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Called by Name in the Garden
An Easter Homily
(Note: Sermons can be heard in audio format at https://millersburgmennonite.org/worship/sermon-audio/)
John 20:1–18
Introduction:
Easter morning begins in a garden.
That is not accidental. John is never careless with his details. He wants us to notice where we are. We are in a garden, on the first day of the week, at the dawning of something no one yet understands. And if we listen closely, we can hear old echoes stirring beneath the new story. We remember another garden. We remember another beginning. We remember the breath of God moving over creation. We remember humanity formed from the earth and called into life.
And now here, in another garden, at the edge of another beginning, Mary Magdalene stands weeping before a tomb.
This is Easter, according to John. Not brass and banners at first. Not certainty. Not a choir already at full voice. But a grieving woman in a garden, searching for the body of the one she loves.
And yet it is here, precisely this place, that the new creation begins.
John wants us to see that Easter is not simply a happy ending after a tragic Friday. Easter is the beginning of God making all things new. The resurrection of Jesus is not merely proof that life continues after death. It is the opening act of a renewed creation. The old world of violence, burial, empire, grief, and endings has not disappeared overnight. Mary still cries. The tomb is still real. The wounds in Jesus’ body have not been erased.
But something new has broken into the world. The Creator has begun again.
That is why the garden matters.
Let us pray,
May the Words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen
Homily:In Genesis, life begins in a garden. In John, new life begins in a garden. In Genesis, humanity loses its way among trees, shame, and fear. In John, a human being stands again among trees, tears, and confusion, and there encounters the living Christ. In Genesis, the ground is cursed by death. In John, the earth itself becomes the place from which resurrection life is announced.
And there is one detail so strange and so beautiful that it almost slips past us: Mary mistakes Jesus for the gardener.
She is wrong, and yet somehow, she is not wrong at all.
For if this is new creation, then who would Jesus be but the gardener of God’s renewed world? Who would he be but the one tending life where death had seemed to reign? Who would he be but the one bringing forth new growth from the scarred soil of human history?
I come to the garden alone,
While the dew is still on the roses;
And the voice I hear, falling on my ear,
The Son of God discloses.
And He walks with me, and He talks with me,
And He tells me I am His own,
And the joy we share as we tarry there,
None other has ever known.Jesús es el jardinero del mundo.
The risen Christ is not less than the crucified one. He is the crucified one transformed, alive, and at work in the garden of the world. He is still bearing wounds, but now those wounds belong to a life death cannot master. He is the gardener of a new humanity, the keeper of a new creation, the tender of all that empire tried to uproot and bury.And this matters because many of us still live as though the world is only a graveyard.
Many of us know what it is to stand among the remnants of what was, among memories, among losses, among plans that did not come to pass, among dreams buried too early. Many of us know what it is to look at the world and see only tombs: tombs of justice deferred, tombs of broken trust, tombs of worn-out institutions, tombs of relationships, tombs of hope. We know what it is to come to church carrying not celebration but sorrow.
Easter does not shame us for that.
Instead, Easter meets us in the garden and says: this is where God begins again.Not somewhere else. Not after you become more cheerful. Not after all the evidence is in. Not after every grief has been resolved. Right here.
In the place where you came expecting only loss. In the place where you thought the best you could do was tend the dead. In the place where your tears are still warm on your face.
Aquí mismo, Dios ya está obrando para hacer nuevas todas las cosas. Right here, God is already at work making all things new.
But John does not stop with new creation. He also gives us one of the most personal moments in all of scripture.
Mary sees Jesus and does not know him.
She sees the angels and still does not understand. She sees Jesus himself and assumes he is the gardener. And perhaps that should comfort us. Because we often imagine that if only God would do something dramatic enough, obvious enough, dazzling enough, then we would finally believe without hesitation. But in this story, resurrection itself stands before Mary, and she still does not know.
Why?
Because resurrection, in John, is not simply something to be observed. La resurrección es alguien a quien encontrar. It is someone to be encountered.
Mary does not truly recognize Jesus until he speaks her name.“Mary.”
That is the turning point of the whole passage. Not the empty tomb by itself. Not the folded grave clothes. Not even the sight of Jesus standing there. The turning point is that the risen Christ calls her by name.
And with one word, the whole world changes.
Mary is no longer simply a mourner at a grave. She is not simply a witness to an event. She is addressed. Known. Reached. Called into relationship again.
My friends, this is good news! The resurrection of Jesus is not only a doctrine to defend. It is not only an argument that death has been defeated, though it is surely that. It is also this: Cristo resucitado aún conoce nuestros nombres. The risen Christ knows us by name.
