March 23, 2008 - "The Risen Gardener"

Crescent Hill Baptist Church
Louisville, Kentucky
Easter Day
March 23, 2008
W. Gregory Pope

THE RISEN GARDENER
Jeremiah 31:1-6; Psalm 118:1-2, 14-24; Colossians 3:1-4; John 20:1-18

It’s the story that never gets old. In fact, it has a way of breathing new life into the world every time it’s heard. Are you ready to hear it again?

It happened early in the morning on the first day of the week, while it was still dark. The darkness of grief hung over the whole earth. The Hope of the World, Jesus of Nazareth, had been killed two days earlier.

One of his closest friends, Mary Magdalene, came to the tomb to anoint his body. To her absolute horror, the stone had been rolled away from the entrance. She ran to tell Peter and another disciple, likely John, that Jesus’ body was missing, stolen she believed.

Peter and the other disciple race each other to the tomb. The other disciple wins, the story says, making us think the other disciple is John, the writer of the gospel story. They say it is always the winners who get to write history.

Well Peter is not far behind. They enter the tomb and see that the body is indeed missing. Only linen cloths neatly folded are lying there. And the text says that when the other disciple saw he believed. And then both disciples went back home.

But Mary stands outside the tomb weeping. When she looks inside she sees two angels sitting there, and they ask her why she is weeping. “Because they have taken away my Lord,” she moans, “and I do not know where they have laid him.”

Then she turns away from the tomb and sees a man standing there, not recognizing him to be Jesus, and he too asks her why she is weeping.

Mary says to him, “Mister, if you’ve taken him, please tell me where you’ve put him so I can care for him.”

But that’s not all we are told. The story offers a seemingly insignificant detail. It says that Mary “supposing him to be the gardener.”

Until recently I have always read that to mean that Mary was mistaken. However, thanks to writer Sam Wells, [1] I am now convinced that Mary was right: The One standing before her is the Gardner. It is Jesus The Risen Gardener.

Think about it. This is the first day of the week, and this is a man and a woman in a garden. There could hardly be three more explicit references to the creation story in the Garden of Eden. Standing in this Easter Garden is a new Adam and Eve.

Let’s take a trip back to Eden just a moment.

It is in the garden of Eden that the Bible sets the first man and woman. From the paradise of the garden of Eden we find who we were created to be. God made Adam and placed him in the garden of Eden, the first gardener, at peace with his Maker.

Created in God’s good image to share communion with God and one another and to care for God’s good creation, Adam and Eve (or insert your name and mine) chose their own path rather than God’s path.

A brokenness tears into the harmony as Adam and Eve choose to live outside the boundaries God had set for their own good. They are no longer at peace with their Maker. And they are driven out of the garden.

This is often referred to as the “fall” of humanity - the fall from innocence into sin and guilt. We began our journey to Easter on the First Sunday in Lent reading this very story.

The late Mennonite theologian John Howard Yoder has said that our “fallenness” or “lostness” and our salvation have to do with something far greater and far deeper than our sins and their forgiveness. It has to do with our separation from God and our incapacity to do the good. [2]

Apart from God, left to our own desires of pride and greed and lust, we make choices that exceed our limits, that run outside the boundaries God has for us, and we find ourselves lost in the world, trying to survive in a damaged creation we pray is not beyond repair, wondering if we will ever see Eden again, wondering if we as a human race will ever have the courage to do what is right for all the world.

In the novel The Kite Runner, Amir, the main character, receives a call from a long-time friend in Pakistan. Behind the words of his friend, Amir says he hears “my past of unatoned sins.” His friend ends with words Amir cannot get out of his head: “There is a way to be good again.” [3]

This is what we all want, is it not? A way to be good again? Not “good” as defined by others or as a kind of perfection we cannot reach, but the “good” God pronounced us to be at creation. The kind of goodness where we are in harmony with our Creator living in the flow of our Creator’s wishes and will.

Is there a way to be good again?

The further we go in the biblical story, it doesn’t look much better.

There is yet a third Garden in the story that precedes the Easter Garden; it is the Garden of Gethsemane, where humanity fell again as the disciples scattered and hid, just as the man and woman had fallen in Eden, then ran and hid at the sound of God’s voice.

But now here we are three days later, in the Easter Garden where we find there is a way to be good again. A way to be restored, redeemed, transformed. A way to reconnect and be reconciled with the One Who Made Us.

Mary thought Jesus was the gardener. And indeed He is. Jesus came and lived in harmony with his Maker, came not to do his will but the will of God, and open to us once again the gates to Eden.

To use John’s language, Jesus is the Word who was with God in the beginning when God made the garden - the whole of creation, epitomized by Eden. [4]

The Easter Story is quite simply a new creation story. It is as grand as that.

In Romans this Lenten season Paul has been talking about how in Adam, in our fallenness, we are all dying, but in Christ we are all being made alive.

They used to say that when they were driving the cross into the ground for the execution of Jesus they struck a skull; and it was the skull of Adam.

The incarnation, death and resurrection of Jesus puts right the fatal error of the fall and gives birth to the new creation.

In a garden the world was lost; and in a garden the world was made new.

In the garden of Eden there was despair - the people cast out, the gates slammed shut.

