10 min
Easter Sunday. The 8th Day. Seasons. An Advent and Lent Podcast By Willow Park Church
-
- Christianity
The Great Gardener.
John 20:11-18
And so on Easter Sunday, our Holy Week Journey with Jesus has come to an end. Today, we begin with the first day of the new creation! The day
that Jesus rose from the grave!
Our journey ended yesterday with Jesus laid to rest in a new
tomb within the walled garden of Joseph of Arimathea near Golgotha.
History and archeology suggest to us that in the time of
Jesus, Golgotha was an abandoned quarry used as a garbage dump.
So we could say it this way: Jesus, the stone rejected by
the builders, was crucified in a quarry-turned-garbage dump, but he was buried as a seed within a verdant garden.
When Jesus is first seen alive in that garden on Easter morning, Mary Magdalene mistakes him for the gardener. But, in fact, it’s no
mistake at all. Jesus is the gardener who turns garbage dumps into gardens!
Jesus is not a conductor punching tickets for a train ride
to heaven. Christian hope is not about getting from earth to heaven; it’s about
getting heaven to earth.
Jesus is not a lawyer to get us out of a legal jam with an
angry judge. God is not mad at sinners. Jesus told Mary to tell his disciples that his Father was their Father too!
Jesus is not a banker making loans from his surplus righteousness.
Jesus is a gardener! A gardener cultivating resurrection life in all who will come to him. The
conductor, lawyer, banker metaphors are mostly false, giving a distorted view
of salvation. The gardener metaphor is beautiful as it faithfully depicts the
process of salvation in our lives.
A gardener’s work is earthy and intimate. Gardeners have
their hands in the humus. (We are humans from the humus.) Conductors, lawyers
and bankers are concerned with abstract and impersonal things like tickets,
laws, and money. But gardeners handle living things with living hands. Jesus is
not afraid to get his hands dirty in the humus of humanity.
I promise you that your life is not so shattered that Jesus
can’t nurture you into something beautiful. The empty tomb is the open door
that leads us away from the ugly world and back into the Garden as God intened.
Not many have captured the idea of
Easter as the inauguration of a new world with Christ as the gardener better
than G.K. Chesterton
“On the third day the
friends of Christ coming at day-break to the place found the grave empty and
the stone rolled away. In varying ways they realized the new wonder; the world
had died in the night. What they were looking at was the first day of a new creation,
with a new heaven and a new earth; and in a semblance of a gardener God walked
again in the garden, not in the cool of the evening, but in the dawn.”
–G.K. Chesterton
Music by, Allswell, Simon Wester.
The Great Gardener.
John 20:11-18
And so on Easter Sunday, our Holy Week Journey with Jesus has come to an end. Today, we begin with the first day of the new creation! The day
that Jesus rose from the grave!
Our journey ended yesterday with Jesus laid to rest in a new
tomb within the walled garden of Joseph of Arimathea near Golgotha.
History and archeology suggest to us that in the time of
Jesus, Golgotha was an abandoned quarry used as a garbage dump.
So we could say it this way: Jesus, the stone rejected by
the builders, was crucified in a quarry-turned-garbage dump, but he was buried as a seed within a verdant garden.
When Jesus is first seen alive in that garden on Easter morning, Mary Magdalene mistakes him for the gardener. But, in fact, it’s no
mistake at all. Jesus is the gardener who turns garbage dumps into gardens!
Jesus is not a conductor punching tickets for a train ride
to heaven. Christian hope is not about getting from earth to heaven; it’s about
getting heaven to earth.
Jesus is not a lawyer to get us out of a legal jam with an
angry judge. God is not mad at sinners. Jesus told Mary to tell his disciples that his Father was their Father too!
Jesus is not a banker making loans from his surplus righteousness.
Jesus is a gardener! A gardener cultivating resurrection life in all who will come to him. The
conductor, lawyer, banker metaphors are mostly false, giving a distorted view
of salvation. The gardener metaphor is beautiful as it faithfully depicts the
process of salvation in our lives.
A gardener’s work is earthy and intimate. Gardeners have
their hands in the humus. (We are humans from the humus.) Conductors, lawyers
and bankers are concerned with abstract and impersonal things like tickets,
laws, and money. But gardeners handle living things with living hands. Jesus is
not afraid to get his hands dirty in the humus of humanity.
I promise you that your life is not so shattered that Jesus
can’t nurture you into something beautiful. The empty tomb is the open door
that leads us away from the ugly world and back into the Garden as God intened.
Not many have captured the idea of
Easter as the inauguration of a new world with Christ as the gardener better
than G.K. Chesterton
“On the third day the
friends of Christ coming at day-break to the place found the grave empty and
the stone rolled away. In varying ways they realized the new wonder; the world
had died in the night. What they were looking at was the first day of a new creation,
with a new heaven and a new earth; and in a semblance of a gardener God walked
again in the garden, not in the cool of the evening, but in the dawn.”
–G.K. Chesterton
Music by, Allswell, Simon Wester.
10 min