A Tale of Three Gardens

Garden Number One

If you ever end up at my mum’s house, it’s usually a hostage situation. You can’t leave unless you have had copious amounts of tea or coffee, too much cake, heaps of chocolate and some more cake just in case the last amount was not enough.

Oh, and some nostalgia. Mum’s always good for some nostalgia. My daughter Sophie, who has stayed behind in Perth some 4000km away from us in Sydney got the dose of chocolate, cake and nostalgia the other day. And the nostalgia was specifically in the form of a photo tour through our old family photo albums.

The photo above caught Sophie’s eye in particular. It was taken in late 1984, – more than forty years ago – in the sunken gardens at the University of Western Australia. Taken by my dad of my mum, my twin brother, me and my two much younger brothers. It looks relaxed and chilled, even if my two younger brothers had the worst bowl haircuts to ever darken the corridors of time.

I’m not nostalgic. Not nostalgic at all. I don’t play my old music. I don’t revisit my old haunts. Don’t hanker over loves lost in the past. I don’t wish I were young again. Shoot!  I don’t even hanker after my hair! I love my beard and I couldn’t grow one then.

But something about that photo. Apart from the whole Stranger Things look about the vibe it’s a fairly unremarkable photo on the surface.  Although when my wife Jill saw it, she immediately remarked upon the fact that I still hold my hands the same way, a sort of pondering posture, with fingers touching, hands encircling what might be an invisible bowl.

Of course I insisted that I never do that, until I noticed upon the same pose in a podcast video we shot at one of the organisations I do communications for. And here we are!:

All of this is beside the point. Sophie remarked to my mum upon seeing the photo, “You look like such a happy family!”  To which mum replied ‘Yes, but that was about a month before your granddad left me.”

Now I don’t think my mum was putting a dampener on proceedings, there was still too much cake and tea left to go, but it was just a sad reminder that there, in that lovely setting, in of one of Australia’ most stunning university campuses, betrayal had already entered the garden.

I look at that photo again and wonder what might have been if my father had refused the temptation and stood for us in the garden. What might have been different if I’d had a man stand up for me at that point in my life and refused the lure – and the allure – of another woman? Oh the pain that was about to be inflicted on those smiling faces. A long drawn out, often subterranean pain. A pain whose nerve endings spike up through the ground even now, catching us unawares.

What might our lives have been like? Yes, mum’s life too. But what might it have been like to have a father alongside me as I grappled with youth and young manhood. Because I can assure you, from that point onwards, the photos were less happy, more fractured. No going back to that garden, that was for sure.

Garden Number Two

Temptation snakes its way into the idyllic setting of the second garden, which in the thread of the creation’s story is actually the first garden, the Garden of Eden. All the conditions are perfect. God has created his good world, and placed humans within it. The delights and sights of that garden would have made the University of Western Australia’s sunken garden look like a mud patch with weeds.

That first garden was the location of God’s “command centre” so to speak, from where the whole creation would be put into order by the man and the woman under God’s sovereign oversight. They would steward the world, subduing its wildness and recognising its creatureliness. That was the intent at least.

Yet temptation snakes its way into the garden, doesn’t it?  God’s garden has a million and one trees. And a million “Yes’s” and only one “No”. Yet somehow the woman is deceived and the man in full knowledge of what is going on, joins in willingly. It’s getting commonplace to blame the woman for the entry of sin into the world these days, via a theology that veers close to brutality and sneering condescension towards women.

But the Bible is clear. Sin entered the world because of the first man – Adam. Or as we shall call him Adam 1.0, because the Bible refers to this Adam as the First Adam through whom sin and death enters the world.

And that this occurred in the Garden, the locus of God’s presence in his creation, the place of goodly order,  and in  the place that is a type of the temple (as Greg Beale’s writing shows us). Adam 1.0 the priest, let down his guard, and he let us all down too.  If a snapshot had been taken just a month from that occurrence it would have shown Adam and Eve in idyllic settings.

All the ducks lined up in a row for this Adam. And he blew it. Expelled from the garden, our first parents were left to rue what might have been. If you’ve ever had nostalgia for a golden past, just imagine what it was like for Adam and Eve? And just imagine what it must have been like as they set in motion the wheels that led all the way to that sunken garden at the University of Western Australia?

