Eden and the Garden of the Resurrection

There is a symmetry between the Garden of Eden and the Garden where Jesus' tomb was laid: where Sin scattered us from the Garden, the empty tomb calls us back, to gather all nations together with the Good News: Christ is not here, he is risen!

St John and St Peter at the Empty Tomb - by Giovanni Francesco Romanelli (1610-1662)

I will never forget my first year as a Seminarian here in Rome, sitting just here to my right on the evening of the Easter Vigil. Here, as in many other Churches around the world, we kept the custom of keeping the lights off during the Vigil, until the Priest celebrating Mass had sung the words Gloria in excelsis deo, Glory to God in the Highest. Then the Organ plays a great sound, and bells are rung, and all the lights come on at once – and all the gold on the walls and ceiling seem for a moment to shine a little more brightly, as we go from darkness into light. What I’ll never forget about that moment, in my first year, nine years’ ago, was the faces of the young American women sitting opposite me – who I don’t think had ever visited our Church before, seeing it in all its dazzling glory for the first time on Easter Night – in the light of the resurrection.

After all the excitement of yesterday evening, and that great account of the resurrection from Saint Matthew’s Gospel – full of Angels, and the appearance of Christ to His disciples, Saint John’s Gospel seems a bit restrained by comparison – the women come to find an empty tomb, and go off to find Peter and John. They too find an empty tomb, and (although our Gospel reading omits that last verse) they return home; ‘… as yet they did not understand the Scripture, that he must rise from the dead.’ In these nine verses, St John presents us with this quite unsatisfying scene, and like the disciples we may not understand. It’s like we’ve had all the lights thrown on, for just a minute, we’ve seen everything in all its dazzling glory, and then suddenly we’re back in darkness.

This is deliberate. The readings of the liturgical year, the cycle of feasts we celebrate, are designed to put is in medias res – in the middle of the action, alongside the disciples and followers of Jesus; we are meant to experience it as they do and so enter in to the mystery of what they witnessed. On Easter Night, the Church witnesses the resurrection as it happens, the awesome glory of that blessed night worthy alone to know the hour when Christ rose. But, in the morning, we are back with the disciples; they do not yet know, they have not yet seen. They live, in that moment, in the unknowing of the mystery.

What is the mystery? What is the mystery we celebrate today, which began to unfold some two thousand years ago, at dawn, on the first day of the week?

The Church Fathers often noticed patterns in the scriptures - especially where things that happen in the Old Testament suddenly reappear in the New. There is a pious tradition, long held by some of the early Church Fathers, that the very spot on which Christ died, the place which the Jews called Golgotha (the place of the Skull) and which we call Calvary, was the very spot on which Adam, the first man, was buried. You can see this, in the icons of the Crucifixion – very often beneath the Cross is a small mound of rocks, split in two by an earthquake, with a skull and crossed bones beneath it – the head of Adam, redeemed by the blood of Christ, falling through the cracks in the earth to set him free from Sin. If you visit the Church of the Holy Sepulchre today, it still houses the Golgotha stone – the rock on which the Cross rested, cracked, leading down (so they say) to the tomb of Adam.

Many have written on the parallels between Christ and Adam, and between the Blessed Virgin Mary and Eve: how they mirror and invert one another. In one of Saint John Chrysostom’s famous sermons, he draws it explicitly – that the devil used three weapons to destroy mankind, and God uses those same three weapons to undo the devil’s wicked works. The devil used a Virgin, a Tree, and a Death; and in the Christian mysteries we see how God undoes his work with a Virgin, a Tree, and a Death. The Easter mystery is the great breaking of the devil’s work – the tree of life is revealed to be the dead wood of the Cross, and its fruit is the body of Christ, which we are given to eat.

Today, from this short passage of St John’s Gospel, we can see the same thing at play – the same weapons the devil used to destroy us being used for the work of salvation. We begin, on the first day of the week, with a woman in a Garden; Eve the first woman, on that first day believed the Devil’s lie and sought to possess what did not belong to her. Mary Magdalene on the other hand found the Truth, and believed Him, and out of nothing more than love came to anoint His body, not to possess, or to make herself the equal of God, but to serve.

What then? Having sinned, Mary calls out to Adam, and gives Him the poisoned fruits of Sin. Mary runs to Peter and John, to bring them to the Garden, to tell them the Lord is missing. Eve draws Adam into sin and death, Mary draws the Apostles into the mystery of new life.

When Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit, their eyes were opened, they knew that they were naked, the knew that they had sinned, and they hid their faces from God. Sin, and with it the great clouding of our minds and our wills, entered the world.

When Mary, and Peter, and John come to the tomb it is the opposite, they did not know, but they were given a greater gift than knowing – the light of Faith. They see that the tomb is empty, and St John says ‘he saw and believed; for as yet they did not understand the Scripture, that he must rise from the dead.’Adam and Eve sought to know, and lost their sight, The disciples at the tomb do not know and yet they see more clearly, because they believe. The Sequence today, that was sung before the Gospel contains these words –

The tomb the living did enclose, I saw Christ’s glory as He rose.

Nobody saw Jesus rise in Glory, but we, today, witness the glory of Christ’s rising; not with our human eyes or our human knowing, but with the perfect sight of Faith.

There is a final inversion – Adam and Eve, as punishment, are cast out of the Garden. Driven away, banished by God and kept out by Angels with flaming swords. But here we are drawn back – Mary calls Peter and John to come back to the Garden to see for themselves, and in our first reading from the book of Acts Peter calls others to share in the mystery he had witnessed. In Adam and Eve, we are cast out and scattered, but in this moment of discovery we are drawn back in – to come to the Garden with Mary, and Peter, and John, to look into the tomb, and to see the truth – He is risen from the dead, He is not here!

What happens in the Gospel today is nothing short of a microcosm of the whole history of salvation – it is the fall enacted in reverse: the innocent sinned and were cast out, now the repentant sinners return and are drawn in.

It is this drawing in, which is the challenge of the Gospel today – we come to the Garden and to the empty tomb, not only for ourselves but for others. We come here so that seeing the empty tomb and the folded grave sheets, we might be able to go out (like Mary Magdalene, and Peter, and John) to share the good news, that death has lost its power over us and sin no longer has the strength to bind us in chains. We are asked, called, commanded to gather in the lost; to bring others to the garden, to that moment of mystery in which we stand this morning, to point into the tomb and to share the Good News – it is empty, He is not there. Christ is risen!