The Gardener God

A plea to see the world from the perspective of the ancients

“It is when we notice the dirt that God is most present in us; it is the very sign of His presence.” — C. S. Lewis

¹No matter how little or much we have studied the Bible, we are all familiar with the Garden of Eden: that idyllic paradise perfectly suited to participating in creation-care alongside God, not because He needed human help but because He, apparently, wanted a bigger family to share it with. But have we contemplated the reality that our God was a gardener?

And what if He still is?

But Mary stood weeping outside the tomb, and as she wept she stooped 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 one at the feet. They said to her, “Woman, why are you weeping?” She said to them, “They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him.” Having said this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing, but she did not know that it was Jesus. Jesus said to her, “Woman, why are you weeping? Whom are you seeking?” Supposing him to be the gardener, she said to him, “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away.” Jesus said to her, “Mary.” (John 20:11-16)²

Maybe Mary was more right than she realized, or maybe John was trying to tell us something, or both. Garden imagery is present throughout Biblical depictions of God and of His promises to us, and I think it’s more than a metaphor.

In the modern world, we forget so easily that we are still tied to the land and its health. We go to great lengths to separate and distance ourselves from this reality, but it remains true.

Young Farmers by August Sanders (1914), to me a poignant prophecy of the industrialization of agriculture that would turn countless farmers into victims, or exploiters, or both.

In the Ancient Near-East where God’s Word was written, it would have been impossible to forget. Religion, politics, and agriculture were not three separate topics but rather one amorphous entity. Kings, usually understood to be the son of a deity, were expected to bring fertility to the land, and they often kept (or at least their slaves and servants kept) elaborate gardens to represent their life-giving rule. Religion, politics, and agriculture, all rolled up into one—and that’s only the surface. These ideas occupied all aspects of life.

An engraving of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon with the Tower of Babel in the background

“[Some of] these monuments still stand today, less in testimony to the vainglorious Kings who ordered them than to the diligence and organization of a society of labor rooted in the land.” — Daniel Hillel

³No human king could really provide the conditions necessary for the land to thrive and increase in lusciousness. You need an actual God for that, but we have a tendency to prefer human leaders who proliferate wars that destroy and degrade the land rather than live in it and work it.

If you are willing and obedient,
      you shall eat the good of the land;
but if you refuse and rebel,
      you shall be eaten by the sword;
      for the mouth of the LORD has spoken.” (Isa 1:19-20)

I’ve been told I’ve got it backwards, but I think we might be better off if we got back to thinking about religion, politics, and agriculture in more interrelated terms—if we got back to seeing “the care of the Earth”, which is “our most ancient and most worthy and, after all, our most pleasing responsibility,”⁴ as a religious practice.

For the creation waits in eager expectation for the children of God to be revealed. For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God. (Rom 8:19-21, NIV)

Taking better care of the land we directly influence and live on (and making choices that take better care of the land we indirectly influence) is not just a religious and spiritual practice that emulates our Creator, but also a step toward embodying the politics and culture of the Kingdom of God. We’ll be better off for it, as Wendell Berry writes:

[I]t must be asked if we can remove cultural value from one part of our lives without destroying it also in the other parts. Can we justify secrecy, lying, and burglary in our so-called intelligence organizations and yet preserve openness, honesty, and devotion to principle in the rest of our government? Can we subsidize mayhem in the military establishment and yet have peace, order, and respect for human life in the city streets? Can we degrade all forms of essential work and yet expect arts and graces to flourish on weekends? And can we ignore all questions of value on the farm and yet have them answered affirmatively in the grocery store and the household?⁵

The answer is answered more convincingly in the negative with every passing year. I think one tiny step—but an equally real, practical, and fruitful one—towards being like Jesus is the creation and nurturing of a garden. Not just any garden, mind you, but one that improves the health of your household and the land you live on, one that emulates natural ecological functions rather than relying on extractive inputs, one valued for its natural beauty rather than the “perfect” unnatural beauty defined by a broken culture. Such a garden can be used in caring for the poor and in teaching little children about important values. It might not be useful in immediately impressing the neighbors, but it can one day be used to share with them.⁶

“The ‘not yet’ of a restored creation demands an ‘already’ ethical commitment to that creation now among God’s people. To be sure, our efforts must always be tempered by the realization that it is finally God himself, in a future act of sovereign power, who will transform creation…Christians must avoid the humanistic ‘Green utopianism’ that characterizes much of the environmental movement. We will not by our own efforts end the ‘groaning’ of the earth. But this realism about our ultimate success should not deter our enthusiasm to be involved in working toward those ends that God will finally secure through his own sovereign intervention.” — Douglas Moo

1. Opening quote from A Letter to Mary Neylen, 1942. I have taken it way out of context, and I think it originally had a meaning more like “it is when we hit rock bottom that God is most present in us.”

2. Emphasis mine. Biblical quotations are in ESV unless otherwise noted.

3. Quote from Out of the Earth: Civilization and the Life of the Soil. The University of California Press, 1991.

4. Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture, 3rd ed., pg 14. The University of California Press, 1996.

5. Ibid, pg 91. Emphasis mine.

6. Closing quote from Nature in the New Creation: New Testament Eschatology and the Environment (2006) for the Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society. Available online here at the time of writing.