She wasn’t entirely wrong.
This “mistake” was not lost on John as he wrote his Gospel: He began with his own creative retelling of the Creation Story found in Genesis. God had now returned to his Garden in human form. Evil had killed him in a garden. Faithful followers had buried him in a garden. And the first person to see him resurrected assumed he was a gardener.
New life. New creation. New world. New kingdom. New everything.
The Gardener himself was the first seed of the new creation that had been buried and was now sprouting up into the sunlight. Just as with the first Creation, everything didn’t flourish at once, but life was set in motion. Life that even death cannot stop.
Here began the task given humans, just like in the beginning, of nurturing God’s good world: To get our hands dirty. To flow with the seasons. To be patient with the process. To tend, water, prune, and harvest. To walk with God himself in friendship as we go about our chores.