In the Garden of the Resurrection
Easter Sunday, Year C
Today I’m cutting collards and kale. They’ve been growing in my garden boxes and the scattered corners of my yard. Their yellow flowers have been feeding honeybees, their leaves have been a constant in my smoothies and soups and sautés. But the season for these greens has come to a close, it is time to harvest all I can, freezing some, giving the rest to a fresh food program at my church.
Gardens represent a certain domesticity, an attachment to place. While animals move, walk, run, fly, and swim, plants stay put, anchored to particular places. To garden is to accept stability, to slow our ranging animal life and follow the example of our botanical kin, putting down roots and making a home.
The marking of home has been a complex reality in human life, but it seems clear that whether they were agriculturalists or nomadic hunters and gathers, humans have tended toward familiar territories, settling into a home range. The major movements away from those home territories have tended to come from the unsettling realities of war, famine, or other disasters. When such displacement comes, one of the most terrible results is the disconnection from the graves of our ancestors.
Body snatching is a crime of desecration. For a body to be moved from its grave is a terrifying thing, the ultimate displacement. Of all the horrors of our colonial past, the exhuming of bodies for the purposes of “science” was among the worst. Whether poor black people (as so brilliantly portrayed in Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad) or native peoples (who still suffer from such grave robberies to this day), the taking of a body from its resting place is a fundamental disconnection between our place and our connection to its past.
Mary lived in a culture that understood this horror. It is because of this profound displacement that she is so upset at the missing body of her teacher, her rabbouni. The stealing of a body is so terrible because it is only through the body that we find connection with others and the world around us. We have non-physical aspects of ourselves, but our presence to the world and one another is fully mediated through our bodies. Without the body we have no possibility of connection to other persons. To have a loved one die without any remains is one of the most tragic forms of death anyone could experience.
Thankfully, as she weeps in the horrifying distress of the missing body, Mary is brought again into the physical presence of her teacher. Who she sees, however, is a gardener. Her vision, though partial, is not mistaken. As the biblical scholar William Brown writes in his wonderful book Sacred Sense, this is “more likely a case of double entendre. John, though the eyes of Mary, transports us back to the primordial past, to the first garden, planted and cultivated by God.” Jesus, she soon discovers, has not been displaced. In his bodily, resurrected reality, Jesus is the one who returns us to the home we have all lost.
Eden was the first home of the human, the ground from which we were drawn and given breath. In the telling of the story in Genesis 2, it is said that God put the human-being, the adam, in the garden. Biblical scholar Kristin Swenson argues that the word for put or placed in Genesis 2 carries with it a Sabbath sense, a gentle placement of the human in the garden. As human, bodily beings, we were made for place and all the connections it fosters. The problem at the heart of the biblical story could be read as both a narrative of disconnection and displacement. We are disconnected from God and one another, and we are displaced from the home we long ago lost.
In the wonder of the resurrection, we find the renewed possibility of both connection and place. Jesus has healed the human person, returning us to the love and presence we were always meant to have. This is not a spiritual reality alone, but a bodily one. As William Brown writes, “Without the body, there would be no resurrection, no new creation. New creation bursting forth from the shell of a seed, out of the ground of dust and decay.” In the resurrection we find that the body hasn’t been snatched away, the grave has not been robbed, but Christ has come back in bodily fullness to recover the home we’ve all been missing.
This recovery is a gardening and construction project. It is like returning to an ancestral home to find the building dilapidated, the gardens untended. We need to pick up shovels and hoes and begin the work of tending to the overgrown place that was once our paradise. We can do this work because we know that already the work of resurrection has begun in the body of Jesus. I’d like to think that part of the reason Mary thought Jesus was the gardener was because Jesus was already doing the work of tending the soil. Perhaps she saw him, bent over a bed of flowers, helping them in their blooming.
Jesus has left us now, but guided by the Spirit we are to continue the work of home repair. This is work we do, knowing that one day, God will come to be with us again in fullness. This coming will not be for a temporary visitation. Instead, as the book of Revelation offers it, God is coming to found a garden city and a permanent home-place. Our own homemaking, our own gardening, if it is done with love and hospitality, provides and opening for that final home. Now, I need to get to harvesting those greens.
