There is a quiet moment in the resurrection story that is easy to miss.

Mary Magdalene stands outside the tomb, weeping.  She has come expecting to find a body, to complete what had been interrupted, to grieve what she believes is over.  When she turns and sees Jesus, she does not recognize Him.  Instead, John tells us that she supposes Him to be the gardener. (John 20:15)

It is such a small detail that we can move past too quickly.  But the more you sit with it, the more it begins to open something up.

Mary is not foolish.  She is not careless.  She is seeing through the lens she has available to her.  She has watched Him die.  She has stood in the aftermath.  She is not expecting resurrection.  She is expecting finality.

And so when life stands in front of her, she does not recognize it.

That is what makes this moment so revealing.  It is not just about Mary.  It is about us.  We often miss what God is doing, not because He is absent, but because we are looking for something else, someone else.  We expect clarity, or power, or immediacy.  We expect something unmistakable, something that fits within our categories.  And yet the risen Jesus stands before her in a way that feels ordinary enough to be overlooked.

And still, she is not entirely wrong.

There is a reason this happens in a garden.  There is a reason the story bends back toward the place where everything began.  There is a reason that, even in her misunderstanding,  Mary names something that carries more truth than she realizes.

G.K. Chesterton captures it this way:

“On the third day the friends of Christ coming at day-break to the place found the grave empty and the stone rolled away. In varying ways they realized the new wonder; the world had died in the night. What they were looking at was the first day of a new creation, with a new heaven and a new earth; and in a semblance of a gardener God walked again in the garden, not in the cool of the evening, but in the dawn.”

The first Adam was placed in a garden and called to tend it, to cultivate life, to live in relationship with God.  That story fractured, and the ground itself bore the mark of it.  But here, in another garden, on another morning, the story begins again.  Not with force or spectacle, but with presence.

The risen Jesus stands as the beginning of a new creation, and He does so in a way that can be mistaken, overlooked, even dismissed.  That alone should slow us down, because it suggests that resurrection does not always arrive in the way we expect.  It does not announce itself loudly or conform to our timelines.  Instead, it often carries the quiet, patient rhythm of a gardener, where seeds are planted long before anything is visible and growth unfolds beneath the surface in ways that cannot be forced.

We see that same pattern in the life of Jesus.  Nearly thirty years pass in relative obscurity before His public ministry begins.  Then the book of Acts, which we often read as a rapid succession of moments, actually unfolds over decades.  What looks like movement is, in reality, a long obedience shaped over time.

Recently, at a regional gathering for 100movements, a new friend reflected on how often Jesus speaks in the language of farming and gardening.  Seeds, soil, growth, harvest.  Not because it was convenient imagery, but because it reflects how the kingdom actually works.  Slowly. Often unseen. Resistant to our urgency. He asked a question that has stayed with me:

Can we slow down enough to catch up with Jesus?

That question exposes something in us.  Because most of us are trying to move faster than the kind of work God is doing.  We want visible progress, immediate clarity, something we can point to and say, “There it is.”  But the work of a gardener does not move at that pace.  And if that is true, then it should not surprise us that Mary does not recognize Him right away.

The work of God is not absent in those spaces.  It is simply not always obvious.

And that brings us back to Mary.

She is standing in the presence of the risen Christ, and she does not yet know it.  Not because He is hiding from her, but because she is still learning how to see.  It is only when He speaks her name that recognition comes.

Which raises a question that is difficult to avoid.

Where might we be doing the same?
Where might we be overlooking the work of God because it does not match what we expected?
Where might we be searching for something dramatic, while something real and alive is already in front of us?

The resurrection is not just an event to believe in.  It is a reality that reshapes how we see.  It invites us to slow down enough to recognize that God is often at work in ways that feel ordinary, in places that seem familiar, and in rhythms that do not match our urgency.

And sometimes, before we can fully see Him for who He is, we may first have to admit that we have mistaken Him for something less.

The gardener is already in front of us.

Are we are willing to see.