from Sabbath to New Eden

It is Holy Saturday, the seventh day of this long and fraught week. On this day in Genesis 2, after the creation of the world, the Creator rested.

On this day 2,000 years ago he rested again in the sleep of death—yes, once again, after a work of creation. Just not the one anyone was expecting.

After the pattern of Sabbath is marked out in Genesis 2, a second account of the creation of the world begins:

Then Adonai, God, formed a person from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, so that he became a living being. Adonai, God, planted a garden toward the east, in Eden, and there he put the person whom he had formed. Out of the ground Adonai, God, caused to grow every tree pleasing in appearance and good for food, including the tree of life in the middle of the garden and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

A river went out of Eden to water the garden, and from there it divided into four streams. The name of the first is Pishon; it winds throughout the land of Havilah, where there is gold. The gold of that land is good; aromatic resin and onyx stone are also found there. The name of the second river is Gichon; it winds throughout the land of Kush. The name of the third river is Tigris; it is the one that flows toward the east of Ashur. The fourth river is the Euphrates.

Adonai, God, took the person and put him in the garden of Eden to cultivate and care for it. Adonai, God, gave the person this order: “You may freely eat from every tree in the garden except the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. You are not to eat from it, because on the day that you eat from it, it will become certain that you will die.”

— Genesis 2:7-17, CJB

I’ve spent a great deal of time in the Garden of Eden over the last six weeks: the garden where God began his kingdom project, where he made sacred space to dwell, where he placed his first self-likeness to represent him and co-rule with him. It was a place of abundance, blessing, and gift; a place of rest, riches, and promise. Even the perfection within the garden’s borders was meant to spread beyond, and we are tantalized with the descriptions of Havilah, Kush, and Ashur, the mysterious lands where life-giving rivers meander and wind. The Kingdom was always intended to expand.

Daily we are reminded how far the image-bearers fell short of their holy vocation. There are sicknesses, deaths, homeless encampments, abused children, wars, autocrats, billionaires, slave laborers, and people who are starving. Instead of growing outward in glorious partnership between God and human as they explored and tamed and cultivated the wild lands of gold and gemstone, the borders of the garden named “Delight” (‘Eden) and the gate leading to the Tree of Life were closed by cherub and flaming sword. The human, having willfully broken communion with the Creator, was not to be allowed back in—banished, instead, to a wilderness now poisoned with death because of his sin.

In Holy Week we are drawn back into garden spaces: First, to the garden named “Olive Press” (Gethesemane) where the Messiah was wrung out in prayer, crushed under the anticipation of his fate, and betrayed. And then, after Jesus drank the cup of death, to an unnamed garden mentioned only by St. John:

Now there was a garden in the place where Jesus was crucified, and in the garden a new tomb in which no one had yet been laid. And because it was the Jewish day of Preparation and the tomb was nearby, they placed Jesus there.

— John 19:41-42

Jesus was crucified—hung on a tree of death, to put it plainly—in a garden.

And in a garden like the place Adam was made the first (doomed) image of God, Jesus—the true and perfect Image, the Son of Man—was laid to Sabbath rest, barricaded by stone and guard, and for an instant the cosmic enemy rejoiced that his Genesis 3 plan to overthrow Creation had succeeded.

Adam, and any hope left for Adam’s heirs to return to the Garden of Eden, was destroyed.

Until.

Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene went to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed from the entrance. . . . Mary stood outside the tomb weeping. And as she wept, she bent down to look into the tomb, and she saw two angels in white sitting where the body of Jesus had lain, one at the head and the other at the feet. “Woman, why are you weeping?” they asked. “Because they have taken my Lord away,” she said, “and I do not know where they have put Him.” When she had said this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing there. But she did not recognize that it was Jesus. “Woman, why are you weeping?” Jesus asked. “Whom are you seeking?” Thinking He was the gardener, she said, “Sir, if you have carried Him off, tell me where you have put Him, and I will get Him.” Jesus said to her, “Mary.” She turned and said to Him in Hebrew, “Rabboni!” (which means “Teacher”). “Do not cling to Me,” Jesus said, “for I have not yet ascended to the Father. But go and tell My brothers, ‘I am ascending to My Father and your Father, to My God and your God.’”

