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She thought he was the gardener (John 20:11-18). John’s history of Jesus’ Resurrection, Easter 2026.

Jesus’ crucifixion was unjust, violent, shameful.

Having obtained Pilate’s permission, Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus took Jesus’ crucified body for careful and reverential burial.

Nicodemus brought a mixture of myrrh and aloes, about thirty-five kilograms. Taking Jesus’ body, the two of them wrapped it, with the spices, in strips of linen. This was in accordance with Jewish burial customs. At the place where Jesus was crucified, there was a garden, and in the garden a new tomb, in which no one had ever been laid. Because it was the Jewish day of Preparation and since the tomb was nearby, they laid Jesus there. (John 19:39–42)

In Israel the well-to-do dead were wrapped head to toe in othonia (ὀθονια), linen, a textile made from flax. It was stiff, durable, and expensive. Myrrh and aloes were packed between the linen strips to mask the smell of decomposition.

The head was wrapped separately in a sudarion (σουδαριον), Latin for ‘facecloth’. Usually made from wool, it was cheaper than linen but softer. So, when Lazarus emerged alive from his tomb “his hands and feet were wrapped with strips of linen, and a cloth was around his face.”

After a dishonourable death Jesus was, as Isaiah predicted, buried “with the rich in death” (53:9).

Matthew says that Mary Magdalene observed these preparations, and that the chief priests obtained a guard for Jesus’ tomb, so no one would steal his body and then claim that he had risen (27:61–66).

That was Friday. Now it is Sunday.

John 20:1 Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene went to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed from the entrance.

We stand on sacred ground.

Because work was forbidden on the sabbath Mary Magdalene hurries to the tomb at daybreak Sunday. Mark says that she and other women came with spices to finish embalming Jesus’ body (16:1–2).

Jesus had exorcised seven demons from Mary (Luke 8:2). She had stood on Golgotha near the crucified Jesus with a few others. All four evangelists describe her among the women who were the first to come to Jesus’ tomb. She is important to the Resurrection history.

Mary sees that the stone that had sealed Jesus’ tomb had been rolled aside, that Jesus’ body was not there.

John 20:2 So she came running to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one Jesus loved, and said, ‘They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we don’t know where they have put him!’

John calls himself “the beloved” for Jesus had a special affection for him.

Mary is upset. It seemed the guards had allowed Jesus’ enemies to remove his body, perhaps to throw it in a pit among the corpses of other executed malefactors?

Peter and John waste no time wondering.

John 20:3–7 So Peter and the other disciple started for the tomb. Both were running, but the other disciple outran Peter and reached the tomb first. He bent over and looked in at the strips of linen lying there but did not go in. Then Simon Peter came along behind him and went straight into the tomb. He saw the strips of linen lying there, (ESV) and the face cloth, which had been on Jesus’ head, not lying with the linen cloths but folded up in a place by itself.

Peter distinguishes the linen winding strips from the sudarion. The linen and facecloth lie separate.

Crucially, he observes that the facecloth had been folded (ἐντετυλιγμενον, entetuligmenon). The verb emphasises deliberate and careful action. Matthew and Luke use the same word for Joseph carefully wrapping Jesus’ body for burial.

Peter and John found Jesus’ grave cloths lying neatly and individually in the same position they were when Jesus’s embalmed body was placed there, except the sudarion had been deliberately and carefully folded and placed by itself.

This is not a scene of robbery, chaos, and despair. Instead, we see calm, order, and hope.

John enters the tomb for a closer look.

John 20:8-10 Finally the other disciple, who had reached the tomb first, also went inside. He saw and believed. (They still did not understand from Scripture that Jesus had to rise from the dead.) Then the disciples went back to where they were staying.

When John saw this “he believed.”

Writing about this years later he knew that neither he nor any of the disciples had understood the resurrection prophecies of the Old Testament.

Psalm 16:9–11 Therefore my heart is glad and my tongue rejoices; my body also will rest secure,

because you will not abandon me to the realm of the dead, nor will you let your faithful one see decay.

You make known to me the path of life; you will fill me with joy in your presence, with eternal pleasures at your right hand. (see Ps. 49:9; 103:4)

God had made abundantly clear that his Son would not remain dead and rotting in a grave. Jesus promised his disciples again and again that he would rise from the grave (Mat. 16:21; 17:23; 20:19). Yet they had neither understood him nor believed him (Mark 9:31–32).

John makes us look at Easter Sunday through his eyes. The empty tomb. The grave cloths, no longer wrapping a body, neatly arranged.

Jesus had risen as David prophesied he would. As he himself had promised.

John 20:11–13 Now Mary stood outside the tomb crying. As she wept, she bent over to look into the tomb and saw two angels in white, seated where Jesus’ body had been, one at the head and the other at the foot. They asked her, ‘Woman, why are you crying?’ ‘They have taken my Lord away,’ she said, ‘and I don’t know where they have put him.’

Mary has not yet come to John’s realisation. She peers into the empty tomb. (We cannot peer enough into Jesus’ empty tomb!)

She is given an apocalypse, an unveiling of what Peter and John did not see: two angels, servants and messengers of God. They sit with the graveclothes which perhaps they themselves had removed from Jesus’ resurrected body and neatly arranged.

Augustine ponders whether the messengers’ position “signified that the Gospel of Christ was to be preached from head to foot, from the beginning even to the end.”

“Why are you crying?” they ask. This is a moment of joy not grief!

Now comes the most spectacular misidentification in all of history.

John 20:14–15 At this, she turned round and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not realise that it was Jesus. He asked her, ‘Woman, why are you crying? Who is it you are looking for?’ Thinking he was the gardener, she said, ‘Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have put him, and I will get him.’

The Gospels consistently describe the resurrected Jesus as at first unrecognisable. Perhaps like seeing an old friend after forty years. Just not the same.

The change in Jesus is significant, as we will see.

Jesus too asks why she cries at such a moment. Why does she look for the living among the dead? Thinking he was the caretaker of the garden she wonders whether he had helped Jesus’ enemies to remove his body.

John 20:6 Jesus said to her, ‘Mary.’ She turned towards him and cried out in Aramaic, ‘Rabboni!’ (which means ‘Teacher’).

The Shepherd’s sheep know his voice. Her eyes open. John sounds the actual word she uttered, the deeply respectful “Rabboni.”

Apparently she reaches out to hold him. How could you not?

John 20:7 Jesus said, ‘Do not hold on to me, for I have not yet ascended to the Father. Go instead to my brothers and tell them, “I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.” ’

Though Mary takes hold of Jesus he is in transit. Things have changed and are changing. That’s why he looks different.

His exaltation begins with his resurrection from the grave, proceeds with his ascension into heaven, continues when his Father seats him at his right hand in the highest place, and culminates with his return, Last Judgment, and establishment of the New Heaven and Earth.

Mary cannot hold Jesus back, to the way things were before his death and resurrection. His exaltation must continue. She must instead announce his resurrection to those whom Jesus names, touchingly, “my brothers.”

John 20:18 Mary Magdalene went to the disciples with the news: ‘I have seen the Lord!’ And she told them that he had said these things to her.

Mary says the same to you and to me. “I have seen the Lord!”

Believe her. And trust in Him who said:

I am the resurrection and the life. The one who believes in me will live, even though they die; and whoever lives by believing in me will never die. (John 11:25–26)

– Campbell Markham