1st April 2025

Dear Friends,

Now that the weather is getting a little warmer and sunnier, perhaps you are starting to enjoy your garden or the outdoors. 

The Bible traces humankind’s journey from garden to garden. The most famous is the first garden, Eden, where it all began....and went wrong.

But in the Lenten and Easter seasons, different gardens provide the backdrop for God’s promises to be fulfilled.

Jesus spent 40 days and nights in the desert wilderness, an arid garden where nothing grew, but where he was tested in preparation for the journey he was to take. Three years later Jesus’ ministry took him to another garden, Gethsemane, where he was terrified because he realised that he was shortly to be put to death. He hoped to avoid this terrible death, but in Jesus’ body, God chose to endure the worst sufferings experienced by humanity, so that He could look us in the eyes, come alongside us and understand us on our darkest days. Jesus’ death took place in the next garden, a hideous garden, where rubbish was dumped, people tormented and which resembled hell on earth.

Jesus’s body was buried in a tomb in another garden – the Easter Garden. On the first Easter morning Jesus appears to his friend Mary Magdalene there; indeed she mistakes him for a gardener, which in a way he was! Jesus is the new cultivator, the new Adam, pruning the weeds and revitalising our lives. At Easter, Jesus neutralised the world’s evil, undid the alienation of Eden and reunited God and humans in a new relationship of tenderness and understanding.

Picture the Easter Garden.... Replace the figure of Mary Magdalene with a picture of yourself. Jesus offers the same love, the same tenderness, the same understanding of your life as he did to Mary Magdalene that day.

But there’s an even better garden to come! The final garden is God’s new creation. In the garden at the end of time we will be alongside God forever. In the fullness of time, God longs to see you in the garden of the new creation where His desire for us and our desire for God will be fulfilled. The garden will be fully unspoilt - the difficulties of being human gone. There is no trace of death in this garden, just life. Perfection in creation will be the only reality. This is eternal life. Love, Larissa 

Love, Larissa