I wonder how many of you have seen what many regard as
British comic actor Peter Sellers’ greatest movie. Being There was produced less than a year before his death in 1980.
It tells the story of a guileless, simple-minded man named Chance. As the film
opens, Chance’s entire world has been the protected environment of the
townhouse of a wealthy man, where he spent his time doing nothing but watching
television and tending the garden. When his employer dies, Chance is forced to
leave the only environment he has known. He wanders out into the streets of
Washington, D.C., dressed in one of his benefactor’s expensive tailored suits.
I will not go into all the details of the story, except to say that, through a
series of coincidences and confusions, Chance the gardener is transformed into
Chauncey Gardiner. His simplistic and meaningless utterances are taken to be arcane
statements of profound insight. People assume he is speaking in enigmatic
metaphors, when in reality all he is talking about is flowers and gardens. He becomes
the most sought-after guest at every socialite soirée. He is a media celebrity.
And before the film reaches its conclusion he is being touted as the next
likely candidate for the presidency.
I can’t imagine that the story’s author had today’s gospel
reading in mind when he wrote Being There.
Yet I cannot escape the correspondence between the two. In Being There, a gardener is mistaken for a savior. This morning we
have been presented with the Savior being mistaken for a gardener.
All Mary saw was the gardener
You can’t blame Mary, really. Less than forty-eight hours
before, she had been one of those standing by, watching helplessly as Jesus
hung dying on the cross, as he gasped for his last breath, as the javelin was
thrust into his side. She had been there as Jesus’ body was laid in the
sepulcher and as the huge round stone was rolled across the entryway. She had
also been the first to arrive at the tomb where Jesus’ body had been laid to
rest. The other gospels indicate that she did not come alone. There were other
women with her: Mary the mother of James and Joseph, Salome, Joanna, and others
unnamed as well. They had brought with them spices to complete the hasty
anointing that had been given to Jesus at the time of his death. Mark tells us
that they were in a quandary about how they would manage to move the stone away
from the opening. Perhaps the soldiers whom Pilate had placed on a security
guard might be willing to give a helping hand.
As it turned out, however, there was no need. The stone had
already been rolled away. John doesn’t mention it explicitly (although he does
imply it and the other gospels do tell us so) that they went into the tomb and
were confronted by the horrifying reality that the body had been removed. Mary
did not stop to think twice. She raced back to where the disciples were staying
and breathlessly announced to them, “They have taken the Lord out of the tomb,
and we do not know where they have laid him.”
Moments later John and Peter were there, peering inside the
tomb—and they too witnessed what Mary and the other women had seen. The tomb
was empty. All that was left of Jesus were his grave cloths.
Peter and John went back, as quickly as they had come, to
tell the other disciples. Which left Mary alone, standing outside the tomb,
sobbing and trembling in grief and bewilderment. Then something (and John
doesn’t tell us what) something prompted Mary to take one more look inside the
sepulcher. There she saw two angels. Or was it one angel, or a young man, or
two men, in white in dazzling white clothes? At this point the various gospel
accounts don’t entirely coincide. I can imagine that the shock and amazement of
it all would have made it impossible to recall the precise details even hours
after the event, much less decades.
“Woman, why are you weeping?” they ask. “They have taken
away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him.” For some reason (and
again John does not tell us why) Mary turns around to look behind her. Did she
hear a footfall? Did she sense the presence of another? We do not know. What we
do know is that she saw Jesus, but she did not recognize him for who he was.
Perhaps it was her tears. Perhaps there was still a little
of the early morning mist in the air. Or alternatively perhaps the sun was
glaring into her eyes. Frankly, I’m not sure it was any of these things. Again
and again after his resurrection people were unable to recognize Jesus: not
only Mary, but think of Cleopas and his friend on the way to Emmaus or the
disciples in the upper room. I think the real reason was that there was a
little bit of Thomas in each of them, as there is in us. Resurrections just
don’t happen. It never occurred to them that this really could be Jesus.
I think that there is something of a parable in Mary’s
inability to recognize Jesus, in her mistaking him for the gardener. How many
times has Jesus come to me and I have not recognized him? We are accustomed to
talking about Jesus coming to us the marginalized, about recognizing him in the
face of the poor—and there is a truth in that. But I am thinking about
something different. I am thinking about those times when God has done
something powerful and we ascribe it to coincidence or simply ignore it. We are
much more comfortable in a world of mechanical regularity, where things are
predictable, explainable—in a world where God does not intervene in power. But
Jesus’ resurrection tells us that is not the world in which we dwell. “In fact
Christ has been raised from the dead,” the Scriptures tell us, “the first
fruits of those who have fallen asleep.”
