And so on Easter Sunday, our forty-six-day journey with Jesus through Lent has come to an end and we begin with the first day of the new creation! The day that Jesus rose from the grave!
Our long 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 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, and 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 hummus.) 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.
That Jesus is a gardener with a good heart and a green thumb should change your perspective.
I promise you that your life is not so blighted that Jesus can’t nurture you into something beautiful. The empty tomb is the open door that leads us away from the ugly world of Gehennas and garbage dumps and back home to the God-intended garden. No one has captured the idea of Easter as the inauguration of a new world with Christ as the gardener better than G.K. Chesterton. I always anticipate Easter by reading this passage from The Everlasting Man. On the third day, the friends of Christ coming at daybreak 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;
Zahnd, Brian. The Unvarnished Jesus: A Lenten Journey (pp. 189-191). Kindle Edition.


Music: KXC Worship. Kingdom Dreamers.

Simon Wester - Hope and Life 

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