Matins Devotion: July 22, 2024

John 20:1-2, 10-18

When Mary Magdalene first sees Jesus on the day of the resurrection, she doesn’t recognize Him. She imagines that this man speaking to her is the man in charge of keeping the grounds littered with tombs. She imagines him to be the gardener. And yet, even though she’s wrong, in a sense, she’s right.

When God created Adam, God created him to be a gardener, to tend the Garden of Eden, to eat of its fruit, to cultivate its beauty forever. But Adam failed at this task. He fell into sin and all creation fell with him. The garden of this earth became infested with thorns and thistles, with disease and death, with sorrow and despair. And Adam’s sinful hands could do nothing to heal and purity the soil he had cursed.

But now Jesus Christ is the new Adam. On the Third Day, the Lord who died for us walked through stone into His garden, into the world He claimed as His own. This earth was now the garden of our Lord Jesus Christ, the one who crushed the devil at Calvary, the one who showed He had the power and the authority to rip the thorns and thistles out of the earth, the one who had purified the soil because He had now purified our souls.

So now, we too, like Mary Magdalene, can have our tears of sorrow transformed to tears of joy because the day is coming when we too will see the face of our Gardener. The day is coming when Jesus will stand outside our tombs and shatter them to pieces when He calls us by our names. The day is coming when we will walk into the eternal peace of the newer and greater Eden, the garden that will never be lost, the garden where sin and sorrow, death and despair will never enter and where our joy will never leave.