God the Gardener

We’re on the cusp of Holy Week.

Yesterday, I was preparing the worship liturgy for a service I’ll lead in June. Not because I always work that far ahead or have that little to do but because the musicians work that far ahead. Thanks be to God for musicians. This meant my colleagues and I were writing summer liturgy on the precipice of the busiest week of the Christian calendar year. But it caused me no liturgical whiplash because the text I’m preparing to preach in June is this year’s Easter Sunday text.

We were asked to select scriptures that shaped us. I immediately thought of Jesus teaching his disciples that he is the vine, and they are the branches. “Abide in me,” he says (John 15). The image of our Triune God as gardener and plant, source and life. Imagining how I’d share the gravity this teaching has on my own faith, I remembered Mary who mistook Jesus for the gardener.

It’s Mary for me.

I feel a kinship with her in that garden. She’s desperate to find his body. Grief-stricken. At a loss. Clinging to what she knew and searching for what remains. Weeping. Angry with a seeming bystander who she anticipates has intel he’s withholding.

Who hasn’t felt a moment akin to this in their own life? The closet full of a loved one’s clothes after they pass – the scent you nearly move in to sit inside. The frustration that simmers within us and boils over when the doctor doesn’t seem to have another solution. The desperation we know when the last trace of a loved one, a hope, a relationship appears to vanish.

To be in that place… And then to hear her name?

To hear her name not from a grave tender with an agenda, a stranger with something to sell, but to hear her name in a voice and a tenor she can recognize. One who had called her by name many a time before.

To come to the grave and hear from God’s lips that it isn’t over.

It’s Mary for me. Her story on that sacred day makes me weep.

Some of us have come to the tombs of our lives and, in a moment of theophany, heard our names. A now passed mentor of mine who, while battling cancer, experienced a light and voice he could only explain as God; once medicine had done its part to give him more time, he returned to life with a new vigor, purpose, and work to do. A friend trying to hold her family together and lacking the financial means to even buy a tank of gas received an unsolicited gift card from a stranger in a parking lot with a note that said, “Merry Christmas.” The mother whose young daughter comes in excitedly dressed for Sunday worship but the mother is too hungover; Okay God, I hear you, it stops today, she thinks.  

Those experiences of plunging the depths and expecting to come up empty but coming face to face with God, they change us. They teach us that God bends down to bring us up. There is nowhere forsaken, no one too far gone, no grave God won’t garden.

Some of us have become dutiful in seeking to abide in Christ – “tell me where you have put him and I will get him” – but the drudgery of grief mixed with the dynamism of God has made it difficult to recognize Jesus when he’s standing right in front of us.  

Jesus’ appearance is changed by crucifixion and resurrection. Mary is not an overly-emotional fool. She knew what he looked like. But he had changed.

She was still dutiful in reporting to the grave to tend to the deceased.

What she didn’t expect was a surprise.  

Too many of us know firsthand what it feels like to show up day after day expecting lifelessness.

Another Sunday worship service, the bread torn and cup poured. Could this change us? 

We nearly tune out the news on the radio as we drive home because it’s so predictable in its disdain for human flourishing. The rote cruelty of the “real world.” Mothers and fathers wondering how to feed their children and keep them safe, fearful relinquishment lies ahead.

Giving up too often appears to us as just good math, good business. We don’t expect a surprise.

We weep because there is much to weep about.

We want to hear our name shouted in the graves of this world from the tongue of a living God.

We want that to be the real world.

And it is.

I’ve bet my life on the promise that Easter is realer than anything I will ever know in this life. The Gardener is in our midst, somehow, someway. Whatever grave we frequent, he is there. He’s pressing his transformed body into the dirt of our dismay. His scarred hands are still shaping the soil of our souls.

So as I head into this new day, on the precipice of Holy Week, I’m going to look for the Gardener. I’m not sure where I’ll find him but I’m desperate enough to be surprised.

//

“Christ as Gardener,” Andrew Hudgins

The boxwoods planted in the park spelled LIVE.

I never noticed it until they died.

Before, the entwined green had smudged the word

unreadable. And when they take their own advice

again—come spring, come Easter—no one will know

a word is buried in the leaves. I love the way

that Mary thought her resurrected Lord

a gardener. It wasn’t just the broad-brimmed hat

and muddy robe that fooled her: He was that changed.

He looks across the unturned field, the riot

of unscythed grass, the smattering of wildflowers.

Before he can stop himself, he’s on his knees.

He roots up stubborn weeds, pinches the suckers,

deciding order here—what lives, what dies,

and how. But it goes deeper even than that.

His hands burn and his bare feet smolder. He longs

to lie down inside the long, dew-moist furrows

and press his pierced side and his broken forehead

into the dirt. But he’s already done it—

passed through one death and out the other side.

He laughs. He kicks his bright spade in the earth

and turns it over. Spring flashes by, then harvest.

Beneath his feet, seeds dance into the air.

They rise, and he, not noticing, ascends

on midair steppingstones of dandelion,

of milkweed, thistle, cattail, and goldenrod.