— John 20:1, 11-17

If Genesis 1-3 is the beginning of Creation, John 20 is the beginning of New Creation. We are not in Eden anymore; it is no longer Sabbath, but rather the “first day of the week” in another kind of garden. Adam is long dead, but the New Adam is alive. The stone is rolled away! The flaming sword that rendered impassable the path back to God’s presence has been utterly removed by the Son of Man, the only Image worthy of walking straight through it. He who hung accursed on the tree of death has become the fruit of the Tree of Life.

And the first person to meet him in New Creation history is Mary of Magdala—who, initially, supposes him to be the gardener.

I love that detail. She’s not wrong. Mary of Magdala may not realize it until she hears him say her name, but she is the new Eve in the new Eden meeting the original Gardener of the original Eden and the New Adam of the New Creation at the same time. She is our very first glimpse of the Church, the Bride.

And she is the first to expand the borders of this new Eden out into the wilds beyond.

Mary Magdalene went and announced to the disciples, “I have seen the Lord!” And she told them what He had said to her.

— John 20:18

If we remember anything this Resurrection Day, let it be that our Bridegroom is alive, and we live in New Creation now. Our life’s work is to push the borders of his Kingdom outward, not by winning battles in the old way—fighting, arguing, going to war, trying to out-gun or out-snark those we see as “God’s enemies”—but by participating in the Grand Reversal of Christ’s example.

He came on a donkey, not a war horse. There is no place for violence in this kingdom.

He was lifted up on a cross, not a throne. There is no place for pride in this kingdom.

He was crowned with thorns, not gold and jewels. There is no place for greed in this kingdom.

He entrusted the Gospel first to a woman. There is no place for sexism in this kingdom.

He expands his borders by cultivating gardens and hosting banquets. There is no place for war in this kingdom.

Tomorrow, we awaken as members of a new family and citizens of a new nation. We awaken as children who share a Father with Jesus, as royal priests in a new kind of temple, bearing God’s image and God’s sacred presence within ourselves. We awaken on the first day of the week to a world entirely remade.

Thanks be to God!

the 40 days of uncreation

We begin the Lenten fast with ashes on our foreheads in the shape of the cross, and the priest saying to each of us in turn, “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”

The reminder comes directly from Genesis 3 and the consequences of the first humans’ sin:

By the sweat of your face
You shall eat bread,
Until you return to the ground,
Because from it you were taken;
For you are dust,
And to dust you shall return.

Genesis 3:19

God composed the human body out of dust, and because of his sin, the human’s end is a decomposition—an uncreation—back into dust.

Uncreation is also where we find the first instance of forty days in Scripture:

Then the LORD said to Noah, “Enter the ark, you and all your household, for you alone I have seen to be righteous before Me in this generation. . . . For after seven more days, I will send rain on the earth for forty days and forty nights; and I will wipe out from the face of the land every living thing that I have made.”

Genesis 7:1, 4

Before there was the world, the world was water—and to water it once returned. Over the waters of chaos in Genesis 1, the Spirit of God breathed and said “Let there be light.” But when the lighted world began to drown under the darkness of human evil, God called the chaos-waters down from the heavens and up from the deep to undo Creation and to reclaim His Spirit-breath from every living creature on whom it had been bestowed.

Save a few.

These few—Noah and his family, and the pairs of animals by kinds—are the anticipation of New Creation amid the despair of uncreation. They are the hope of life that flickers still throughout our 40 days to memento mori. The ark that comes to rest on the mountains of Ararat, passing safely through the waters of death as a vessel of life, becomes our symbol of God’s mercy and faithfulness—that even as we examine ourselves over these 40 days of Lent, finding sin and failure and unworthiness too deep to measure, we remember the cleansing waters and hold fast to His guarantee that we have passed through death into life.