The one whom death could not hold is not distant, abstract, or vague. He is not merely the subject of our hymns and creeds. He is the living one who calls people personally, intimately, tenderly. He comes not only to humanity in general but to each beloved child of God in particular.
Jesus knows your name beneath all the names the world has placed on you. Beneath your titles, your failures, your roles, your pain, your reputation, your confusion, your grief. Beneath all the labels—ALL the labels —successful, unsuccessful, strong, weak, faithful, doubtful, useful, forgotten—Christ knows your true name.
And perhaps that is why the church gathers on Easter: because we need once more to hear ourselves called by the voice we know, the voice of the Good Shepherd, the voice that speaks not condemnation but life.
“Mary.”
And if you listen, perhaps you can hear your own name there too.
Yet even here, the story turns again in a surprising way. Just when Mary recognizes Jesus, just when she reaches toward him, just when she wants to hold onto what has been restored, Jesus says, “Do not hold on to me.”
It is one of the strangest lines in the resurrection stories. It sounds almost harsh at first. But it is not rejection.
Es una invitación a una relación transformada.
It is invitation into a changed relationship.Mary wants, understandably, to keep Jesus as she knew him before. To stay in that moment. To cling to who or what has been found again. Who among us would not? When something lost is restored, when someone beloved is returned, our instinct is to hold tight. To keep it from slipping away. To preserve the moment before it changes again.
But resurrection is not a return to the old arrangement.
Jesus is alive, but not simply back. He is risen into a new reality, and his followers cannot relate to him as though nothing has changed. The relationship will continue, but it will be transformed. It will become a relationship carried not by physical nearness alone, but by trust, by Spirit, by witness, and by mission.
How often do we try to hold on to Jesus in ways that keep us from following the living Christ into newness? We cling to old forms, old certainties, old pictures of how God must act. We cling to past revelations, moments we cannot reproduce, seasons we cannot recover, churches as they used to be, lives as they once were, versions of ourselves that no longer fit the call before us in this present moment. We want resurrection to mean restoration of the familiar.
But sometimes Easter means letting go.
Sometimes the risen Christ says: do not cling to what you think I must be. Do not imprison me in yesterday’s forms. Do not reduce resurrection to nostalgia. I am alive, and because I am alive, Te estoy llevando a un lugar nuevo. I am leading you somewhere new.
That can be unsettling. But it is also liberating. Because faith is not about grasping a frozen sacred past. Faith is trusting the living Christ who is still moving today, still calling today, still sending today, still making all things new today.
And that leads us to the final wonder of this passage: the grieving one becomes the messenger.
Jesus says to Mary, “Go to my brothers and say to them…”
He sends her.
This too is astonishing. The first witness of the resurrection in John’s Gospel is not Peter. Not the beloved disciple. Not the most publicly powerful person. Not the one least marked by grief. It is Mary Magdalene, who came looking for the dead and found herself entrusted with the news of life.
The one who came weeping becomes the one who announces hope.
The one who came to tend a broken body becomes the one who bears a message of healing and hope.
The one who had been standing outside the tomb crying is now the first to say, “I have seen the Lord.”
And there is gospel in that for the church.
Because too often we imagine that the good news is entrusted only to the polished, the confident, the credentialed, the unshaken. But here the risen Christ places the message first into the mouth of one who has just been weeping. The first Easter preacher is one whose voice is still raw from grief.
So take heart, church. You do not need to have mastered every sorrow before you can bear witness. You do not need to have solved every mystery before you can testify. You do not need to stand above the world’s pain in order to speak hope into it.
Sometimes the most faithful witness is the one who doesn’t say, “I understand everything,” but simply,
“He visto al Señor.” “I have seen the Lord.”That is enough.
That is the task of Easter People.
To live as those who have glimpsed new creation in the midst of the old world. To listen for the voice that calls us by name. To loosen our grip on what must pass, so that we may follow the living Christ into what is being born.
And to bear witness, even through tears, that death does not get the final word.
So today, in this garden of resurrection, hear the good news:
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Christ is alive.
The gardener is at work.
Creation is beginning again.
Your name is known.
Your grief is not disqualifying.
Your clinging can become trust.
And your trembling voice may yet become the voice that tells the world,
“I have seen the Lord.” -
7 brutal truths from John 15 will forge you into the man God demands—no excuses, just fruit. Abide hard or become kindling. 🔥💪 #John15 #BiblicalManhood #AbideInChrist
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7 brutal truths from John 15 will forge you into the man God demands—no excuses, just fruit. Abide hard or become kindling. 🔥💪 #John15 #BiblicalManhood #AbideInChrist
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7 brutal truths from John 15 will forge you into the man God demands—no excuses, just fruit. Abide hard or become kindling. 🔥💪 #John15 #BiblicalManhood #AbideInChrist