In the garden of Resurrection there is life and hope. The tomb has burst open. The Easter garden is putting right all that our desires have messed up. In the Easter Garden we learn that the worst that can be done is not all that can be done. Behind and beyond the darkness there is the ever-creating Voice: “Let there be light! Let there be light!”

In the northern hemisphere in which we live, we are fortunate that the Easter garden is a Spring garden. Even though there is a chance of snow tonight, it is the third day of Spring. We normally associate Spring with gardens coming back to life and creation full of living creatures like butterflies. The butterfly is an old Resurrection symbol; new life emerging from the apparent death of the chrysalis. They are all around us in the sanctuary today. A reminder that at the very time when nature’s garden shows the signs of new life God brings life out of death at Easter.

The Easter story taken in all of its fullness means that redemption is not just for individual persons, but for creation itself. The whole cosmos redeemed.

Eastern Orthodox theology uses the language of the “shattered image” to describe the fallenness of creation and of humanity. And that in Jesus Christ God is mending what has been shattered.

If what Christ does in his incarnation, death and resurrection is to restore the divine image in which we were made, then the shattered image of creation is also being restored: A healed imago dei for all creation!

The great fourth century theologian Athanasius puts it this way. He says the divine image within each of us is like a great painting that has been destroyed by the elements; however, the artist doesn’t throw the canvas away, but begins to repaint it to its original glory. [5]

That is the work the Original Artist wants to do in you and me and in all creation: repaint us to our original glory. Matthew Fox reminds us that we were not created in original sin but original blessing. The One who waits for us in the Easter Garden seeks to restore us to shine with the original glory of original blessing. God’s paint brush is already busy at work.

Easter has come early this year. Earlier than most of us have ever seen. Earlier than all of us will ever see it again. I think it fitting for Easter to come just three days into the season of Spring. It would help if it felt more like Spring and less like the middle of Winter. This Easter, Spring is not in full bloom. Spring is just in its infancy. Give it some time and new life will begin to sprout up everywhere.

So it is with Easter. The resurrection of Jesus was the beginning of a new creation. This new creation was not a new creation fully come, but one which has dawned. The resurrection of Jesus is the starting point of a new creation, a the new world. The resurrection inaugurates a new creation right in the middle of the old one. And so we are born into this new creation by faith. Because there’s still enough of the old creation around for us to believe that’s all there is.

At the end of the biblical story we find yet another Garden in the City of God. It is the vision of a new heaven and a new earth come down from above. It will be the final fulfillment of the promise of Genesis 1.

In the City of God the Tree of Life is planted on each side of the river. The leaves of the Tree are for the healing of the nations. In that Garden nothing will ever again be cursed. The Throne of God and of the Lamb is at the center. There is no night in that city. Nor is there sunlight. The shining face of God is all the light the Garden needs to flourish and grow. Because then God will be all in all.

It is the final accomplishment of God’s great design, to defeat and abolish death forever. It is the rescue of creation from its present plight of decay. [6]

Our task in the present is to live as resurrection people in between Easter and the final day as a sign of Easter and a foretaste of creation’s full redemption. [7]

Easter faith gives us eyes to see the dawn of God’s new creation in the midst of the old. It gives us courage to live by the new creation rather than by the old one:

To live by forgiveness rather than guilt and vengeance.
To work for justice in the midst of the powers and systems of injustice.
To live in the community of the new creation because the divisions and hatreds and bigotries of the old creation no longer count.

Easter faith lets us trust in the God of Easter who says, “Behold, I am making all things new. In this world you will have tribulation, but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world.”

And while the new creation has not yet fully come we can taste the goodness of its morning light. We can taste it in every experience of joy. We can taste it in every experience of love. We can taste it in every experience of forgiveness, healing and hope.

“The power of Jesus’ resurrection is the power of creation - new creation. The power of death is broken. When Mary turns at the calling of her name, she turns from darkness to light, from despair to hope, from death to life. Not only is the future open; the past is transformed. The possibility of forgiveness means that one can begin to reclaim that past as a friend rather than as an enemy. Life does not need to be lived running away from regrets or running away from death. The power of resurrection is a power beyond description. It is not subdued by death. It has the force of a new creation, a significance as great as God’s original purpose for the world. It is no longer frightened of the past, because the power of forgiveness makes even terrible mistakes redeemable and opens gateways to new possibilities.” [8]

Mary knew who it was when the Gardener called her name.

There is a Gardener who waits for us in Easter’s Garden this very morning calling out our name.

It is our task to listen and follow the voice of the Gardener on the way to goodness and life.

Christ is risen. He is alive. God has begun to put things back to where they were meant to be all along. God wants to put you back to where you were created to be.

The Risen Gardener stands before you now calling your name. Will you look up long enough for him to wipe away your tears of grief and guilt and despair and then walk with him through the Garden of Grace and New Life? He’s calling your name. Do you hear it?

_________________________

1. Samuel Wells, Power and Passion, Zondervan, 2007, 178
2. John Howard Yoder, Preface to Theology, Brazos Press, 2002, 300
3. Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner, Roverhead Books, 2003, 2
4. Wells, 178
5. Athanasius, On the Incarnation, St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2003, 41
6. N. T. Wright, Surprised By Hope, HarperOne, 2008, 104-105
7. Ibid., 30
8. Wells, 180, 183