Mary Magdalene was one of the most popular saints in the late Middle Ages. She was particularly beloved in southern France, where legend says she arrived by rudderless ship at Massilia (modern day Marseilles), with Martha and Lazarus, shortly after Jesus’s resurrection. According to Jacobus Voraigne’s Golden Legend, she would go on to live the rest of her life in Provence, converting kings and nobility and performing miracles. For her last thirty years, she wandered in the wilderness as a hermit and was eventually buried in Provence.
In the centuries that followed, her story took on new and increasingly fantastical dimensions. Once upon a time, Mary Magdalene was rich. Once upon a time, Mary Magdalene was a prostitute. In either case, she must have been really beautiful. This narrative amalgam gave rise to an extremely complex cult in Europe. This all stemmed in part from the confusion of many writers, who conflated her not only with the sister of Martha (hence the company she kept aboard the ship to Massilia) and the unnamed “sinful woman” in the Gospels who washes Jesus’s feet with her tears (Luke 7:36-50). The Eastern Church, while acknowledging her sainthood, never accepted this amalgam. But by the end of the 13th century, the cult of Mary Magdalene was so important to the Roman Catholic Church that several major monastic communities in France claimed to have discovered her relics.
My favorite aspect of this cult has its origin in one of the few passages where Mary Magdalene is mentioned by name in the Gospels. In chapter 20 of the Gospel of John, she sets out to visit the tomb where Jesus has been buried. She finds the stone rolled away and goes and finds Simon Peter. Peter and John return with her. Finding it empty, the men despair and go home. Mary Magdalene remains behind. Weeping, she decides to stoop down and look into the tomb. She finds two angels seated on Jesus’s bed, one at the foot and one at the head. They ask why she’s crying. Mary is confused: someone has taken Jesus’s body away and she doesn’t know where to find it. Mary turns around and sees someone. He asks why she is weeping. Thinking it was the gardener (Vulgate: Illa existimans quia hortulanus esset), Mary asks: “Sir, if thou hast taken him hence, tell me where thou hast laid him, and I will take him away.” [Douay-Rheims, 20:15]. His reply: “Mary.” Hearing her name, the woman immediately recognizes Jesus. But before she can embrace him, Jesus commands her not to touch him: Noli me tangere, nondum enim ascendi ad Patrem meum: vade autem ad fratres meos, et dic eis: Ascendo ad Patrem meum, et Patrem vestrum, Deum meum, et Deum vestrum (Do not touch me, for I am not yet ascended to my Father. But go to my brethren, and say to them: I ascend to my Father and to your Father, to my God and your God [John 20:17 Douay-Rheims]).
This exchange between Mary Magdalene and Jesus had a rich iconographic history in the Middle Ages. In paintings of the Noli me tangere episode, Jesus is often dressed like a gardener. He is usually holding a hoe or sometimes a mattock, like Fra Angelico’s fresco of the scene, which adorns the convent of Saint Mark in Florence:
Noli Me Tangere, Fra Angelico, tempura on wall, 1440-1442, San Marco, Florence.
In the image, Christ’s tool is slung over his shoulder. He bears the stigmata in his feet and in his hands. Like the two angels in the tomb, he is dressed all in white (20:12). The painting implies that, when Mary first notices the man, all she can see is the tool in his hand and the comportment of his body, both of which are directed away from her. The painting depicts the moment of Christ’s revelation to her, but up until then, his identity is hidden. He is a gardener; the man is very clearly at work. Holding up his hand in a gesture of deferral, Jesus’s pose suggests that Mary has interrupted his work. Noli me tangere—don’t touch me— there’s more left to do.
In Coreggio’s treatment (ca. 1525), Christ’s clothes look deshabille and tomb-like. But there, in the far right corner of the painting, a wooden tool rests against a tree. In this instance, Christ’s work (or most of it, anyway) appeared to be finished. The tool points to the origin and the end of time: to the Tree of Life, to Eden, to the garden, to Adam, the first man who toiled, and Christ, the man who brings Adam’s work to completion.
Noli Me Tangere, Coreggio, oil panel, c.1525, Museo del Prado, Madrid
Clearly, some medieval artists thought that Mary’s confusion of Christ with a gardener wasn’t a simple mistake. If Mary thought he was a gardener, it was because Jesus wanted to be seen this way. Maybe, then, Jesus really was gardening. But if he wasn’t, why would he have wanted to look like he was? For patristic and early medieval commentators, the detail in John’s gospel was provocative. In his commentary on Genesis, Origen ridiculed the idea that a God might garden: “who could be found so silly as to believe that God, after the manner of a farmer, planted trees?”1 Eden, Origen thought, wasn’t a real garden, but a metaphor of paradise. God simply wasn’t in the business of putting seeds in the soil; gardening would have been beneath the Son of God. Others, like Jerome, found the possibility intriguing. Mary made a mistake, Jerome says, but her mistake pointed to a deeper truth: “When Mary Magdalene had seen the Lord and thought that He was the gardener…she thought that He was the gardener; she was mistaken, indeed, in her vision, but the very error had its prototype. Truly, indeed, was Jesus the gardener of His Paradise, of His trees of Paradise.”2 Mary’s eyes misled her–Jesus didn’t actually garden–but her intellect pointed in a direction whose truth would soon be revealed. Later, Gregory the Great suggested that Mary erred by divine inspiration: “perhaps it wasn’t by a mistake that the woman erred. Was he not the spiritual gardener of her soul–he who planted the seeds of virtue in her breast through his love?”3 Jesus was a spiritual gardener, sent to toil and dig and plant in the souls of men. Why then would he not appear to Mary, and to us, in the shape of a gardener? Mary’s mistake was fortuitous: it pointed beyond a simple misperception to a deeper, spiritual truth.