Now maybe you have not had my own experience, but each of us has either experienced, or caused, such things because of that failure to resist temptation in the garden.

Garden Number Three

Which brings us to the third garden, and it’s worth a visit on this Easter week. In fact I preached about it on the weekend; the Garden of Gethsemane. And we don’t simply get nostalgia when we enter this garden in the gospel of Matthew chapter 26. We get a deja vu moment.

Haven’t we been here before? Haven’t we been in a garden with a man, with the sniff of temptation in the air, and a betraying snake making his way into the garden? Indeed we have.

The agony of Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane is palpable. John Calvin points out the deep mystery of what is going on when he explains that Jesus is not merely worried about the impending end of life, when the text tells us that he did not merely stand in the garden, but he fell on his face in the garden!:

He had no horror at death, therefore, simply as a passage out of the world, but because he had before his eyes the dreadful tribunal of God, and the Judge himself armed with inconceivable vengeance; and because our sins, the load of which was laid upon him, pressed him down with their enormous weight.

The dreadful tribunal of God.  The Judge armed with inconceivable vengeance. The enormous weight of our sin. These terms are not popular today. In fact, even in Christian circles they are seen as gauche and not fit for modern sensibilities. That, however, does not make them any less true.

What we get in this third garden is Adam 2.0, doing a reset of history. Adam 1.0 fell to temptation in the garden. My father fell into temptation even as he was taking photographs of us in the garden. But Jesus fell on his face in the garden exactly so he could stand for us! He hands himself in his agony over to the Father’s will, rather than seeking his own.

Tim Keller puts it beautifully when comparing the experience of Adam 1.0 to Adam 2.0

To the first Adam he says :”Obey me about the tree and I will be with you and you will live.”

To the second Adam he says: “Obey me about the tree and I will abandon you and you will be crushed.”

The Lord Jesus passes the test in the garden and obeys God. And look at how truthful and tender he is with his sleepy disciples who are literally caught napping when they should be praying:  “The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.”

At the very point Jesus could have been harsh with them he calls out their failures, while even acknowledging their intent. They are about the deny him and run away from him, and yet he still pastors them. What a man!

After he has finished praying, after the hinge point of history has been reset by an obedient man in a garden – an Adam 2.0 – he says to his disciples “Rise, the hour has come“. Which hour? The hour that this man will stand in for the whole world on the tree. He falls flat on his face in the garden in order that he can mount the tree and take away the sins of the world that have caused so much misery and brought the wrath of God upon us.

Oh, and One Woodpile!

And now – just to finish up a woodpile. Not exactly a garden but it’s in a garden in New Zealand where I was living at this time last year, thousands of kms from home. I stacked that firewood on a cold Christchurch morning, sweating and removing layers as I did so. It was symmetry and art for me. And it sure was pleasant to look at for sure, when I’d finished it.

I’m nearly fifty seven in this picture. You may recognise it from my social media platforms. The only thing missing is the aching arms and sore back from all of that stacking.

So this is me some forty years on from that first photo at the top. Glasses for fading eyes. A lot less hair (on my head at least), a lot more lines, and a whole lifetime of temptations and failures and sleeping when I should have been awake, and weak flesh and willing spirit, and, the list goes on.

I’m often asked a constant question at every school that I speak at. And it’s this:

“What age did you become a Christian?” And I reply “At the age of eight, after a lifetime of drugs and prison.” And they laugh (well most of them do). But I go on to say “The more interesting question is why am I still a Christian nearly half a century later?”

And then I unpack every point in my life where Jesus has stood for me. Where he has filled and refilled me afresh with his Spirit to enable me to flee temptation, to run to him, to seek his will not mine, and to resist the devil and see him flee from my garden.

At every point for every year since that first photo back in 1984, Jesus has been the man who has stood for me even – especially – when I’ve barely stood for myself. And that’s the man I have needed in these past forty years. That’s the man you’ve needed, even if you don’t know it yet.

Adam 2.0 succeeded where Adam 1.0 failed. There’s a lot more to Easter than this one event, but gee it’s a critical hinge point isn’t it? It’s a reset of history, and begins the process in which – as we know from Lord of the Rings: “All of the sad things will come untrue.”

What a man!