Garden
John 20:1-18
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In his essay, “Jesus Shaves,” humorist David Sedaris describes a particularly challenging day in French class. Sedaris was living as an American expatriate abroad in Paris and wanted to learn the language so he’d signed up for this class. On that particular day the teacher was leading the class in an exercise to promote the use of the personal pronoun, one. To do so they were working through a list of major holidays in their textbook. “Might one sing on Bastille Day,” the teacher asked, and so on. The conversation that day, Sedaris explains, “was being dominated by an Italian nanny, two chatty Poles, and a pouty, plump Moroccan woman.” When they finished discussing Bastille Day, the teacher moved on to Easter. “And what does one do on Easter?” For us, the answer would clearly be, “one goes to church.” Well done. In the class Sedaris describes, “the Italian nanny was attempting to answer the teacher’s latest question when the Moroccan student interrupted, shouting, “Excuse me, but what’s an Easter? I have no idea what you people are talking about.” It’s easy when you’re surrounded by a particular religious tradition, like we are here, to forget there are places where Christianity and the observance of this day are far less common. The teacher called the rest of the class to explain, and that’s where the challenge came in as they did so in their broken French. “The Poles led the charge… ‘It is,’ said one, ‘a party for the little boy of God who call his self Jesus, and…’ she faltered and her fellow countryman came to her aid. “He call his self Jesus and then he die one day on two…morsels of… lumber.’ The rest of the class jumped in, offering bits of information that would have given the pope an aneurysm,” he writes. “’He die one day and then he go above my head to live with your father.’ ‘He weared of himself the long hair and after he die, the first day he come back here for to say hello to the peoples.’ ‘He nice, the Jesus…’ Part of the problem had to do with vocabulary,” Sedaris explains, “Simple nouns such as cross and resurrection were beyond our grasp, let alone such complicated reflexive phrases as, ‘to give of yourself your only begotten son.’”
Of course the same might be said for any of us trying to explain this day in our native tongue. We know the vocabulary, but maybe the way it’s been shared with us, the way the story’s been told, is somehow beyond our belief. Maybe somebody’s tried to prove the claim of this day to you, and suggested that your willingness or unwillingness to buy that proof and all that it suggests has implications for your own death and what comes next. Maybe you hear a story like the one we just read from John’s version of the Jesus story and it just sounds too far fetched, too beyond the realm of the rational, or the reasonable. Angels?! Really? In 2019 we’re supposed to believe that instead of a corpse, Mary saw angels inside that tomb? That day in the classroom, Sedaris observes, “Faced with the challenge of explaining the cornerstone of Christianity, we did what any self-respecting group of people might do. We talked about food instead.” Which is, of course, what we do. We talk about the Easter Bunny, and chocolate, and brunch, and new clothes. All of which is fun and festive, don’t get me wrong. But, I suspect it is also our way of avoiding the thing that we ourselves don’t quite have a language to articulate, the very thing that draws us to places like this some two thousand years after the fact- and that is the power of resurrection.
It might help then to point out that the Gospel writers aren’t all in agreement about the details of that day either. I won’t rehash the discrepancies to you now (you may have brunch reservations to make) but suffice it to say that each Evangelist has their own take on who found what, and how. But there is a curious detail in John’s account that tips his hand and signals what he means to tell us about this day. After all the coming and going, Mary running to tell Peter about grave robbers, Peter running to see for himself, racing the other disciple to the tomb, the two returning home, Mary seeing angels, after all that Jesus himself is standing right in front of Mary and she doesn’t recognize him. She thinks he must be the gardener. Why the gardener? Where are they anyway? Well, John tells us that there was a garden in the place where was crucified, and in that garden was a brand-new tomb that had never been used. So, the whole thing is set in a garden. Only that is a detail particular to John. None of the other three mention a garden, they only talk about the tomb. So why is that important? Why would John want to include that detail?
Like someone trying to communicate something that is beyond their language skills, John is the gospel writer who traffics in signs and symbols meant to point to the bigger picture surrounding Jesus. His is a gospel that is far more literary than it is literal. So, when we hear a story that starts in the dark, on the first day of the week, and is located in a garden, John may be mixing his metaphors a bit but it is meant to evoke another story, an older story. And that is the biblical poem of creation, that begins with darkness covering the face of the deep on the first day as God brings creation into being with a big bang- Let there be light! And in the second iteration of that creation story, humanity finds its place, its home, in a garden. Because the power of resurrection isn’t about proofs, or rational explanations. It’s about the poetry of a new creation. It’s about the disorienting promise that the world as its been is not the world as it has to be, or will be. That first creation story, the one that we find in Genesis is believed to have first been set to paper, or papyrus, or whatever media was the standard for the day; that first creation story is believed to be recorded while God’s people were in exile in Babylon. Jerusalem had been sacked, their temple destroyed, and the people forcibly removed to a land not their own by a hostile foreign power. They set down the story that reminded them, that assured them that the power of the Creator is the power to bring order out of watery chaos. The power of the Creator is made good in a garden.
So, when John sets his version of what took place following Jesus’ death on a Roman cross, at the hands of a hostile foreign power, when John sets this story in a garden he is signaling to those who first heard this story what resurrection means. It means an end to exile. It means a return to the garden. It means a new creation not just for Jesus but the whole thing. If the first garden is where things began to fall apart, then this garden is where things start to get put back together by nothing less than the power of resurrection. Mary thought he was the gardener. Of course she did, because new creation isn’t something that we are ever going to come up with on our own. New creation isn’t something that we are capable of doing on our own. It is only through the power of the Holy Spirit that raises Jesus from the dead that any one of us, or our world will be saved from our unique and varied forms of self-destruction.
The story that Mary tells, the story that she can’t let go of when she sees the tomb empty, even after being questioned by angels, is the same old story that we are stuck with- someone else has done something, taken something from me and I don’t know where to find it. Someone has what I don’t have. Someone did what they shouldn’t have done. Something is missing from my life- meaning, connection, purpose. It’s the same old story, over and over. We feel exiled from something, cast out, strangers in a strange land where the only thing that makes sense is that nothing really makes sense. But when resurrection speaks your name, a new story begins to unfold, a new creation breaks forth and you see what was right in front of you the whole time in a new way.
You see friends, this story was never about some transaction to stamp your pass to another world, later, when we’re cold and in the ground. Resurrection is about the new creation that is here and now in the land of the living. Resurrection is about reclaiming our home in the goodness that God made for us in this place and letting go of that old, old story of exile, that old, old story of missing out. In this garden, like Mary, we are called by name and told that we cannot hold on to what was, we cannot hold on to what used to be if we are to be embraced by the power of resurrection and become a part of this new creation of God’s making. That old life is gone, a new life, a new creation has truly begun. This is the good news.
Alleluia, Christ is risen!
Christ is risen indeed! Alleluia!