Sunday, April 12, 2020




Light Lenten Reflections


Week 7B




Back to the Garden: Reprise


Mary Magdalene has something in common with Joni Mitchell.

I started out these Lenten reflections* looking at Mitchell's iconic song Woodstock. She writes:

We are stardust
We are golden
And we've got to get ourselves
Back to the garden

I said Joni got it right, her song reflecting the longing in each of us to get back to the Garden and the Garden Life we were originally created for, that intimate walk with God. I pointed out Joni also got it wrong. We can never get ourselves back to the Garden - way above our paygrade, way outside our purview.

Easter celebrates the day, the event, that ultimately got us back to the Garden. It is fitting that what started in the great Garden back in the beginning is completed in another, smaller, sparser garden. Though the setting may be less than an Eden, the event rivals, if not surpasses, that other Garden experience.

After Jesus' death on the cross, a disciple of Jesus claimed his body and put it in a new tomb in a nearby garden. Two days later, Mary Magdalene comes to the tomb before sunrise and finds the stone covering the entrance to the tomb has been rolled away. She leaves and returns with two of the disciples. They see an empty tomb, Jesus burial cloths, but no Jesus. Puzzled, they return home, leaving Mary Magdalene weeping in the garden outside the tomb. She then sees two angels who ask her why she is weeping. She is telling them of her missing Lord when another figure also asks her why she is weeping. She mistakes the newcomer for the the gardener, who is, of course, Jesus. He then speaks her name and she joyfully recognizes the risen Lord she only moments before assumed was dead and stolen.**

Mary Magdalene had just had her Joni Mitchell moment. She had gotten it wrong. She thought the newcomer to the sad, mystifying scene was the gardener, the tender of plants, perhaps someone who could solve the mystery of the missing dead man. But Mary Magdalene had also gotten it wonderfully, gloriously right. The person wasn't the gardener, but The Gardener, the Son of the triune God, the same God who walked with Adam and Eve in the Garden, whose death, and now, resurrection restored to Mary, and to all of us, the walk lost when our first parents' disobedience exiled them from the Garden. It is why the tragic day of Jesus' death is Good Friday with a capital G. It's why we rejoice on Easter Sunday and call to one another "He is risen!" "He is risen indeed!", knowing our walk with God has risen, indeed, as well. True, we still have the fallen world to contend with, but The Gardener relationship is back in as much glory as this fallen world allows. He invites us to walk with Him in this present garden and all we have to do is say yes and move our spiritual feet.



Something to ponder: Grab a bible or biblegateway.com and read John 20:1-18. Ponder!

Something to pray: If the weather allows, find some time to take a walk with God. Celebrate the restored relationship this day represents. Ask God to give you a time of worship with Him, unique to your relationship with Him.



** Read the full account in John 20:1-18.


Jesus's resurrection is the beginning of God's new project not to snatch people away from earth to heaven but to colonize earth with the life of heaven... ― N.T. Wright, Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church

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