Christ is risen. Alleluia! He is risen indeed. Alleluia!
How wonderful it is to bear witness to the ongoing redeeming love of God in human history. A redeeming love that culminated on the first Easter morning, that culminates at this Easter Vigil as we celebrate the resurrection of Christ, a resurrection that promises that we too have a share in his eternal kingdom, that we too are part of the life everlasting.
And as always, our Gospel helps us enter the life of Christ; and, also helps Christ to enter our lives.
Though she is actively looking for him, when Mary Magdalen encounters Jesus at the empty tomb, she does not recognize him. She mistakes him for the Gardener, because as we are told previously in John, in the Gospel we heard on Good Friday, that the place where Jesus was laid had a garden in it.
And we too, our church here, is surrounded by a garden, a genuine community garden, a garden that has been and is tended by many different people, a garden for all people, just as Christ is for all people.
The symbol of a Garden is highly charged in the bible. It was to tend a Garden, that humanity was created by God in Genesis 2. It was in a garden that humanity first sinned, and it was in a Garden that Jesus was betrayed. And now he has been resurrected in a garden.
Garden’s are places of life and the complexities of life. Plants, flowers and fungi are seeded, fruit, blossom, wither and die, and in their decay, they become food and nutrients for the next generation of life. Every plant in some ways interacts with the rest of the garden. Some plants do better in the presence of other plants, some thrive in the shade of taller plants, some benefit from the insects that live on neighbouring plants.
This web of interdependence also exists throughout all of Creation, including our human world, between you, me and every other person. This was clearly understood by the great civil rights leader, Dr Martin Luther King Jr, who was assassinated just over 57 years ago.
While in prison for non-violent protests against racial segregation, Dr King wrote:
We are tied together in the single garment of destiny, caught in an inescapable network of mutuality. And whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. For some strange reason I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. And you can ever be what you ought to be, until I am what I ought to be. This is the way God’s universe is made; this is the way it is structured.”
“I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. And you can ever be what you ought to be, until I am what I ought to be.” What powerful, what amazing words.
We are all created by God, in the image of God, so that we may serve her and enter with her into eternal life, united with all her saints and angels. This is our birthright, this is our destiny, this is who we ought to be. This is who we all ought to be, including those people we cannot ever imagine being in heaven with us – whatever heaven means to us.
But if Dr King is right, we may never become who we ought to be, until we all fulfil the purpose of our lives.
And this is what the earliest icon of the resurrection depicts: Christ is shown returning from hell, having ensnared death forever, and with him, one in each hand he is pulling, he is dragging upwards Adam and Eve – the spiritual ancestors of every human and symbolic of every human. The resurrection to eternal life is a corporate resurrection, everyone is included, because everyone needs to become who they ought to be, before a single human being is who they ought to be.
But Dr King was also Reverend King – and central to his life and this powerful statement is the understanding that this is “God’s universe”. God has structured it this way, because as well as interdependence between all creation, all of creation is radically dependent on God. At every second, at every moment, God brings all of creation including our own beings, into existence. Everything is dependant on her.
This means the Garden of the redeemed creation, is not a garden by itself, it has a Gardener – Jesus. And we live, and will eternally live, in his garden not as individuals but as an interdependent and a dependant family. Again, as we heard on Good Friday, this is the new family of disciples, instituted by Jesus while he hung on the cross, declaring to Mary, his mother that his beloved disciple was her son, and to the disciple, that she was his mother. This is the family we continue here today.
As any gardener knows, for a rose to become what a rose ought to be – beautiful, fragrant and lush, requires intervention from the gardener. The interdependence of the garden may keep the rose alive, but it will never bloom as deeply as it does under the love of a skilled gardener. The rose will be pruned, fed with foul compost, maybe transplanted; whatever is needed for it to become what it ought to be.
And so it is with our lives. God, like a gardener, is actively involved and loves the world. She may feed us with food that does not seem like food to us. She may move us away from our familiar lives. And when they are no longer needed, when they are actually dead and holding us back, she may remove, may prune aspects of our lives and ourselves.
All this comes about through the resurrection, when the barrier between the spiritual and the material, the heavenly and the human, the barrier of death, was forever destroyed.
And so, what we do now, with our physical, earthly lives, today, now on this cool Djeran-Autumn morning, affects our souls.
Soon, we will physically say the words that reaffirms our baptism, a baptism into Christ’s resurrection, and our souls will stir. In that stirring, we pray then, that we are open to the fruit of the resurrection of Christ in our hearts, as he leads us, like a loving and tender gardener, towards who we ought to be. Amen.