Sabbath Day Thoughts — “Meeting the Gardener” John 20:1-18
The world is filled with weeping places this morning. In northern Nigeria, vulnerable people are hungry. They live with lingering violence of the terrorist organization Boko Haram, which has made international headlines for abductions, murders, and other criminal activity. They’ve been hit by natural and manmade disasters, too. Flooding has caused crops to fail. Corruption and poor governance exploit the poor, serve the rich, and sell justice to the highest bidder. According to Nigerian Peacemaker Peter Egwudah, life in northern Nigeria is a long-running struggle with food insecurity. Hardest hit are women, children, the elderly, and those with disabilities.
The world is filled with weeping places this morning. The family of Kilmar Abrego Garcia is weeping. Kilmar came to the United States illegally from El Salvador in 2011, sent north by his family to escape gang violence there. Here, he has worked construction, married Jennifer Vasquez Sura—a US citizen, and supported his family. His five-year-old child has autism, is deaf in one ear, and cannot communicate verbally. Kilmar was mistakenly accused of being an MS-13 gang member by a paid informant, who had never met him or even been in the same state. Last month, he was deported to the Terrorism Confinement Center in Tecoluca, El Salvador. Although the courts have called for his release and return, the Abrego Garcia family waits and weeps, unsure if they will ever see their husband and father again.
The world is filled with weeping places this morning. We know those who weep: the neighbor who struggles with a bleak diagnosis, the friend who has lost a job, the parent who laments the untimely death of a child, the family member who wrestles with addiction, the person on a fixed income whose retirement savings have been hard hit by volatile markets. We know those who weep; sometimes we are the ones who weep.
It is hard to see the Lord when we are in our weeping places. Just ask Mary Magdalene. Mary walked to the tomb in the pre-dawn darkness. Her footsteps echoed through the streets of the sleeping city. Her heart was heavy with memories of recent days. A week ago, Jesus had made a triumphal entry to Jerusalem, but things had gone terribly and unthinkably wrong. Powerful opponents had conspired to bring about his arrest through the betrayal of a trusted friend. Injustice had been served by both the Temple court and Pontius Pilate. On Friday, Mary’s world had descended into violence and chaos as her teacher was brutally beaten and scourged, taunted with insults and mockery, reviled in hate, and crucified. Mary wept at the tomb, thinking that the world’s evil had outmatched God’s goodness, and now her Lord was nowhere to be found. Mary wept.
It is hard to see the Lord when we are in our weeping places. When the doctor breaks the bad news or the boss hands us the pink slip, we wonder “Why me, God?” When we are bowed down with grief and cannot see tomorrow, we ask, “Why this, Lord?” When addiction controls our lives and wreaks havoc within our families we ask, “Where are you, God?” When we are gripped by fear and worried about the future, we lament “Lord, why would you let this happen?” In our weeping places, we feel powerless and overwhelmed. In our weeping places, we fear that God is distant and we are alone.
As she raised her voice in lamentation outside the empty tomb, Mary learned that Christ was with her in her weeping place. Eyes blurred by tears and ears closed with grief, Mary first mistook Jesus for the gardener, come to clean up any mess left behind by Friday’s hasty burial. But then her tears came to an end as she heard her name, “Mary,” spoken by that most beloved of voices.
On Easter morning, we remember Mary’s tears, and we proclaim again the beautiful, terrible truth of the incarnation and the cross. God loved us so much that God would become flesh and live among us with mercy, healing, and infinite compassion. God’s love would stop at nothing to be reconciled to us and to reconcile us to one another—willing even suffering death upon a cross. But God’s love wins the victory over sin and death. God shows up in our weeping places with our name upon God’s lips and a purpose for our lives.
On Easter morning, we can face our tears head on, because we see that we are not alone. When the test results arrive and the doctor shakes her head, the risen Lord is with us. When the pink slip is in and the job possibilities are out, the risen Christ is with us. When untimely loss sends us into the valley of the shadow of death, we are not alone for God is with us. When we feel brought low by addiction or hardship, economic chaos or uncertain times, we trust that Jesus is in our midst with a love that is stronger than all the tears our world can serve up.
Bible scholars like to call our attention to the placement of Jesus’ tomb within a garden. They say it recalls God’s amazing work of creation, described in the first chapters of Genesis. They say that in breaking the power of sin and death upon the cross, God made a new creation. The separation between humanity and God came to an end, our alienation from one another is over. As new creations, we can go forth in holy, healed, and unexpected ways. It was true for Mary Magdalene. There in the garden, outside the empty tomb, Jesus the gardener gave Mary a new vocation. She became an evangelist. He sent her forth to a weeping world with a message of resurrection hope, “I have seen the Lord.”
On this Easter Sunday, may we, too, know that we are a new creation. May we, like Mary, see that we have a new vocation. We are sent into the world with the hopeful message that we have seen the Lord. Yes, the world abounds with weeping places, and yet God’s love is stronger than our tears, stronger than the hurt and harm that cause our eyes to fill and our hearts to tremble. As we go forth into the world’s weeping places, we point to the presence of Jesus, who continues to walk among the hurting and broken people of our world who fear they are alone.
