In the Garden
Easter Sunday
Today, April 14th, has been set aside—as part of an ever-growing calendar filled with special days—as “National Gardening Day.” According to a press release about the event, “National Gardening Day on April 14 is a day of encouragement, a day created to give gardeners a shove and a shovel so that they can begin their gardening journey.” Normally, at this time of year, I would count myself among them. As the days get longer and the weather gets warmer, my wife and I (along with our kids after an appropriate amount of arm-twisting) would be getting to work on some familiar tasks—plowing, tilling, breaking up stubborn dirt clods and arranging the (mostly) neat, orderly rows where we would soon be planting tomatoes, okra, green beans, and squash, along with whatever other goodies we want to try our hand at growing. This year, however, because of a particularly hectic summer schedule, we’ve decided that the garden wouldn’t get the attention it needs, so we’re foregoing this routine for (hopefully) just one season.
I have to confess I won’t miss fighting with the weeds, or dealing with the bugs and the tiny thorns that make picking some vegetables a less-than-pleasant chore, especially in the heat of an August afternoon. But there is a lot that I will miss: the feeling of satisfied abundance that comes from heaping my dinner plate with sautéed squash, sliced tomatoes, and fried okra that we grew ourselves; the opportunity to share what we’ve picked with neighbors and friends from church; and even before that, the thrill that comes from watching a stalk push through the dirt on an early summer morning, the sense that something new is happening, something new that happens every year but, despite this fact (or maybe because of this fact), it never really loses its wonder.
Whether—like me—you’re just a hobbyist, or whether your livelihood or even your survival depends on your ability to grow things from the soil, there is something in us that is drawn to a garden. As Genesis teaches us, our relationship to the dirt is strong. Life—including our life—began in a garden, one that God planted eastward of Eden. And as the book of Revelation draws to a close, we encounter images of the tree of life bearing fruit in its season as a reminder that, as in the beginning stages of creation so also at the consummation of all things, God is a gardener, a cultivator working to bring forth an abundant harvest according to his purposes.
In the final verses of John 19, just after Jesus’ body has been taken down from the cross, we read, “Now there was a garden in the place where he was crucified, and in the garden there was a new tomb in which no one had ever been laid.” While John might describe the location of Jesus’ burial in terms of convenience and proximity—the suitability of this garden for the burial of a recently crucified rabbi—what happens just a few verses later prompts us to wonder if there isn’t much more to the story than this. The events that unfold in that garden just a couple of days after Jesus’ body was placed in that new tomb are not the sort of quiet and somber occurrences we would expect from a graveyard, a place of death, but just the opposite.
This sleepy garden, early on the first day of the week, becomes a place teeming with life. From Mary Magdalene’s first encounter with the empty tomb to Peter and John’s footrace to the sepulcher to Mary’s excited, understandably confused exchange first with the angelic messengers sitting in the open grave and then, moments later, with the risen Jesus himself, this Easter story is filled with activity, urgency, and emotion of all kinds. Here, in this would-be graveyard near the place of the skull, God is fulfilling his promises spoken through Isaiah and others to make a new creation, to usher in a new reality, to triumph over the forces of sin and death and darkness with a new vision, a realized vision of wholeness and abundance, the first glimpses of a new heavens and a new earth embodied in this risen Savior. And it all happens in a garden.
As Mary weeps outside the tomb, puzzling over what has happened, we read that she asks Jesus to show her where they have taken the body, because she supposes him to be the gardener. Of course, Mary wasn’t really mistaken. The man she was speaking to was the gardener; he is the gardener—the Word through whom all things were made and through whom that first garden was planted, the Lamb who will sit on the throne among the life-giving, fruit-bearing trees in the eternal kingdom of God’s enduring love, and the resurrected one who, on that third day after his own crucifixion, stood in a garden where nothing less than a new creation was coming into existence. This Jesus, whom we glorify and celebrate on Easter, is both the cultivator and the first fruits of that abundant harvest. He is risen, indeed.
