Resurrection can be confusing, amazing, startling, and life-changing. In this morning’s gospel, it is Mary Magdalene that discovers the stone rolled away and the body of Jesus gone. She runs to inform the Beloved Disciple and Peter who run to the tomb to find it empty with face napkin neatly folded and the burial clothes strewn all over the tomb. As they leave, Mary remains at the tomb weeping.

Mary looks into the tomb to see two angels in white–one sitting where the head of Jesus was laid to rest and the other at the feet. They ask her, “woman, why are you weeping?” Magdalene’s responds, “They taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him.” Mary’s epiphany vision deepens with her longing. The narrative possibly alludes back to the Song of Songs 3:1-4, where a dark skin woman searches for her male lover, asking the city guards if they have seen her lover. Magdalene’s longing to find the human body of her Lord within a garden furthers my ecological reading of the narrative. Magdalene’s yearning for her Lord is shared by green Christians who identify the body of Christ with the Earth.
Jesus’ resurrection from the garden tomb is reminiscent of Jesus’ parable, “unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth, it just remains a single grain, but if dies, it bears much fruit.”(Jn. 12:24) The contrast of the parable is falling into the earth and barrenness with the seed dying and bearing fruit. Death and life are co-mingled in the tomb, but the God of life brings the fruit of resurrected life in Christ.

In one of the beautiful scenes of mistaken identity, Mary Magdalene’s epiphany deepens into a christophany of the risen Christ.
Supposing that the risen Jesus is the gardener, Magdalene pleads, “Sir if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away.” What if in her misperception of the garden christophany of the risen Christ, Mary spoke prophetically that the risen Jesus is indeed the gardener. Jesus just could not be standing in the garden to be mistaken for the gardener. Was he weeding the garden or tending the flowers in some way? Was he appreciating beauty of the spring flowers in bloom? Eco-theologian Edward Echlin writes, “Mary’s initially mistaking Jesus for the gardener is a profound irony with many connotations. Jesus, in fact, is the Gardener, the New Adam, as the open side on the cross intimates, Master of the garden earth, the One in whom, with whom and under whom all human gardeners garden.”

Jesus appears to her in the garden, symbolic of Eden restored to a new fullness and the cosmos coming to life fully within God. She recognizes the gardener as her Teacher only when he calls her by name. She is the disciple that Jesus predicts in John 16:20 who will “weep and mourn” and have pain turned into joy. Her inclination is to touch or to cling onto Christ, but Jesus tells her that she cannot continue to hold him in this way as his resurrection transformation is not completed until his body becomes transformed from one plane of existence into the entire cosmic eco-system.

The resurrection of Jesus is not only the radical transformation of the crucified Christ but the “green” transformation of all things in God. All things become interconnected through the risen Christ as he is the vine connected to the branches (Jn. 16:1-ff) and God is the vine-grower. This strengthens the irony of the mistaken identity of Jesus as the gardener. The risen Christ now assumes the divine position of vine-grower and or gardener.

Resurrection is the final green event, a transfiguration of all things—an incarnational ripening and greening of human life and the cosmos. For John’s community, there was no doubt that what God was doing for the whole cosmos and humanity had been done to Jesus in the dark hours before Easter dawn within the tomb. In other words, gardening is a resurrection activity of God’s Spirit, for what God did to Jesus, God has been doing from the beginning of time—saving and bringing life from death. God calls Jesus back into God’s life to green the world. In other words, God harvests Jesus from the tomb and brings him to life everlasting.

What is Easter really about? Easter is about relationality– that is connected or interconnected with all life. God reveals that everything in the universe is interconnected and will flourish with divine life. God reveals to us that life and death are interrelated. Jesus is the lynchpin between the interrelated process of creation and redemption. Jesus is God’s gift of interrelated love that unites all and brings flourishing to life.

Certainly, Easter is about gardening. God raises Jesus from death in the garden tomb. Coincidentally, Jesus is not only the gardener but also the garden. Think about garden. A garden is not a single plant, for it is a garden because it is a collection of plants—diverse from desert landscape and succulents to rose bushes and trees to herbs and other plants. It includes water features and provides sanctuary to other life and new life with the morning dove and her two offspring born on our rain barrel. Our garden is a network of living plants which together flourish and bring us beauty, but most importantly it is experienced as a gift. Every plant in our garden is a gift, and the garden is a gift from human sweat and labor—mostly, Gregoir’s.

