My beloved spake, and said unto me,
Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away.
For, lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone;
The flowers appear on the earth;
the time of the singing of birds is come,
and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land;
The fig tree putteth forth her green figs,
and the vines with the tender grape give a good smell.
Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away.
Song of Solomon 2:10-13
It is often said that Jesus died for our sins and so it is. It is not often said, however, that he entered the place of the dead, for us and that he rose again on the third day, for us. The point of Holy Week is not merely to point out the fact of our sinfulness – as important as that is –; the point is, rather, Jesus was resurrected by the Father for us. In a sense, the point of Easter, the point of Holy Week, the point of Lent, the point of the Incarnation was our Life, our true Life.
Jesus the Messiah is lifted up, to take what kills us and our life together, to take each and every one of our pettinesses, to take the acts of our malice and spite so regularly studded throughout our lives, to take the choices which we know full well to be wrong, to be harmful to ourselves and harmful others –yes, we know this to be true!– and smashes them on the rock of his divinity. Like the Hebrews in the desert, we must behold what kills us – and live.
Sin is merely –merely!– our separation from God and that separation results in death. When the Messiah hangs on a tree, and then lies dead in the tomb, he restores our relationship with the Father and his plans for us: life and life abundant. The entire point of the life of Jesus is about this very moment, this very slice in time, where he breaks the bonds of death, he breaks our ultimate separation from God and why he created us: ‘for so came I into the world’.
But it is far stranger than this: our salvation, our tasting of life and joy, hinges upon knowing God – and not just any god; we see it in the resurrected Jesus. But what does this mean? In Jesus, we have the revelation of the Father and his eternal purposes. Clement of Alexandria, a bishop of the early church, puts it this way, when speaking of Easter: ‘Our feast does not relate to time only, but to eternity [also]’ (Epistulae festalies 4).
When the Galilean dies on the cross 2000 years ago, he reveals who God was, is and shall be, the great I am: the one who from eternity and for eternity comes to find you, to bring you home, to bring you life, to bring you love, to bring you the life that he has always, from eternity, wanted for you. To bring you into a garden far more beautiful than Eden. The resurrection of Jesus is our re-creation, the rebirth of our hope, and that moment, that precise moment, is now. But this ‘now’, how we live in time, from moment to moment, changes, as a result of Jesus’ resurrection.
When we learn about who God is, on the cross and awakening in a dead-cold body on a spring morning, we learn about the very nature and purpose of time, we learn about the very nature and purpose of creation, we learn about the very nature and purpose of life: our God, who suffered death and has risen – and he has risen indeed –, our God has, once and for all, bound himself up in our lives, he has bound himself up in each of our lives, and that, that is our only hope. Sometimes it makes me tremble.
Our God is not some clock maker off beyond Pluto, our God is not some vague and abstract idea, all religions do not say the same thing. The very Word of God – which creates life and the cosmos – is the one who, having died and come to life again, and while waiting for the disciples, goes about tidying the garden around him. Fussing about, caring for His creation, weed by weed, bulb by bulb, blossom by blossom. Think about that. The first thing that the resurrected lord of the cosmos does is he gets down on his hands and knees and prunes. Jesus comes down from heaven, to die in the place of a skull, and awakens in a garden he prepares for us.
One motto of the Benedictine order of monks and nuns is, ‘Pruned, it grows’. (Succisa, virescit.) And so it does. What applies to apple trees applies to our very souls and this, surely, is what John means when he has Mary Magdelene confuse the gardener with Jesus. And, surely, this is what John means in his prologue, when he writes that the Word shone in the darkness and the darkness did not comprehend it – did not snuff it out. Jesus shines into the pits of hell – the pits of human despair -; Jesus shines into our souls overgrown with self-will, overgrown with self-harm, choked with the vines of wounds from others, and the power of these fall away through his descent into Hell and his resurrection. ‘Our feast does not relate to time only, but to eternity [as well]’. Sometimes it makes me tremble.
The eternal Word of the Father, begotten not made, takes on the flesh of a virgin and dies on a cross, in an outpost on the very edge of the Roman Empire, so that he can go about and do some pruning, some serious pruning, in each of us. He prunes, so that we may grow.
He prunes and he yanks and he waters and he sings to us and he sticks tomato hoops around us and he takes twist-tie after twist-tie, ever so gently, to help us up and grow. He prunes, so that we would be who God the Father wanted us to be from before the foundation of the world. He takes away the sin of the world to bring us joy and relief; to recreate us; to take us by the hand, ever so lovingly, into his garden and ours –; to show us, like only a lover can; to show us who we really are. He brings us to the feast in a fragrant garden he always wanted us to be in. ‘Our feast does not relate to time only, but to eternity [also]’. Sometimes it makes me tremble.
The very meaning of life, of creation, of time and of the nature of God is revealed now, now, in the Resurrection: he has come back to life for you, for each one of us; and this is just who he is. The great I am is a gritty, grinder Lover who has broken into time, to come into our souls and bring us back to him, to bring us Life, to bring us to the true feast in a glorious garden. Brothers and sisters in Christ, if he has overcome Death, he can overcome your darkest moments. Do not doubt this. Do not doubt this. ‘Our feast does not relate to time only but to eternity’. Sometimes it makes me tremble.
This is our hope, not that there was some single event, a miraculous moment at some point way over there: our hope is that God has revealed himself as Love, with a Love as strong as Death, that he has revealed himself as a Lover on the shores of Galilee, as the true Gardener of Gethsemane, having come back to life. And he lives. His eternal death-conquering-life transforms time; it transforms us, for how else do we live and make every choice, but in time?
He loved us first, he loved us and he loves us from eternity and for eternity, now, now, and now and always and forever and nothing, not nothing can stand in the way of that: ‘neither death, nor life,
nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers,
nor things present, nor things to come,
Nor height, nor depth,
nor any other creature, …
shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord’ (Rom 8:38-39).
Our Christian faith, our hope, rises and falls based on the fallen and risen Lord and can overcome anything, anything.
Today, and now and now and now, is a new creation and as a new creation, a new garden, a new feast in time and eternity. Today, thanks to the risen lord, is redemption. ‘For we know’, Paul says, ‘that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together… until now’ (Rom 8:22). The message of Easter is simply this:
My beloved spake, and said unto me, …
Rise up, my love, my fair one, … and come away.
For, lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone;
The flowers appear on the earth;
the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land;
The fig tree putteth forth her green figs,
and the vines with the tender grape give a good smell.
…
Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away.