Today, we will share the good news of Christ’s presence with the vulnerable people of northern Nigeria through One Great Hour of Sharing. Since 2017, our contributions have supported the work of the Civil Society Coalition for Poverty Eradication (CISCOPE). CISCOPE is at work in northern Nigeria, Sudan, Somalia, and Yemen, places where 20% families experience a severe lack of food. Beyond meeting emergency needs, CISCOPE helps families to find long-range food sufficiency through vegetable seed, agricultural machinery, teaching farming practices, and training for disaster preparedness. 70% of those helped by CISCOPE are women, children, and vulnerable people who have traditionally been ignored.
How do we bear witness to Jesus for families like that of Kilmar Abrego Garcia? It’s challenging in this highly-politicized partisan climate, where one faction characterizes Kilmar as a violent criminal while the other side champions him as a local hero. We can begin by remembering that there are families at the heart of the immigration crisis. Kilmar is the public face of an international tragedy in a world where violence, disaster, and extreme poverty have forced people from homes in places like Central America, Africa, Syria, Afghanistan, and Haiti. They flee in search of safety and opportunity. They come to lands that welcome their undocumented, underpaid labor but prefer that they remain strangers to us, subsisting in the shadows on the scraps of the land of plenty. For Kilmar and those like him around the world, we remember that Jesus, too, was a migrant. We point to the infant messiah, whose parents were forced by threat of political violence to flee their homeland and sojourn in the land of Egypt. What might our policies and actions look like, if we envisioned the infant Jesus caught in the crossfire?
What does pointing to the presence of Jesus look like for the hurting people whom we know, those who fear and mourn, despair and weep? We can begin by going to the tomb, showing up and being present for folks who weep with shared tears and abounding compassion. When the time is right, we can try, like Mary, to share how we have “seen the Lord” in our own times of hardship, loss, and pain. We can bear witness to our hurting friends and neighbors with more than words: with hot meals, honey-dos, and practical support; with abounding prayer, phone calls, and cards; with generous encouragement and lots of listening.
On Easter morning, the world is filled with weeping places, my friends, but it is also filled with the presence of Christ. The Lord has risen; he has risen indeed. We have seen the Lord. Let us go forth to those who weep with the good news of God’s amazing love.
Resources
Ben Finley. “Who is Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the man ICE mistakenly deported to an El Salvador prison?” in The Associated Press, April 18, 2025.
Rich Copley. “How your One Great Hour of Sharing gifts are used” in Presbyterian News Service, April 6, 2022. Accessed online at https://pcusa.org/news-storytelling/news/2022/4/6/how-your-one-great-hour-sharing-gifts-are-used
Joy J. Moore. “Commentary on John 20:1-18” in Preaching This Week, April 21, 2019. Accessed online at https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/resurrection-of-our-lord-3/commentary-on-john-201-18-10
Alicia D. Myers. “Commentary on John 20:1-18” in Preaching This Week, April 12, 2020. Accessed online at https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/resurrection-of-our-lord/commentary-on-john-201-18-11
Jason Ripley. “Commentary on John 20:1-18” in Preaching This Week, April 20, 2025. Accessed online at https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/resurrection-of-our-lord-3/commentary-on-john-201-18-19
Rolf Jacobson. “For Such a Time as This” in Dear Working Preacher, April 5, 2020. Accessed online at https://www.workingpreacher.org/dear-working-preacher/for-a-time-such-as-this
Paul Simpson Duke. “Homiletical Perspective on John 20:11-18” in Feasting on the Gospels, John, vol. 2. Westminster John Knox Press, 2015.
John 20:1-18
20 Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene came to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed from the tomb. 2 So she ran and went to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one whom Jesus loved, and said to them, “They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we do not know where they have laid him.” 3 Then Peter and the other disciple set out and went toward the tomb. 4 The two were running together, but the other disciple outran Peter and reached the tomb first. 5 He bent down to look in and saw the linen wrappings lying there, but he did not go in. 6 Then Simon Peter came, following him, and went into the tomb. He saw the linen wrappings lying there, 7 and the cloth that had been on Jesus’s head, not lying with the linen wrappings but rolled up in a place by itself. 8 Then the other disciple, who reached the tomb first, also went in, and he saw and believed, 9 for as yet they did not understand the scripture, that he must rise from the dead. 10 Then the disciples returned to their homes. 11 But Mary stood weeping outside the tomb. As she wept, she bent over to look[a] into the tomb, 12 and she saw two angels in white sitting where the body of Jesus had been lying, one at the head and the other at the feet. 13 They said to her, “Woman, why are you weeping?” She said to them, “They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him.” 14 When she had said this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not know that it was Jesus. 15 Jesus said to her, “Woman, why are you weeping? Whom are you looking for?” Supposing him to be the gardener, she said to him, “Sir,[b] if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away.” 16 Jesus said to her, “Mary!” She turned and said to him in Hebrew,[c] “Rabbouni!” (which means Teacher). 17 Jesus said to her, “Do not touch me, because I have not yet ascended to the Father. But go to my brothers and say to them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’ ” 18 Mary Magdalene went and announced to the disciples, “I have seen the Lord,” and she told them that he had said these things to her.
Joann White 