The Good Gardener

John 20:1-18

Easter 2011

How many of us here this morning maintain a garden of one variety or another? I applaud this outdoor activity. I also lament that I don’t have that proverbial green thumb. My thumb is more a blotchy brown mushroom color because it prefers to just sit quietly under the trees!

Yet I do know that experiencing solidarity with soil for any amount of time can cultivate more than just the good organic growth of the seeds. It can cultivate a happier, healthier mind and spirit for the gardener. There is something innately uplifting about getting dirt under your nails and engaging the root essence of earth.

Scientifically speaking, I’ve read how this is caused by endorphins in our bodies getting released while we actively engage nature.

Spiritually speaking, spending time in a garden or any place in the great outdoors is a common way many people feel divinely inspired and faithfully uplifted. Is this true for you?

Perhaps that good feeling folks get when appreciating nature is the result of a spiritual seed buried deep within our souls; a seed planted all the way back to when humankind first came into being, planted by God’s evergreen thumb to remind us of our original part in the ecology of all that was created and called good.

You remember the story of the beginning found in the Book of Genesis, right? And do you specifically recall what sort of location the birth of human beings took place at? It wasn’t under the sea, atop a great mountain, or amidst the scrub brush of a dry desert. It was in a lush garden! We know it as the Garden of Eden. As the Scriptural teaching goes, God breathed us into existence in a natural paradise. When God did this, we were also given the ability to freely choose to appreciate, uphold, and cultivate it. Our emblematic ancestors, Adam and Eve, initially used this freedom to glorify their Creator by being good gardeners.

All was well in this garden paradise until our first parents fell prey to personal pride. This was not a healthy kind of humble before God and others pride, but a polluting pride. This pride told them it was not enough to just be good gardeners under God. This pride sneakily summoned them to become more powerful and important. It tempted them to want to be equal with God. They took the bait and gave priority to this seductive, destructive pride. They chose to disobey their good Creator. This disobedience, this original sin, corrupted everything and humankind ending up being cast out of Eden.

We are their spiritual progeny, and so every human generation has inherited the polluting pride, the rebellious spiritual condition.

All that we read about across the Old Testament is rooted in this epic explanation of good gardener’s gone bad before God. We read how our good and loving Creator attempted again and again, through the chosen nation of Israel, to restore the polluted relationship to its original purity. And we read how human beings again and again disobeyed, choosing to promote their own polluting pride, thoroughly stuck in the quicksand of sin.

Let’s fast forward the epic story on through to the end of the Old Testament teachings. Let’s further fast forward on through the perfectly holy birth of a long awaited baby, a “New Adam,” in a stable in Bethlehem. Now let’s step swiftly step ahead on through all of the radical, itinerant preaching and healing ministry of that child once he’d grown to a young adult. Pause for a moment to remember, as we did last Sunday morning and last Thursday night, how this “New Adam,” Jesus of Nazareth, then rode into Jerusalem on a donkey, dined a final time with his disciples before every one of them denied him, and then was crucified by all the people too polluted by sinful pride to recognize him as the very Son of God.

This morning, we stop at the point in the Greatest Story Ever Told where we find ourselves in … well, interestingly enough, a garden. Not the one in Eden, but one located directly outside the burial cave of Jesus.

In this garden, we stand with a wonderfully faithful woman named Mary Magdalene. Upon first arrival, she hovered there weeping in deep grief over the death of the good and holy man who’d healed her from what everyone understood at the time to be demon possession. This Mary’s sorrow was all the more magnified when she arrived at this garden to find the tomb … empty. Of all the gross injustices in this world, how horribly harsh was her conclusion about what had happened. Thieves. Thieves had boldly removed a boulder and robbed Jesus’ body from a respectful resting place. Standing with her, we can imagine that just had to have felt like the absolute and emotionally excruciating death of any and all hope.

That was what happened at first, there in that grief-covered graveyard garden. We are still standing with her, though, when she received a totally unexpected surprise. She had suddenly noticed a man also hanging about in that garden. She supposed him to be, naturally enough, a gardener. She supposed, logically enough, he might well have had a hand in committing the disgusting crime. After all, if a very close friend of Jesus had been bought out to assist in his downfall, why not a common laborer?

Knowing he’d be pressed for details, the man spoke first, saying, “Woman, why are you weeping? Whom are you looking for?” Then, following her explanation of what she thought was happening, the man did something shocking. He revealed that he knew her name. It wasn’t until this intimate, personal address that all the blanketing blindness of grief lifted from Mary Magdalene. Only then did she see what she had not initially noticed – this man, this supposed gardener, was her Lord Jesus! No Grand Theft Body had taken place! Jesus had instead miraculously come alive again, gracefully up and walked right on out of the tomb, and by doing so conquered all the power of deadly sin in his path!

Mary Magdalene had supposed wrong. The man was not a gardener. Were we actually standing with her, though, we would have supposed the same.

And yet, knowing now what we do about the epic narrative of the Greatest Story Ever Told, doesn’t it make sense to identify our Risen Lord as a gardener after all?

He was, He is! When Jesus busted out and planted his fresh feet in graveyard garden soil, He left behind forever the spiritually corrupted legacy of the original Adam. He, the New Adam, arose from the quicksand of sin to replant the good seed of connection with our Creator. He, the Good Shepherd who knows us all by name, who personally forgives us our sin, is also the Good Gardener who leads us to the path of fully restored life with God!

So here we are on Easter Sunday 2011! We are in the sacred garden of God’s redeeming, resurrecting grace in Jesus Christ. What are we to do from here?

We are to follow the example of Mary Magdalene. Jesus told her not to hold onto Him. After all, the Risen Lord had been loosed into the world and was not to be held back. He had to get about the process of re-seeding the great garden of life, a re-seeding that really flourished when the Day of Pentecost and then his Ascension took place. So Mary Magdalene went on to do as she had been directly, divinely instructed. Having done so, she will forever be remembered and celebrated as the world’s first witness to the Risen Lord, the world’s first preacher about this Good News, and as the world’s first disciple in the glorious age of His Resurrected Body.

We stand with her and we too are being sent out. We must actively devote our lives to Jesus, our Risen Lord. Every moment that we do, we reconnect with our good roots. We experience an innate uplift in mind and spirit. We experience healthy spiritual restoration to God’s original intention for us, and thus turn away from the polluting pride within us. And, by God’s grace, we grow. We grow individually as His disciples, and we grow the church in working on behalf of our Good Gardner to restore every garden gone to rack and ruin on the face of this planet.

Jesus is risen! Alleluia! Now let’s get pick up the spiritual spades given to us by our Savior and go out to do His gardening! Amen.