You know, Easter is one of the few religious holidays that has crossed over into the secular calendar, even for folks that are not religious. Maybe that’s thanks to the candy companies, who’ve got tons of chocolate bunnies to sell and Cadbury Crème Eggs and let us, my friends never forget the visceral response those marshmallow-and-sugar-armored neon things called Peeps evoke in just about everyone. Seriously, love them or find them revolting. No middle ground there. Easter in many people’s minds is all about the pastel colors, tulips and lilies, the Easter Bunny, and maybe a new outfit or a new hat, and about gathering family around Easter dinner.
Speaking of food, around which ALL great American holidays orbit, if you try to go out to eat today, good luck, by the way—Easter brunch smorgasbords are a huge money-maker for restaurants. As long as you already have reservations, that is. I’m too wiped out for that kind of death match at the prime rib station, myself. I would probably fall asleep in my twice-whipped potatoes.
We’ve been seeing plastic Easter eggs and Easter candy in the candy aisle in the drug store for 7 weeks now—it came out just as soon as the Valentine’s candy was reduced to half off on February 15. And tomorrow, it will all be gone. The candy makers will have to wait until Labor Day to put up their Halloween displays. People will resume their lives as if Easter is over.
But it is not. For Christians in liturgical traditions such as ours know that Easter is a season—lasting during the Great 50 Days until Pentecost. But there’s a secret: when you examine what we really believe in the Episcopal Church, Easter is not just a season. It is an ongoing, ever-present reality.
Following in the teaching of the great scholar St. Augustine, we are an Easter people in the Episcopal Church. One Easter Sunday long ago, he preached “We are an Easter people, and Alleluia is our hymn of praise!”
Being an Easter People means, first of all, being a people of resurrection. We are a people who know that eternal life begins right here, right now, in living a life of faith and discipleship. We do not simply await the resurrection of the dead that some people fixate on. We are called to resurrection because resurrection is about LIFE, not what happens to us when we die. Contrary to what some goateed, head-bobbing TV preachers say, Jesus did not simply die for us to take away our sins. Jesus rose victorious from the grave to remind us that we are a new creation in Christ. Being an Easter people means LIVING out our faith in Jesus as our Savior by imitating him. That’s why we are ever hearing scripture through new ears and seeing it through new lenses. Jesus’s redeeming work in the world is not confined to the stories and verses in the Bible. Jesus is alive and asks to reign in our hearts and lives right now. God is still speaking to us right now. The Holy Spirit is still moving right now.
And we need that presence more than ever, regardless of what newspapers say about the death of the Church. Because we are an Easter people—living in a Good Friday world, as the writer Anne Lamott famously noted, quoting Barbara Johnson(1). She wrote those words at a time of the Iraq War, and she was despairing over all the crises that loomed over us just like crises that loom over us now. And so she sought comfort in simple things.
She wrote: “I am going to try to pay attention to the spring, and look up at the hectic trees. Amid the smashing and crashing and terrible silences, the trees are in blossom, and it’s soft and warm and bright. I am going to close my eyes and listen. During the children’s sermon last Sunday, the pastor asked the kids to close their eyes for a moment—to give themselves a time-out—and then asked them what they had heard. They heard birds, and radios, dogs barking, cars, and one boy said, “I hear the water at the edge of things.” I am going to listen for the water at the edge of things today”(2).
Those words resonated with me, tree-hugger that I am. And they resonate with the Easter message we Easter people just heard a few moments ago.
Anglican biblical scholar, and bishop N. T. Wright is clear: Easter Day is not the happy ending to the long dreary Lenten slog of Jesus’s rejection, trial, lingering execution and death. No, he says, “Easter is the start of something. It isn’t the ending. It is the beginning of the new creation which has been made possible by the overcoming of the forces of corruption and decay in the death of Jesus…. In the New Testament we find a very different picture. We do not find a ‘life after death’ in heaven, but a ‘life after “life after death”’, a newly embodied life in a newly reconstituted creation. And we see Jesus’ resurrection, not as the ‘happy ending’ after the crucifixion – though to be sure it functions like that at a fairly trivial level – but as the launching of nothing less than new creation itself (3)."
Perhaps that is why I want to direct your attention back to a detail in our gospel passage we just heard. Mary Magdalene approaches the tomb early that morning. She is still in that Good Friday world—the main reason you approach a tomb is to remember the person who is gone. But when she gets there, she finds the tomb empty. Hoe much more must that have devastated her—she has lost her beloved friend and teacher, and now she doesn’t even have the closure of knowing where his body is. She runs to tell the male apostles, and then she returns, weeping. It is there that she is confronted by two angels, who ask her why she is crying. As she is answering, she turns around and sees Jesus. But she doesn’t recognize him. Instead, she thinks he is the gardener.
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| Lavinia Kunstdruck, Noli Me Tangere, 1581 |
Mary Magdalene’s confusion has been a rich source for artists and poets throughout the ages. Seriously-- type “Jesus as gardener” into google images, and you will probably be stunned at all the ways this scene is represented. Some just show Jesus and Mary Magdalene in a lush landscape. Other artists go all in, and depict Jesus holding a spade or a hoe, and some, like Rembrandt, even show him wearing a floppy hat.
