the principle of first mention
It is such a letdown to rise from the dead and have your friends not recognize you.
The writer John tells us that Mary saw Jesus after his resurrection but did not realize it was Jesus. Jesus asked her, “Woman, why are you crying? Who is it you are looking for?”
“Thinking he was the gardener, she said…”
I love that line “thinking he was the gardener”. It is so loaded. Jewish writers like John did things like this all the time in their writings. They record what seem to be random details, yet in these details we find all sorts of multiple layers of meaning. There are even methods to help decipher all the hidden meanings in a text. One is called the principle of first mention. Whenever you come across a significant word in a passage, find out where this word first appears in the Bible. John does this in his gospel. The first mention of the word love is in 3:16 – “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son.” We then discover that love is first mentioned in Genesis 22 when God tells Abraham to take “your son, your only son, Isaac, whom you love” and offer him as a sacrifice. John is doing something intentional in his gospel: He wants his readers to see a connection between Abraham and his son, and God and God’s son. John’s readers who knew the Torah would have seen the parallels right away.
Back to the empty tomb and Mary’s inability to recognize Jesus. She mistakes him for a gardener. Where is the first mention of a garden in the Bible? Genesis 2, the story of God placing the first people in a … garden. And what happens to this garden and these people? They choose to live outside of how God made them to live, and they lose their place in the garden. Death enters the picture and paradise is lost.
John tells us that Jesus is buried in a garden tomb. And Jesus is mistaken for a gardener. Something else is going on here. John wants us to see a connection between the garden of Eden and Jesus rising from the dead in a garden. There is a new Adam on the scene, and he is reversing the curse of death by conquering it. As one writer put it, “It was impossible for death to keep its hold on him.” And he’s doing it in a garden. He’s reclaiming creation. He’s entering into it and restoring it and renewing God’s plan for the world.
Jesus is God’s way of refusing to give up on his dream for the world.
Bell, Rob. (2005). Velvet Elvis: Repainting the Christian Faith. Zondervan: Grand Rapids.