Good Friday. The Garden and the Tree

Garden Tomb

The story we hear tonight begins and ends in a garden.  At midnight, they come for him.  A swat team, armed forces.   In the garden of Gethsemane.  Among the olive trees. The warm night air, a cool breeze, silence and the rustling of leaves.   In prayer, he waited.  To be handed over.  And accused.  And beaten.  And mocked.  And hanged on a tree.  Cursed be he who is hanged on a tree.  He waited for the curse to take effect.  The curse that effected everything, that infected everyone.  The curse that wounded and paralyzed and blinded and impoverished and killed them all in one way or another.  The garden’s curse.         

We, people of the book recall that first garden.  Adam and Eve and the tree and its fruits.  Edible and delightful, yet prohibited.  Prohibited by the God who made them and loved them;  loved in their innocence, their vulnerable nakedness, their soft skin and bright eyes and faces full of curiosity and wonder and awe as they take in with their keen senses all that God had made.  These babes.  These young ones.  Children of the earth, children of God.    They were beautiful and fragile and sacred, beloved creatures made in the image. 

Until, tempted by their insatiable appetites and their desire for power they eat from the tree and become aware of themselves and their surroundings and their vulnerability, their weakness.  Aware of their disregard of, disrespect for, distance from God—they feel shame and guilt and learn to hide.  They learn to lie.  They learn to lie low and protect themselves at the expense of the other.  They learn to gratify their own desires and ignore the desires of the other.  They learn to trust snakes and ignore their God.   

And so they expel themselves into a world of danger and darkness and death.  Much of which they bring on themselves and on their descendants forever.   From the garden they roam.  They plant and build, but never recreate the garden.  They cannot return.  We are lost, displaced, a long way from home.  It didn’t have to be this way; this dark, this lonely, this ugly, this violent, this deadly. But we have made it thus.    

Like Adam, like all who are made from the dust, so too Jesus is cast from the garden.  Taken prisoner by malevolent forces of envy and fear.  The desire to self-protect  and preserve power runs deeper than brotherly love or respect or mercy.  Those with power do what they must to keep it now. 

And so it goes as it must go.  Abandoned by friends, betrayed and denied.  Trumped up charges and absurd accusations, arrogant politicians and smug bureaucrats, rowdy crowds with a taste for blood and violence, hatred and mockery and abuse and stinging whips and thorny crowns and nails…the sound of nails piercing flesh and bones, the cries of horror from the lips of women and children, and then the silence.  Cursed is he who hangs on the tree.   And cursed are they who put him there.  And cursed are we who deny our part and look away from the suffering and the violence and the shaming and the accusing and the hating and the killings.  All the killings.  All around.  The senseless killings and the weeping mothers we drown out with the white noise of sports and videos and talk shows.  So afraid and vulnerable are we that we scarce can look at it; the cursed tree, the cross and the man who hangs upon it.  But look we must.  Because we continue to crucify and to be crucified. We continue to fearfully deny and betray to save ourselves. On this Friday we call Good, as once he did in the garden long ago, we see a man killed and buried in a garden tomb.  On this day when God made us in God’s image and called us Good---Very good---the Son of God hangs on a tree and finishes the great reversal. The curse is reversed.  That the ones who were overcome by a tree might by a tree be restored.  The curse is broken by the one who bears the full effect of its power, assumes it in his body and by his death puts to death the curse itself.  In the garden, he taught us to be human---vulnerable, humble, in prayer listening for God to show mercy, to love justice, to give comfort.  IN the garden he lays dead, waiting for God to breathe new life.  A man in obedient adoration of his Creator.  IN the silence, waiting. With hope that surrenders. With hope beyond suffering and beyond death.  Hope that lingers for three days.  Hope that clings to the promise of a new dawn.  Hope that rises with outstretched arms like the branches of the tree reaching toward the heavens.  Hope that must live in our own hearts until the day dawns, until the garden is restored and filled with unending life.  And the world is blessed anew by the good and gracious God.  Amen.