Julian of Norwich, the great fourteenth century theologian and mystic, takes a more radical approach when she sees a vision of a lord sending out a servant. Wondering what errand this servant might be doing, she suddenly realizes that
He shuld be a gardener: delve [dig] and dike [make ditches] and swinke [work] and swete [sweat] and turne the erth up and down, and seke the depnesse [depth], and water the plantes in time. And in this he shulde continue his traveyle [work], and make swete flodes [streams] to runne, and nobille and plentuous fruite [rich and abundant fruit] to spring which he shulde bring before the lorde and serve him therwith to his liking. And he shulde never turne againe till he had dighte [gotten] this mete alle redy, as he knew that it liked to the lorde, and than he shulde take this met with the drinke, and bere it full wurshiply before the lorde. And all this time the lorde shulde sit right on the same place, abiding the servant whom he sent oute.4
Julian’s vision is more expansive and cosmic than Jerome’s or Gregory’s reading of Mary’s mistake. Christ’s incarnational labor merges with the labors of Adam and Eve. Mankind is called to till and to keep the earth (Genesis 2:25). That vocation remains even after the fall, as Adam works by the sweat of his brow (Genesis 3:19). In Christ, that vocation is brought to completion: the gardener’s “traveyle” of the earth, his passion, makes “swete flodes” run. And the “lorde” will eat only when the servant has finished harvesting all the “fruite.”
Elsewhere in Revelations of Divine Love, Julian equates the kynde, or nature, of God with kyndeness, or kindness. God expresses his nature, his kindness, in the person of Jesus, the Son of God, who became our kin (our kind, or kynde) in order to save us. The proliferation of senses of kynde mirrors the fecundity of divine love. But in Julian’s vision of the lord and servant, Christ’s love becomes granular and historically located. It’s hard to ignore the skillful digging and the sweat and the irrigation. Humans are the soil Jesus is working–the “depnesse” he is seeking–but he sweats and moans and makes ditches like a peasant. Julian’s language transfigures the skilled labor of a peasant gardener. In the image of the lord and servant, the toil of human life on earth is articulated and then absorbed into Christ’s own traveyle and brought to fulfillment. “In the servant is comprehended the seconde person of the trinite, and in the servant is comprehended Adam: that is to sey, all men” (ibid.).
A similar exegetical pattern is at work in the play that dramatizes the noli me tangere gospel scene in the York Corpus Christi play cycle. Staged and performed by the guild of “winedrawers,” or wine porters, the play presents Mary’s encounter with the risen Jesus as a dialogue between what the earth hides (dirt, seeds, corpses) and what it will one day reveal (resurrected life). The play does away with the angels and dramatically lengthens the dialogue between Jesus and Mary. Mary begins by confessing that “to grounde nowe [now] gone is all my glee [joy]” (14).5 Her joy was buried in the earth when her maker, the one who formed the earth and “schope [made, or shaped] both day and nyght” (18), was nailed to a tree and killed. Her mysterious interlocutor disagrees: “he is full nere [near] that [who] mankynde bought” (32). Mary can’t figure out what the man means. Jesus’s body has disappeared, so she assumes this person has put it somewhere close by.
We don’t know anything about how the scene was staged or what props the actors would have used, but it’s obvious from how Mary interacts with him that he is presented as a gardener–a “goode gardener” (42), Mary says, inferring perhaps from the work he does while he talks. When Jesus finally addresses her by name and shows her his wounds, he proclaims: “trowe [believe] it wele, it turnes to goode/ Whanne men in erthe ther [their] flesh schall hyde [hide]” (68-9). Christ’s body is like a seed that he planted. That seed has sprouted and risen. Because the seed of Christ’s body has sprouted, the bodies of the dead we bury will also rise.
What interests me about the two medieval texts is the interplay between the mundane details of gardening (hoeing, watering, planting, harvesting) and the cosmic “gardening” of God. In both texts, gardening is obviously a metaphor for the divine work of salvation. However, it’s also plain that the practice of gardening employs natural and human forces that, while not identical to God’s redemptive work in human history, ultimately share a common origin in the created order (Adam’s labor). Perhaps gardening can be a continuation of that redemptive work. Who’s to say the working out of one’s salvation can’t be tied to the soil?
On First Principles (New York: Harper, 1966) 266.
I’m sorry to say that this footnote and the next have been casualties of the Internet Archive outage. Both would have contained hyperlinks to the relevant passages in Latin. At any rate, the Jerome sermon is Homily 87 in the second volume of Jerome’s homilies. If I ever get to the library I’ll provide the bibliographic citation.
Sermon 33 the volumes of Gregory the Great’s sermons in the Patrologia Latina.
Revelations of Divine Love, eds. Nicholas Watson and Jacqueline Jenkins (University Park: Penn State Press, 2005) 283.
York Corpus Christi Plays, ed. Clifford Davidson, TEAMS editions (2011).