A garden surrounds the tomb where Jesus was laid to rest. There is no coincidence in the confluence of garden and tomb. They are both gardens, for the tomb is the soil from which God brings Jesus to life. I am reminded by the seeds that Celia planted several weeks ago in the planters and then labeled the seeds. Those seeds within days broke from the tombs of the soil, sprouting initial leaves and buds. For what a garden gives to us a sense of gift, that communicates growth and life, and together abundant life

In the Genesis story, our primal ancestors are placed in the Garden of Eden. It is there they encounter God their creator, it is there they sinned and hid themselves from God in the evening behind the bushes aware of their sin. Our evolutionary fall from the garden has been a catastrophe for us as a species because we hide ourselves from God so many times by disconnecting ourselves from gardens. Author Carolyn Merchant in her book—Reinventing Eden—writes about the human search for Eden is “perhaps the most important mythology have developed to make sense of their relationship to the Earth.” And I would add to “God” as well.

The nature of human sin has been to hide from God by abandoning our connections to the Earth for an exaggerated self-centeredness and consumerist greed to dominate and enslave nature and Earth. After all, all creation was made for humanity. Is creation all about us? Or is creation about God wanting to sharing love with life? But God has instilled a grace in our very being, an instinct and desire for gardens. This search for gardens or the Garden of Eden is the heart of our spiritual quest as human beings. I admit we have some wonderful local gardens such as the Huntington and Descano Gardens and botanical gardens in many cities. However there are too few gardens and too much pavement.

Often the gardens we Americans create is to pave over the Earth, build buildings and malls everywhere, and leave room for an occasional square with a a few plants and trees. It reflects our spiritual impoverishment and our fall from the quest for gardens. Our American gardens promote consumerism, profit, and greed without constraint. Greed and profit communicate something very different from gardens, for gardens are truly places of grace. They are places of gift and grace, for they communicate something that we humans need to experience and re-experience—that we belong to the garden, and God’s garden is in our blood. Gardens offer us the gift of abundant life, beauty, and grace.
Gardens teach us to return to the Earth’s as a living and magnificent garden. Gardens teach us devotion and reverence to life. They help us fall in love with God.

Resurrection is the cosmic green event, a transfiguration of all things—an incarnational ripening and greening of human life, all life, and the cosmos. For John’s community, there was no doubt that what God was doing for the whole cosmos and humanity had been done to Jesus in the dark hours before Easter dawn.

Easter unites the self-empting nature of God’s love in Jesus, it is God’s vulnerability in Jesus, suffering, and laying down his life for us on the cross, but Easter reveals that God is about new life, joy, and transfiguration. The cross of Jesus is caught with suffering creation groaning for resurrection transformation. In other words, gardening is a resurrection activity of God’s Spirit, for what God did to Jesus, God has been doing from the beginning—saving and bringing life from death. God calls Jesus back into God’s life to green the world. He comes to life sprouting from a tomb in a garden as the vines on our pergola.

Magdalene and the other disciples were called to follow in the steps of the gardening Christ. They were invited to participate in the important job of co-creating and co-living with the Spirit in giving life to the garden and bringing that garden to the fullness where God originally intends. Gardens are certainly places where heaven and Earth meet; they are spiritual portals to grace and recognition of God’s gift of abundant life to us.

Cultivating, nurturing, watering, and fertilizing and enjoying garden are means to assist the garden to flourish collectively and become a means of discovering and rediscovering God’s call to enjoy and appreciate the gift of abundant life.

But our garden, the Earth, is dying, and human beings are responsible for killing the garden. All resources are required to heal, nurture, cultivate, and restore health to God’s garden. Humanity has precipitated in its drive for overconsumption and reckless disregard for long-term consequences of carbon emissions to the atmosphere have impacted our fragile eco-systems with global warming. Climate change harms gardens.

Resurrection is about gardening the Earth and nurturing life on the Earth for God. Early Christianity scholar Elaine Pagels notes how the first generation of Christians shocked the ancient with the counter-cultural lifestyle. They cared for babies, often disabled, and left on hillsides to die. They raised these children as their own. Christians brought food and medicine to prisoners and slaves in the Roman mines, they fed the poor. They were known for their loving-kindness. What if again we Christians as a resurrection people were known for our loving kindness to the poor and homeless, but also expressing that loving kindness towards life and the Earth. Christians were known to transform strangers into brothers and sisters. Could we follow in St. Francis’ footsteps and envision kinship other life and the living systems of the Earth?

Resurrection is God’s crazy wisdom, God’s mad condition of exuberant giving to us without any condition; it is the madness of Jesus’ message of the kingdom of God and his table fellowship. Jesus wanted the people around him to flourish and grow in their intimacy with Abba God. It is about the flourishing of grace just as the Garden tomb becomes place for us deepen our understanding that grace will flourish as we reconnect to Earth.

Living Easter is about living the flourishing of gardens, humanity, all life and the Earth.

In a poem by Erich Fried, understand that living Easter is the antecedent.
It’s nonsense, says reason.
It is what it says, says love.
It’s a disaster, says logic.
It’s nothing but pain, says fear.
It’s hopeless, says commonsense.
It’s what it is, says love.
It’s ridiculous says pride,
It’s foolhardy, says prudence.
It’s impossible, says experience.
It is what it, says love.