Jesus is the Gardener – Dennis Ormseth reflects on the garden as the place of restoration.
Care for Creation Commentary on the Common Lectionary
Readings for the Resurrection of Our Lord, Year B (2012, 2015, 2018, 2021, 2024)
Acts 10:34-43 or Isaiah 25:6-9
Psalm 118:1-2, 14-24
1 Corinthians 15:1-11 or Acts 10:34-43
Mark 16:1-8 or John 20:1-18
In its stark simplicity, Mark’s spare account of Jesus’ resurrection serves to underscore the themes we have developed in our consideration of the narrative of his passion. The women go to the tomb to anoint his body. Entering the tomb, they encounter the young man in white, who tells them the startling news that “He has been raised; he is not here. Look, there is the place they laid him.” The body they have come to anoint is absent. The young man gives them a message for his disciples: “But go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him, just as he told you.” The focus rests on the missing body, the young man and his message, all of which figure significantly in understanding the import of Mark’s narrative for the care of creation.
The old cult is not replaced with a new cult, but with practice alone.
In our comment on Passion Sunday, we saw how Jesus’ body, in the course of Mark’s narrative, came to replace the temple as the center of the symbolic order of Jewish life. Now his absent body is in turn seemingly displaced by what Ched Myers refers to as the “discipleship practice.” “In other words,” Myers notes, “the old cult is not replaced with a new cult, but with practice alone. The focus upon the body confirms Mark’s commitment to a discourse firmly fixed upon the historical world” (Binding the Strong Man, Myers, p. 406). This is, of course, the direction in which the Gospel has moved since its opening, and with fury in its closing chapters. In the passion narrative, there was “no voice from the clouds, only Jesus’ voice protesting his abandonment by God; Jesus is not with Moses and Elijah, but between two bandits; it is not the heavenly voice that attests to Jesus as ‘Son of God,’ but an enemy, the centurion.” And when with the visit of the women to the tomb the narrative is regenerated, this also is done, accordingly, with reference to his body, risen from the dead, and the disciples are directed, not to heaven, but rather to Galilee, “the site of earthly practice” (Ibid.). And if the young man represents not only the beginning of the rehabilitation of the community of disciples, as Myers suggested (Ibid., p. 369), but also the once blind beggar who now sees, the agent of that rehabilitation turns out to be none other than Mark’s “son of Timaeus.” And thus, as Gordon Lathrop surmised, we encounter in this final scene of the Gospel the representative of a cosmology that is a strikingly different than the perfect heaven of Plato’s philosophy, in that it proposes, as we wrote in an earlier reflection, that “the movements of earthly bodies have more to tell us than have all the stars in heaven” (See our comment on the readings for Passion Sunday).
There is now a moveable feast.
In the face of the multiple endings attached to the Gospel, which seek to fill out the picture of the resurrection, Myers alerts us to the enduring importance of this spare narrative: “The ‘implied resurrection’ at the end of Mark functions,” he writes, “to legitimate the ongoing messianic practice of the community.” But at the same time, he adds, it “subverts the possibility of a glorified christology, which might render the community passive. The empty tomb means the story of biblical radicalism can continue in the living and dying of disciples in all ages” (Ibid. p. 408). At the heart of Mark’s alternative to the temple/state, Myers finds
“. . . a radical new symbolic system based upon the primacy of human need (3:4). In place of the purity code Jesus exhorts moral imperatives concerning exploitation (7:21). . . . In place of the debt code he enjoins a community practice of forgiveness (11:25). Jesus’ teaching functions to both ethicize and democratize the traditional symbolic order, undermining the legitimacy of those who mediate it—that is, priests, scribes, and Pharisees. Mark presses the bold claim that the temple is not necessary in order for Yahweh to dwell among the people. There is no sacred institutional site from which Yahweh must be addressed in prayer: that site is faith (11)24) . . . Yahweh is no longer a recluse in the Holy of Holies, but present among the community” (Ibid. p. 443).
Accordingly, the community is free to move out from the national cultic center of Jerusalem to embrace the suffering of the people of the entire Roman empire, but first in their home place of Galilee, to be sure, as the young man in white directs them. There they will tell the story of Jesus with its remarkable ending, as our reading from Acts 10 reminds us, to both Jews and Gentiles.
