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Easter 2006: Back to the Garden
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| 4/16/2006 |
To prepare for today, I gathered with parishioners for several weeks at 7 AM to study the Easter Gospel (text below) we have just heard from John: of Mary Magdalene coming while it was still dark to the tomb where Jesus had been laid, and finding the stone that sealed it removed, and running to get Peter, and the disciple whom Jesus loved, who then won the foot-race back. One believed Jesus raised, one didn’t, but they left Mary Magdalene wondering, and then went home. And then the remarkable conversation between the risen Jesus and Mary, where he tells her to let go, that he must leave, ascend, but that she must go and preach to the disciples, and give them the good news of the resurrection. I asked my study group, what was the part of the story that struck them most, was the most poignant, the most meaningful. After a long silence, one ventured, “The part where Mary Magdalene thought Jesus was the gardener.”
At this moment, I started wondering if meeting with these guys was such a good idea at 7 AM.
“Think about it,” he went on. “Who would ever think that when Jesus was raised from the dead, he’d end up looking like the gardener? He doesn’t look like a gardener in those paintings at the museum. Think about what a gardener usually looks like. . . .”
I felt trapped in a David Mamet play.
“But I got to thinking about it,” he continued, “Jesus is the gardener. In fact, like that movie, Jesus is the ‘Constant Gardner’.”
“That’s right,” another guy in the room chimed in. “The point seems to be that Jesus’ body was laid in a garden. In fact, the garden. What’s happening here, Jesus has reopened the Garden of Eden. The passage starts, ‘Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark.’ That’s the way it was in the beginning, in Genesis, right before God started creating the heavens and the earth on the first day. Mary Magdalene goes in the dark, because on the first day, when God started creating, it was dark. What’s happening here, is creation starting again. When Mary Magdalene goes into that garden where the tomb is, she is taking us all back into the Garden of Eden. We are getting a new start. We are the new creation. We are being planted once again.”
And then another added, “If someone like Mary Magdalene gets to go back to the garden, then it seems to me that we all get to go back. I guess that’s the point.”
I tried to interrupt the conversation with a quick summary of the recent research on Mary
Magdalene, with the learned points that we should see her as a sexual sinner, but that didn’t interest them much.
“I think it’s poignant,” the conversation went on, “that it is Mary Magdalene, who is taking us back to the garden. We’ve always said that a woman Eve took us out of the garden, because of sex and lust, so it makes sense to me that a woman with a ‘reputation’ takes us back. Jesus is setting things right, like with the woman caught in adultery who he says shouldn’t be stoned. He is wiping it all off the books. If Mary Magdalene gets a second chance, I suppose the resurrection means I get a second chance at the garden.”
I was outmatched. They were right.
When we proclaim “Christ is died, is risen, and will come again,” we push our rationality to the brink, but we create a space for faith, and in that incredible faith, God gives us a grace that allows us to say we are able to begin again, to start again.
Who here is wearing new clothes? We put on new Easter clothes to remind ourselves that we are a new creation--that we are putting off the corruptions of the old, and putting on the glory of the new. Our old, sinful, physical bodies die with Christ on the cross, and our new bodies, with built in capacity for eternal life, rise on Easter, and remind us that we are not to be exiles from the garden, but restored to that place where we have our source—the image of God within us.
Now, I know most us feel that one day to the next our bodies are not becoming new, but older. We don’t creak less, we creak more. The body to which Jesus speaks is not the body of the flesh, but to the body that we might call our primary identity, or our sense of self. In resurrection, in the proclamation, “Christ has died, Christ has risen, Christ will come again,” we put off the old flesh that we are just meaningless cogs in the mechanism of an accidental creation and put on the new flesh that we are children of God, made in God’s image, redeemed from our failures to which our flesh condemns us, and set free to live in the purpose of God’s life so abundantly promised to us.
As I worked with my study group, I kept hearing a song in my head, and I finally figured out what it is. Maybe you remember Joni Mitchell’s “Woodstock.” Some of you might remember that it goes:
I came upon a child of God
He was walking along the road
He said, I am trying to get my soul free
We are stardust
We are golden
And we’ve got to get ourselves
Back to the garden.
