In the Scriptures, gardens are important places of creation, encounter and transformation. From Genesis to Revelation, God’s word offers us a variety of models of shared life for humans, animals and plants.
In the Scriptures, gardens are important places of creation, encounter and transformation. From the first book of the Bible, Genesis, to the last, Revelation, God’s word offers us a variety of models of shared life for humans, animals and plants. From the Tree of Life in the Garden of Eden to the River of Life in the New Jerusalem – gardens are wellsprings in the history of God’s creating and saving relationship with the earth.
The world of the Biblical texts is an agrarian world. Planting, sowing and harvesting, managing livestock, and seeking and storing water are the activities that provide resources for life to flourish. From the vision of our Biblical ancestors, we understand our mutual relationship with nature and the land. It is God who builds rest and recreation into the very structure of Creation by offering us the Sabbath Day – a time to reflect and enjoy what God has made, a time away from work and toil to delight in the fruits of the earth.
In the Old Testament, a Jubilee year – the Sabbath of all Sabbaths – takes this one stage further as it looks back to God’s original relationship with humanity and the earth, and forward to establishing the final peaceable kingdom of which Eden was a prophetic anticipation. The Jubilee in later Scriptures therefore functions as a type of the ideal age when God will reign supreme over the world, and everyone will be free to delight in the earth and worship its Creator.
Until that time, the prophet Jeremiah, writing in exile, invites the Israelites to hold fast to hope. “Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat their produce.” (Jeremiah 29:5). Gardens become the spaces around which living communities can be created and sustained, where the seasons embrace the cycle of living and dying, and where God’s beauty is praised in the cool of the day.
The garden motif is woven through the New Testament writings. In Mark 1:12-13, Jesus is tested in the wilderness and reverses the Fall in Eden. He lives at peace among the animals as Adam and Eve did before the Fall. Throughout his ministry, in his miracles, healings and exorcisms, he restores creation to the image God intended.
The Early Church writers St Jerome and St Ambrose speaking of the Annunciation, take images from the Song of Songs. They describe Mary’s womb in which God’s word became flesh, as a hortus conclusus – an enclosed garden. Later, it is in an Olive Garden, on the edge of the Holy City of Jerusalem, Gethsemane, that Jesus entrusts himself to his Father and where Judas his disciple betrays him to his enemies. After three days, in the cemetery garden where he was buried, Jesus reveals himself as the risen Christ to his friend Mary Magdalene. While she at first mistakes him for a gardener, he sends her out as the Apostle to the Apostles. The New Jerusalem, the garden city in the Book of Revelation, is the last of these rich images of healing and restoration.
As we journey toward the Great Jubilee, our project inspired by this Biblical vision, will encourage Christian communities in our dioceses to build and maintain sustainable gardens. We will be helped by our patrons – the three siblings Martha, Mary and Lazarus who in John 11-12 had created a home in Bethany to care for others on the holy pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Jesus was their close friend and stopped there often with his disciples for rest, sustenance and encouragement. From their garden, Martha and Mary picked the plants and fruits to provide them, and other pilgrims, with good food to sustain them along the way. Around their table Jesus gave some of his most profound teaching. Our project will help us to explore that teaching anew and share it with others in our own time. Join us in being renewed in faith and planted in the house of the Lord.
Fleur Dorrell