It seems plausible, as Myers suggests, that in Galilee (or more broadly, in northern Palestine) the disciples will gather up the story of their days in Jesus’ company, which will eventually be written down by the author of the Gospel (See Myers, pp. 40-42, cf. p.443-44). The story of the life of that “body,” written as it was in the shared language of the ancient world, would prove essential to the spread of the community as they moved outward toward the Roman capital, onto the continent Africa, and even across Asia. But equally important would be some means of giving material embodiment to that word, comparable to, although very different from, the temple that had anchored the experience of God in the land of Israel. As Myers astutely notes, “the importance of table fellowship to Mark’s social and economic experiment” means that
“. . . it is not surprising that Jesus chooses this site (the table fellowship) as the new symbolic center of the community. In place of the temple is a simple meal, which represents participation in Jesus’ “body” (14:22-25); . . . Yet it is the meal, not the body, that is ‘holy,’ for the latter is absent at the end of the story. We are left, then, not with a ritual but the social event of table fellowship. This meal, which itself was an expropriation of the great liberation symbol of Passover, is meant to bring to mind the entire messianic program of justice and the cost of fidelity to it” (Ibid. p. 443).
The meal created bonds of “membership” in the social, political, cultural and ecological communities in which it was shared.
However valuable this insight, Myers is mistaken in one aspect of his characterization of this meal. While it is true that the meal is, as he has it, “a meal for a community in flight, or more accurately, a community that follows its true center, Jesus, who cannot be institutionalized because he is always ahead of us on the road (Mark 16:7),” the community would not have been sustained in any of its places of settlement had it not also been a meal that created new bonds of “membership” in the social, political, cultural and ecological communities in which it was shared. The meal, meant as it was to meet real human need, addresses all kinds of human hunger, and is always a real meal, which ties the community that shares it to Earth and to its inestimable community of communities, addressing all sorts of hunger, both human and other than human.
Gradually, the community would find itself needing to make that fuller embodiment part of its regular telling of the story of the resurrection. Indeed, we think we see that need rising and being met in the other texts appointed for this Sunday. In his sermon to the Gentiles, for instance, Peter recalls that “God raised [Jesus] on the third day and allowed him to appear, not to all the people but to us who were chosen by God as witnesses, and who ate and drank with him after he rose from the dead.” The memory of eating with Jesus has special, enduring importance, a significance emphatically underscored by the reading of the alternative first lesson from Isaiah 25: “On this mountain the Lord of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wines, of rich food filled with marrow, of well-aged wines strained clear.” The eschatological feast on the mountain of God, it seems, will become as important as the destruction of “the shroud that is cast over all peoples, the sheet that is spread over all nations,” and the wiping of tears “from all faces.”
Jesus is the gardener and all gardens are places of restoration.
If the meal necessarily embeds the movable feast in the socio-economic and ecological life of the communities in which Jesus’ followers found themselves, then neither location nor dwelling are irrelevant to the post-resurrection narrative of the Christian community. In addition to the mountain on which Jesus stands over against the forces of Zion, there are the other locales in which the story of Jesus plays out: the home of the leper, the attic room, an open field, a courtroom and a courtyard, each of which offers its special kinds of membership for our consideration upon the rereading of the Gospel in the light of the resurrection. And, of course, one must not neglect the garden: the story that seemed to end in the garden where there was a new tomb begins anew, the alternative Gospel reading from John 20 informs us, also in a garden, something to which the author seems to want to call our attention with his story of Mary mistaking Jesus as the gardener. Was Jesus not the gardener of the new Eden of creation, as later Christian legend would have it? Was there not something appropriate to the suggestion by a Jewish rabbi it was “the gardener, looking out for his cabbages that morning of the first day of the new creation?” (See Raymond E. Brown, The Gospel According to John XIII-XXI, p. 990, for the source of these legends). If the garden is, since Eden, the place of betrayal, it is also the place of restoration; the place of death becomes the place of new life. Can we not hope that this can be said for every garden, if the God we meet in the meal is truly the Creator of all that is?
Originally written by Dennis Ormseth in 2012.
dennisormseth@gmail.com