Listen my friends, what our Gospel screams at us today is that it is time to get back to the garden.
In the cosmic metaphors by which God has left us the roadmap to find meaning and purpose in our life—to find the light—rather than to succumb to the randomness of the myth of accidental creation—death, we learned that at the very beginning of creation, God placed us in a garden of perfection, but we lost it. And, we, as a human race, have been trying to get back to that Garden since.
Now, for we the scraggily bunch who calls ourselves Christians, we hear the most outrageous tale, but one that resounds in the very chambers of our heart: the very Word that made that first Garden where Eden saw play, became flesh, and lived among us as Jesus. By following his life, he becomes life. If follow his life, take on his life through faith, receive light, life, water, bread, and a door to meaning and purpose, then our watery lives will turn into sweet wine. In Christ, in the putting onto our flesh the flesh of his perfection, we become the children of light, not walking in darkness, but walking in light. We can find ourselves heading back to the garden.
To say we put on a new creation, is to say we put on forgiveness, we are redeemed, we are, renewed, and we are raised with Christ, so that we might be light in the darkness, and the darkness will not overwhelm it.
We are still so in the darkness. As that Joni Mitchell song goes, we can see the “bombers riding shotgun in the sky.” But if we take the gift of the life of risen Jesus onto our flesh, if we walk as children of light, we can dream, as she sings, “that those bombers turn into butterflies, over our nation.”
And lest we forget how the song ends:
We are stardust, billion year old carbon
But we’re caught in the devil’s bargain
So we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden.
How true that we’re caught in the devil’s bargain of death, of war, of poverty, of degradation, of deathliness. The devil makes a strong bargain—if you climb high enough on the pile of goods and power so that others quake, and then you defend those bursting earthly barns with enough armies, you can make the mistake of assuming that those barns are full of life. Look again, as those barns are not the treasure stored in heaven, but the debris piled up that keeps you from seeing the garden beyond. If you look up, all you might see is the bombers in the sky, circling, like the buzzards do. As we get back to the garden, we can dream of the bombers in the sky, becoming butterflies.
So let us get ourselves back to the garden.
Mary Magdalene goes in the dark, to receive her new creation, her new self. As Isaiah promised, Jesus dries every tear. Her fear of her death, and his death, is swallowed up forever. She is given the new message: “Do not hold on, let go. The new creation is not just for you, but for all. Go, preach; you have work to do.
It is time for all to get back to the garden.
Early on the first day of the week,
while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene came to the tomb and saw that
the stone had been removed from the tomb. So she ran and went to Simon
Peter and the other disciple, the one whom Jesus loved, and said to
them, "They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we do not know
where they have laid him." Then Peter and the other disciple set out
and went toward the tomb. The two were running together, but the other
disciple outran Peter and reached the tomb first. He bent down to look
in and saw the linen wrappings lying there, but he did not go in. Then
Simon Peter came, following him, and went into the tomb. He saw the
linen wrappings lying there, and the cloth that had been on Jesus'
head, not lying with the linen wrappings but rolled up in a place by
itself. Then the other disciple, who reached the tomb first, also went
in, and he saw and believed; for as yet they did not understand the
scripture, that he must rise from the dead. Then the disciples returned
to their homes.
But
Mary stood weeping outside the tomb. As she wept, she bent over to look
into the tomb; and she saw two angels in white, sitting where the body
of Jesus had been lying, one at the head and the other at the feet.
They said to her, "Woman, why are you weeping?" She said to them, "They
have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him."
When she had said this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing there,
but she did not know that it was Jesus. Jesus said to her, "Woman, why
are you weeping? Whom are you looking for?" Supposing him to be the
gardener, she said to him, "Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me
where you have laid him, and I will take him away." Jesus said to her,
"Mary!" She turned and said to him in Hebrew, "Rabbouni!" (which means
Teacher). Jesus said to her, "Do not hold on to me, because I have not
yet ascended to the Father. But go to my brothers and say to them, `I
am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.'"
Mary Magdalene went and announced to the disciples, "I have seen the
Lord"; and she told them that he had said these things to her.
John 20:1-18
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