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| Michael Cook, Noli Me Tangere, from A Derbyshire Passion Stations of the Cross, Derby Cathedral, 2016 |
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| Janpeter Muilwijk, New Gardener, 2017 |
Some have tried to find a practical explanation for Mary’s confusion. After all, Jesus has shed his burial clothes and his other clothes were stripped from him and divvied up when people gambled for them, so maybe he borrowed the gardeners spare pare of gardening clothes so he wouldn’t be strolling around in his altogether. Modern versions even sometimes show him in overalls.
The painting on our bulletin cover is one of the most recent versions I could find, painted in the midst of the pandemic in 2021 by Joel Briggs. In his version, we don’t see Mary Magdalene, but we see Jesus with a shiny shovel over his right shoulder, standing in a denuded swamp, trees stripped bare and snapped off as if an F5 tornado had just barreled through. And yet, look over Jesus’s shoulder and there in the cerulean sky is a rainbow. A dove perches on the shovel handle, with an olive branch in its mouth. And Jesus holds a seedling in his left hand, where a king holds the orb that is a sign of his power over the entire earth. The wounds of his crucifixion are visible on his wrist and his side. Off in the distance at his elbow there is rain from the thunderheads on the horizon.
As observers standing in front of Jesus in the midst of a wrecked landscape, both physical and spiritual, wrecked by our own actions and inactions, we hear echoes not just of the destruction of Good Friday but also of the story of the loss of the Garden of Eden, of Noah’s ark coming to rest on the sodden earth after the flood waters have receded. We would be fools if we do not also see a warning about rising sea levels and our changing climate, of polar ice thinning and disappearing and weather becoming ever more extreme with each passing month that we do nothing.
Yet, this gardener Jesus looks forward confidently, ready to start anew—and expecting US to help him. This is not the false version of God, the Santa-Claus-God, The Wish-Fulfilling-Genie -God that waves a magic wand and fixes things for us that we don’t want to do ourselves. This is the God who rolls up their sleeves and reminds us that we were created in God’s image to share in God’s work of healing and compassion, most of all.
Perhaps, Mary Magdalene sees Jesus as a gardener because that is exactly what he is. The Risen Jesus is, and always has been, the messenger and inaugurator of a new creation, a return to the garden. And the first garden he asks to tend and care for is right inside of us—right here in our own hearts. The love of God that Jesus teaches us is the fertile soil in our hearts that Christ can bring to bloom—if we welcome him in. And then we can begin the work of reconciliation and healing of this world. Rather than Jesus’s death and resurrection leading us as his followers to a rejection of this world in favor of simply waiting it out until we go to heaven, the risen Christ reminds us that eternal life is NOW, not later.
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| Wlodzimierz Kohut, Jesus the Good Gardener, 2015 |
The poet Andrew Hudgins imagines this scene in his poem “Christ as a Gardener:”
The boxwoods planted in the park spell 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.(4)
A garden is a place of care, of craft, of ongoing cycles of life and greening and renewal. It is a place where resurrection is practiced daily, a collaboration between human and earth that reminds us of the blessing of life and abundance that is the heart of God’s dream for us. Resurrection is not an event, it is a way of true life. In the garden, we remember the words of Henry David Thoreau, heaven is beneath our feet. Heaven is not “God’s space” and the Earth “our space.”(5) Jesus told us repeatedly that the kingdom of God—heaven—is right here, right now, among those who are an Easter people, a people who believe in the power of resurrection against the powers that tell us we are helpless to keep us from rising up and demanding true justice, grace, and mercy to reign instead.
The Romans treated Jesus and all those whom it executed and oppressed as disposable, and such is the way of all tyrants even in our own time. The world we inhabit right now has a tendency to do the same to both people and this planet and everything on it. The heart of Jesus’s message is exactly the opposite-- that no one and no thing are disposable. God has renewed creation in Christ—and ever calls us to be partners in God’s holy work of restoration, reconciliation, and healing. That is the heart of Jesus’s good news from the time of his birth through his passion and resurrection, through his calling to us today.
Jesus’s resurrection is ours too. We have been placed in a garden—the only place in the entire universe that we are sure can support us and our children and all the other living things that are so gloriously and wondrously made. Jesus calls us to die to short-term thinking and instead embrace the power of resurrection in our relationship with God, with each other, and with this beautiful planet which God ever calls “good.” All these relationships call out for us to commit to a not just a season but a lifetime committed to revival, to living out the power of resurrection. For now. For good.
Our loving gardener, Jesus Christ, has planted us, tended us, and cares for us with tenderness. Let us renew our commitment to be an Easter people, resurrected, blooming and beautifying the places we are planted, and alive with new growth. Alleluia! Christ is risen! Let us rise with him, and get to work restoring the garden.
Amen.
Preached at the 10:30 am Holy Eucharist on the Day of Resurrection, April 9, 2023, at St. Martin's Episcopal Church, Ellisville, MO.
Readings:
Citations:
1) Anne Lamott, Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith, 140. Kindle edition.
2) Lamott, Plan B, 144.
3) N. T. Wright, “Resurrection and the Renewal of Creation,” lecture at Baylor University, Nov. 16, 2018), available here as a pdf or also available on YouTube here.
4) Andrew Hudgins, from The Never-Ending, 1991.
5) Wright, "Resurrection," see above.
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