The Rev. Dr. Pamela Dolan
Easter Sunday; April 9, 2023
Several years ago when I was a Sunday school teacher, I bought something called a Resurrection Plant, also known as a Rose of Jericho. It’s a fern-like plant that can survive for years at a time without water by simply drying up and going dormant. In their native habitat, the deserts of Mexico, they blow around as tumbleweed until they find water. When you purchase one in its dormant state, it definitely looks and feels dead—curled up, dry to the touch, and completely brown.
The idea of using it in Sunday school is that you show it to the children in its dormant state during Holy Week, and then water it for several days. When you gather the children back together on Easter Sunday, you show them the same plant now looking green and luxuriant, and very much alive. It’s a symbol of resurrection, a very good illustration, actually. But of course it’s also a trick. The plant was never really dead, it only appeared that way. The story of Easter is about reality, not about tricks. It’s about seeing that in the resurrection of Jesus God is doing an entirely new thing, a thing that we can’t do on our own, that nothing in creation but only the Creator, only God’s self, can make happen.
What began in a garden ends in a garden. Remember the stories about the Garden of Eden, where life began? I always picture that garden as something a little wild, not manicured or immaculate but verdant and profuse. Contrary to what the glossy magazines and aspirational websites would have us believe, most gardens are not places of exquisite perfection and order. There is messiness in a garden—if not always on the surface, then just below the surface, or even behind the scenes. And that is how it should be.
If you have ever seen a garden where every plant is in the perfect bloom of health, where there are no withered leaves, no drooping blossoms, no weeds poking their heads in, uninvited, then you’ve seen a garden that is more artifice than natural wonder, more the result of human effort than a showcasing of God’s creation. And even then, you would have to freeze things in place to maintain that illusion of perfection. No single moment can reveal all that went into making the garden look like that—all the sweaty work and smelly fertilizer needed to bring about such a glorious result. And anyway, the next moment a gust of wind will blow through and leaves will drop or branches fall, and the whole ecosystem is subtly changed. Life is never static. Change is always part of the pattern.
Maybe that’s why a garden that is too perfect runs the risk of looking lifeless. As Toko-pa Turner says, “Perfection is a counterfeit form of beauty.” In a garden, as in life, work and wonder, effort and beauty, all co-exist in a dance of reciprocity, an intricate and symbiotic exchange. Growth and vitality, aliveness, not perfection, is the goal.
What began in a garden ends in a garden. Mary goes to the garden while it was still dark. Darkness in this case is not a sign of danger, but more likely a symbol of mystery and unknowing, of the great things that happen in life that are beyond our human understanding. After all, it could be argued that the most important work in a garden happens underground, in the dark, where a whole community of microorganisms create a living ecosystem, a network without which life and growth are not possible. And of course seeds come to life in the darkness of the soil. In some mysterious way, Jesus had already seen this moment coming, when he said, “Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.”
Jesus died. Jesus was buried, dead, in a cave. Mary understood this with her whole heart, but it is something that we need to grapple with if we really want to experience the beauty of Easter. This was not an illusion, the mere appearance of death—it was the real deal. The thing that happened on that first Easter morning was not a resuscitation, it was resurrection. The wonders of the natural world can help us understand this up to a point, but only up to a point. We may catch glimpses of that reality, but after that it is all, as T.S. Eliot said, “Hints and guesses, hints followed by guesses, And the rest is prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action.”
What began in a garden ends in a garden. It is both a touching and a slightly comic moment when Mary mistakes Jesus for the gardener. Surely some of her confusion was simply that she did not expect to see him alive; as John’s Gospel tells us, at this point “they did not yet understand the scripture, that he must rise from the dead.” But I’m pretty sure there must be more to it than that.
People often wonder what Jesus looked like after the Resurrection, what it was about his presence that made him hard for his friends and companions to recognize. When I think of Jesus on this first Easter morning, I wonder if perhaps he really did simply look like a gardener. Maybe he had dirt under his fingernails. Maybe resurrection is strenuous, that same mix of work and wonder, effort and beauty, that great symbiotic dance of love with God. Maybe Jesus glowed with health and vitality even more than he had during his earthly life. Whatever we imagine, it is important to note that Jesus did not look otherworldly—Mary does not mistake him for an angel or a ghost, but for that most ordinary of humans, a gardener, the one whose attention and care create nourishment from the humble materials of topsoil, water, and seeds.
Back at the beginning of the story, God gave the garden to human beings to tend it and care for it. From the very start God has given us all that we need to live in harmony with creation and one another. And yet we so often forget that vocation, forget the abundance and goodness that is our inheritance. We become mired in competition, conflict, and even despair. Now, on Easter morning, the world has been transformed. If Jesus looks different it is because he is different. He is the very first person alive in this new way, a way that will never again be subject to death or decay. He is showing Mary and us a glimpse of the new creation, of the time that is coming when pain and sorrow will be no more, when all our tears will be wiped away by God’s own tender and loving hand.
The story began in a garden, but Easter morning is no ending. It is a new beginning. That grain of wheat that fell on Good Friday has become the bread of life, the sustenance we need for the journey, the food and drink of new and unending life in God. That new life that Jesus first revealed to Mary in the garden is an ongoing reality, not just something that happened 2000 years ago. Our vocation to tend and care for the earth and for one another that we were given in that first garden has not changed; in fact, Easter is in many ways a reminder, a call for us to return to that vocation with renewed energy and courage and hope. New life is not just for us, but for the whole of creation; the universe restored and whole is our true end, our goal, and our hope.
And now we have a new calling as well—to tell the world that we have seen the Lord, both in our words and in our actions. And I don’t just mean our good works, as important as they are. Last night after we baptized four young adults at the Great Vigil, we prayed for them all to have the gift of joy and wonder in all God’s works. Joy and wonder, laughter and gratitude, are signs of resurrection. As the prophet Jeremiah says, we people who have found grace in the wilderness are called to sing and dance, to play our tambourines, to plant our vineyards and enjoy their fruit. We are the vineyard that God has planted, and our lives can be a fragrant offering. the gardens of our lives, messy and imperfect as they are, can be testimonies to the victory of love. Every morning we can wake up to the wonder of the world, proclaiming, This is the day the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it. What began in a garden is completed in us and in all creation. Alleluia. Amen.
