pat loughery

Have you ever noticed how many significant Biblical events occur in a garden?

By way of background: I’m heads-down with work, kids and grad school. I recently finished my Old Testament Theology class and am preparing for the class wrapped around Off the Map’s “You Say You Want a Revolution” conference. If you want to follow my life for some odd reason, you’ll probably find more happening at my flickr photostream and our church’s website, both of which have RSS feeds, than you will here.

Anyway, For my OT Theo class, I’m working on a paper exploring environmental stewardship in the Old Testamant. I’ll post it at the church’s website and probably here when I’m done just like I did with the paper on Benedictine spirituality in the suburban missional church, but I wanted to take a few moments to post about an interesting theme I’m running into when working on the stewardship paper.

So, back to the previous question: have you ever noticed how many times big stuff happens in a garden? Here’s a sampling:

1. God creates Adam and Eve to live in and tend the Garden of Eden (Genesis 1, 2)
2. The temptation and fall of humanity happens in the same Garden (Genesis 3). Humanity is, as we all know, kicked out of the garden until it and we are redeemed.
3. The Garden becomes a family story for succeeding generations (e.g. Lot, Genesis 13)
4. Ahab and Jezebel conspire to illegally sieze Naboth’s vineyard to turn it into a vegetable garden (1 Kins 21)
5. King Xerxes throws a garden party and Queen Vashti refuses to parade her beauty before him – leading to the rise of Esther who saves the Hebrews from genocide (Esther 1, 7)
6. The bride in the Song of Songs is compared to a lovely garden (SoS 4,5), and the lovers rendezvous after the groom returns from a walk in his garden (SoS 5, 6)
7. Jesus prays to escape crucifixion in a Garden (Matt 26)
8. Jesus’ crucified body is laid to rest and resurrected in a garden (John 19)
9. Jesus appears, in that same garden, to Mary after his resurrection. She mistakes him for a gardener (John 20)
10. The Biblical story ends with a redeemed garden of Eden, now incorporated into a city(Revelation 22)

Those things happen in gardens. Add to that the times that gardens enter the story as places of rest, comfort, strength, prosperity, fruitfulness and you have a pretty impressive biblical theme. Important enough to spend time considering our own relationship with the natural envionment around us, wouldn’t you think?