriving in an unrecognized shape is written into the first morning, because the written word keeps a woman asking the risen Christ where the body has been taken, and the Spirit of God is the one who saw to it that the mistake was not edited out.

And here is the boundary, because this house does not do the cheap version.

Nothing here says your father's death was the answer to your prayer. That would be an obscene thing to say and it is not what the passage does either. She did not get what she was asking for; she got something else, and the grief she came with was real and was never called a mistake.

What is written is that He was there in a form she was not watching for, and that recognition came later, and that it came through her own name being said.