Mary and the Gardener

Paul Kerensa’s reimagining of Mary Magdalene’s encounter with the risen Jesus skillfully weaves together the narratives of several gardens—the Garden of Eden, the Garden of Gethsemane, and the garden containing the tomb in which Jesus was buried. Kerensa also intersperses in his narrative Mary’s recollections of Jesus’ ministry—his healings, his Parable of the Sower, and his feeding of the 5,000 with a few loaves and fish.

As Mary weeps at the empty tomb, her eyes are blinded by tears, and she thinks the man she sees approaching is the gardener. The gardener gently and patiently interacts with her. Eventually, when he says her name “with the kindest voice you can imagine,” Mary’s eyes are opened, and she sees physically and with the eyes of faith that Jesus is alive. Filled with joy, Mary goes and spreads the word of Jesus’s resurrection, which continues to reach the nations of the world today.

Young readers are encouraged to understand the consequences of Jesus’s resurrection: “Like that other garden story—of Eden, and Adam and Eve and the fruit—this was also about a new start. A new start for Mary—and a new start for you and me. It starts with a garden. And it’s all thanks to the Gardener.”

Illustrator Leanne Daphne’s pastel-hued artwork inspired by the natural world captures the contrasting beauty and brokenness of the gardens and the divergence between the splendor of God’s creation of people and the fallenness in which they exist apart from Jesus. She also skillfully portrays the range of emotions Mary experienced—despair, sorrow, bewilderment, joy, and adoration.

Mary and the Gardener provides Christian parents and other adults who engage with children a worshipful resource to initiate a conversation about God’s astounding, patient narrative of redemption and, as Kerensa says, how it still offers each of us a new start as we submit to our risen Lord. (Beaming Books)