From Garden to Garden

After an unusually harsh winter the spring thaw may make us more eager than ever to plant a garden. Gardening gives us many metaphors for salvation history and our own spiritual lives. Our human history began in the Garden of Eden, a microcosm of the Garden of All Creation. In the beginning all was beautiful, but we foiled God’s plan, and the New Creation needed to be restored in the New Adam.

Jesus Christ was no stranger to gardens. On the night before he died he agonized in the Garden of Olives. He was mistaken for a gardener on Easter Sunday morning. The death-resurrection-ascension-sending of the Spirit oriented all creation to Jesus Christ. All is now “in Christ.” We are grafted to Christ by baptism like vine and branch. With all creation we await the fullness of redemption that we have been promised. In the end the tree in the primeval garden (Gn. 2:9) will blossom in “the tree of life which grows in the garden of God” (Rev. 2:7). Salvation is from garden to garden.

O God, our Good Gardener, prune whatever needs to be taken from me so that I may nurture the seeds of your life in me. Journey with me, O God, toward the fullness of the Kingdom when “earth’s harvest is fully ripe” (Rev. 14:15).