We are dust, and we are New Creation people. Decomposition is not our final destiny.

As written by St. Peter,

In the ark a few people, only eight souls, were saved through water. And this water symbolizes the baptism that now saves you also—not the removal of dirt from the body, but the pledge of a clear conscience toward God—through the resurrection of Jesus Christ, who has gone into heaven and is at the right hand of God, with angels, authorities, and powers subject to Him.

1 Peter 3:20b-22

we walk like Mary

“Walk of Mary Across the Mountains” by Maximilian Albert Josef Liebenwein (1869–1926)

I’m sure we’ve all seen any number of artistic interpretations of the journey of the Holy Family to Bethlehem for the census and the birth of Christ. In most of them, Mary’s fragility as a very-pregnant mother seems to be an important theme: She is typically perched on the couple’s donkey while Joseph tirelessly walks alongside, or is at least leaning heavily on Joseph’s support, if she tries to walk herself. This painting, titled “Walk of Mary Across the Mountains,” struck me as so opposite to those renderings that I first thought – until I noticed Joseph and the burro in the shadows of the upper right-hand corner – that it must be depicting Mary’s visit to Elizabeth, not her trek toward meeting God in tiny-human-baby form.

Perhaps it strikes me especially because I’ve been in this “very-pregnant” state twice in the last six years. I know the immense (perhaps near-impossible) ask that a 70-mile journey on foot would make on an unstable pelvis, split abdominal muscles, and half-capacity lungs. I understand why so many paintings show her riding the donkey – which, granted, wouldn’t have been particularly comfortable, either. Yet in this piece, Maximilian Leibenwein has captured something different in Mary that I also recognize: That state of resigned determination that takes a woman from her already-great discomfort through a period of excruciating travail and into the extraordinary euphoria on the other side.

Toward the end of each of my pregnancies, I didn’t know what scared me more: that I might be pregnant for another three weeks, or that I might not be pregnant for another three weeks. Each option was defined by a different kind of uncertainty and discomfort, but either way, I could not escape the fact that my fate was to endure the uniquely life-upending transition of a birth, sooner or later.

Mary’s baby is coming. The pain is inevitable; the process is inevitable; the birth is inevitable. He is coming. Her body will do the work, and she must only be ready to meet him.

But unique to Mary’s circumstance is that it’s not merely her firstborn son coming; it is her Lord. The Messiah is coming. After millennia of relentlessly inviting his people into his space, God Incarnate invaded ours, bringing heaven to earth and commencing the rebirth of humanity through the birth of Jesus.

Ready or not, the King is coming.

We remember his royal-and-lowly approach in Advent, in part, to remember that the King still approaches us; the King, though come, is also here, and is coming again. He has already-and-not-yet come, already-and-not-yet rescued us, already-and-not-yet glorified us.

How do we approach him? How can we be ready to meet him? Perhaps with a doggedness like Mary’s, as she made the journey toward the “greatly multiplied” pain promised her in Genesis 3:16 for the sake of meeting the snake-crusher of Genesis 3:15. She was at once humble and bold: humble, in her wholehearted submission to God’s use (Luke 1:38); and bold, in her unflinching determination to praise the Lord for the goodness and certainty of his plan for her life, and for her whole people besides (Luke 1:46-55).

We need not have birthed children from our bodies to know what it is to make an arduous trek through certain suffering for the sake of immeasurable joy. This is the story of every saint, every martyr, every follower of Christ – the story of my life and yours. Pain in life, and death at life’s end, are inevitable. But on the other side is Jesus. And with us every moment – though like Mary in Leibenwein’s depiction, we cannot yet see him – is Jesus.

Every day is another step toward the God who has stepped toward us. Every day, a step closer to his presence, a moment nearer to the full realization of his glory. We walk humbly, yet boldly: obeying and praising, walking and singing, enduring and rejoicing. We walk like Mary, across treacherous mountains and valleys of shadow, until at last we see our Lord face-to-face.