Readings: Genesis 24. 1-27, Mark 5. 21-end
The first garden in the Bible is, of course, the Garden of Eden, planted by God in the East, where he “made to grow every tree that is pleasant to sight and good for food”. God planted rather than created; this is not creation as before when God speaks and his words become real; this is God rolling up his divine sleeves and working his creation; action and work are needed for the delightful place and God places man in it in order that they, Adam and Eve, should work in it too, “tilling it and making it grow (no mention of the necessity for weeding at this stage).
The Garden is also the home to the Tree of Life and it is Adam’s and Eve’s unfortunate lapse that brings death into the world, as well as labour in every sense; the working for food and the pain of childbirth. The lapse destroys the harmonious relationship within the garden; but expelled from it man nevertheless hankers to return; to return to the place where co-operation with God is natural and right.
The sense of loss and longing to return, to home, fruitfulness and righteousness-or co-operation and harmony with God and his plan for humanity, recur throughout the Old Testament, and often using garden imagery. So in the first five books of the Bible the Promised Land is imagined in horticultural terms and sometimes expressly as a garden, occasionally with a sense of irony, comparing the longed for land with the fruitfulness of Egypt which of course, the Israelites have fled. I can understand this; the Nile Valley, indeed all oases that I have seen, have been stunningly beautiful; the compact and intense working together of man and nature surrounded by the austerity of the desert. For me, landscapes worked by men for generations are much more beautiful than mountains covered in gleaming snow, or endless ancestral pine trees. The ancient Israelites seem to have thought so too.
Similar imagery of the garden as the destination recurs in the prophets of the Exile; Isaiah, Ezekiel and Jeremiah all draw on horticultural imagery to express the longing for the exiles’ homeland. The fecund, well-watered and green garden is the antithesis of the wandering and nomadic existence in the desert. The exiles were not in fact in the desert although desert lay between them and home but Babylon was a spiritual desert compared to the Promised Land. They longed for the sense of belonging that comes with cultivating a garden, as a garden with its trees and shrubs supposes continuity, the hope and expectation that plants will flower and fruit again next year.
In the Song of Songs we have a twist in this imagery; the fruitful, delightful garden has become the symbol of, and location for, sex, for human beings potentially the most life-giving and fruitful experience, demanding, for success, love and respect and co-operation with God’s creative purpose.
But while the seductive garden of the song of Solomon reminds us of the start of life, a different thread, present too in Eden, reminds of the end, as King Manasseh and his son Amon- neither of whom according the writer of Kings, “walked in the ways of the Lord”, nevertheless chose to be buried in the garden of Uzzah by their palace. The garden is becoming a place that is the ultimate home, secure, fruitful and fit for both love and burial.
Gardens appear less frequently in the Gospels, and my first example doesn’t strictly appear in the Gospels at all, but traditionally the angel Gabriel announces the surprising news to Mary in a garden (although she’s not quite in the garden, but usually shown under a sort of gazebo, as it wouldn’t be right for a well brought up girl to be alone outside the house. Think of the trouble that Susannah got into with the Elders, although you might think that skinny dipping in a garden was courting disaster). The garden is the place where co-operation with God is tested, and where Mary says her momentous Yes, to God’ will. As in Eden Adam and Eve’s disastrous No brings in death, so Mary’s acceptance of God’s will brings, eventually, eternal life.
But not, of course before much pain and suffering. And the critical moment for that pain takes place in another Garden, of Gethsemane. Here Jesus accepts God’s will, and having done so sets in train the Passion. We can, I think, understand that a garden should be the place where Jesus should feel closest to God; gardens are where we may create beauty but know it only happens through aligning our efforts to nature; they are equally places where we may hope to recognise God’s will and his intentions for us.
The last two gardens are not quite gardens; Joseph of Arimathea’s new tomb is not expressly said to be in a garden, but as we have heard, gardens were thought to suitable places for burial, and Mary Magdalene, confused and distressed assumes the strange man whom she encounters to be a gardener. And so in a way he is; he is the gardener God who planted Eden and is now cultivating a new garden, a new Eden of a new Creation.
It is this idea that is behind our own conception of graveyards as gardens; special ones, certainly, with wild flowers and ivy and the flowers under strict control (and some of them not living, nor ever having lived). But like the first garden in Genesis and its counterpart at the end of the Gospels, the garden graveyard is where we hope to find new life though physical death.
That should, perhaps be the end, but there is one more garden reference right at the end of Revelation where the city of God is conceived as having a river running through it and planted on its sides with trees which bear twelve different fruit and having leaves which bring healing. This is another echo of the Garden of Eden with its rivers and the tree of life. But it’s in a city, that ultimately man made space, which it’s easy enough to think of as the very opposite of the Garden. And yet the heavenly city, is one where God’s will for men is fulfilled. We can, I believe make our own earthly cities like gardens- not simplistically by planting trees and flowers (although that is quite a good idea) but by trying, as in garden, to align ourselves with creation and nature, to create a space where human life may flourish like the flowers in a well-tended and watered garden. And if we do so we may find that even cities can be places where we will encounter God, and find ourselves able to discern and do his will. Amen