God the gardener
The resurrection of Jesus turns our world with all its
naturalistic presuppositions on its head. The man who stood in Mary’s presence
was Jesus. Yet, stop for a moment and think. Was there not a sense in which
Mary was right? Was he not also the gardener? Take a moment to look at the
Renaissance paintings of this scene by Fra Angelico, van Oostsanen, Lavinia
Fontana and Rembrandt. What they all have in common is that they depict Jesus
with a spade in his hand (and in some cases with a gardener’s broad-brimmed
hat!). The one Mary saw was indeed the Gardener (with a capital “G”) returning
to his garden. “She did not mistake in taking him for a gardener,” declared
Lancelot Andrewes, the Bishop of Winchester, in his Easter sermon of 1620.
Though
she might seem to err in some sense, yet in some other she was in the right.
For in a sense, and a good sense, Christ may well be said to be a gardener, and
indeed is one. A gardener he is then. The first, the fairest garden that ever
was, Paradise. He was the gardener, it was of his planting. So, a gardener.[1]
“No wonder at the empty tomb, Christ came to Mary Magdalene
as the gardener,” reflects contemporary theologian Vigen Guroian. “For he is
the Master Gardener, and we, we are his apprentices as well as the subjects of
his heavenly husbandry.”[2]
The Old Testament prophets looked with anticipation to the
day when God would return to his garden:
The Lord will comfort Zion; he will comfort all her waste
places, and will make her wilderness like Eden, her desert like the garden of
the Lord; joy and gladness will be found in her, thanksgiving and the voice of
song. (Isaiah 51:3)
They shall come and sing aloud on
the height of Zion, and they shall be radiant over the goodness of the Lord,
over the grain, the wine, and the oil, and over the young of the flock and the
herd; their life shall become like a watered garden, and they shall never
languish again. (Jeremiah 31:12)
They shall again live beneath my shadow, they shall
flourish as a garden; they shall blossom like the vine, their fragrance shall
be like the wine of Lebanon. (Hosea 14:7)
In the final chapter of the Bible John the Seer is given a
vision of the world that is to come:
Then the angel showed me the
river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God
and of the Lamb through the middle of the street of the city. On either side of
the river is the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, producing its
fruit each month; and the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the
nations. (Revelation 22:1,2)
As Mary turned around from the empty tomb and looked up, the
figure she saw was indeed the Gardener returning to his garden—and his work is
in the soil of our hearts, yours and mine, planting the seed of his word in its
furrows, pruning away the unfruitful branches, producing within us the
luxuriant fruit of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity,
faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.
Christ the second Adam
What Mary was the first to witness was the new creation irrupting into the old. The garden that had become a wilderness was beginning to bloom again. But before we leave this passage this morning I would like to take us one step farther. It has to do with the fact that the one whom God entrusted to till and to tend the original garden was Adam. So when Mary turned from the sepulcher the one she set her eyes upon was the second Adam: humanity fully transformed, you and I as we will one day be, victorious over sin, evil and death.
For the time being we groan, as Paul says, with the whole of
creation. In the Spirit’s power we wrestle with the sin that has become so
deeply implanted within us. We wait eagerly for the day when Christ’s
redemption will be fully revealed.
Yet at Easter especially we recognize that by God’s grace,
by Christ’s redeeming work on the cross, by the power of the Holy Spirit within
us, we are at the same time in some mysterious sense partakers in the new Adam.
Yes, we continue to sin. Yes we stumble and fall, sometimes spectacularly. Yet
we are the gardeners, called and empowered to mediate the beauty of God, to be
agents of his shalom, in a world
corrupted by sin and death.
Our Christian communities ought to be places where loveliness
of Christ is evident in our lives and relationships. Right now in our front
lawn there are snowdrops and crocuses blooming. Passers by walking their dogs
or pushing their strollers stop to admire them. That is how it is to be with
us—that people may see the difference in our daily lives, in the quality of our
relationships, in the undying hope that is within us. That is how it was with our
earliest forebears. Luke tells us that they enjoyed the favor of all the people
(Acts 2:47). Tertullian, writing at the end of the second century, observed how
the pagans would say of their Christian counterparts, “Look how they love one
another … and how they are ready to die for each other…”
As we stand with Mary, may it be with a profound wonder and
joy that the Gardener has returned to his garden. And may it be with a
willingness to let him do his work in us and through us. “For we are to God the
sweet fragrance of Christ…” (2 Corinthians 2:15)
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