Are we good? Good enough? Sometimes my mind races with that question. It seems we are consumed with answering it and separating each other into good and bad buckets. The answer to this age old question begins and ends in two different gardens. Back in the beginning there’s a story that God made a garden. So much about that story revolves around the idea of good, and there’s even a tree of good and evil that no one is supposed to eat from.
What strikes me is that from the very beginning before anyone had done a thing, gotten anything right or wrong, God stood back and said it was good. We were good. He delighted in us, in just being with us. But we don’t believe it. For me I think goodness gets thrown out the window and I somehow equate being good with being perfect. So since I’m not perfect, don’t love perfect, don’t do everything right every single time, then there’s no way that I can be good or truly bring delight.
That was really the problem with eating the fruit in the garden. It wasn’t that they disobeyed. It was so much more seismic than that. What occurred was a reorganization around how humans defined themselves and their relation to God based on their perceived goodness. Before that, they were in the garden, naked without knowing it, truly and wholly seen, with an innate knowing of their goodness before god. And then it was all ripped apart and the only way to judge whether they were okay with God was through whether they were good enough. And that’s the tragedy isn’t it? The very thing that they were, good, they were no longer able to see. And even worse they decided that the way to God was through knowledge of their goodness. Ever since the quest has been to find that goodness and use it to reconnect with God.
Interesting side note, the only thing at the beginning that God said was not good was for us to be alone. We were made to connect and be with one another and whenever we isolate ourselves we are not walking in his goodness.
Fast forward a gazillion years and you’ll find a man hanging on a tree between two thieves and after he died you know where they laid him? In a tomb…where? You guessed it…in a garden. The story in genesis ends with the garden forever being closed and Adam and Eve barred from getting back there. I don’t know how I missed this connection all these years but Jesus was resurrected in a garden. The veil in the temple that limited access to the holy place where God was believed to be found was ripped in two when he died and the garden was reopened. Traditionally we’ve made it all about a way being made for us to get back to the garden as heaven and the after life after we die. Jesus came to do more than that. There’s a life in the garden that he has for you now. One of connection and life and love and goodness.
But if we step back before that resurrection in the garden just a moment we’ll find Jesus hanging on the cross. Traditionally Christianity has told us that what was happening on the cross was a substitution whereby Jesus takes our place and dies the death we should have died because of our sin and God somehow needing a death to rectify the situation and make us good again. But if we pull the lens back just a little further we find two others there that day. There were two thieves also crucified on each side of Jesus.
Maybe they have something to tell us about what was going on and where god’s heart was that day. I think the thieves were there to show us the violence that we try to do to ourselves each and every day. We often nail ourselves to crosses because just like Adam and Eve, the life we now live is defined by our trying to prove our goodness and use it to somehow connect ourselves to God. Invariably we fail and end up on a cross of our own making. Maybe what Jesus was doing that day was showing that we could stop the violence to ourselves, we could stop trying to get to God by proving we are good by belief in all the right things, doing the right things, living like we should. Maybe Jesus didn’t hang there to make us good but so that we could see again finally that we are good. I think that’s what the one thief finally got while hanging there. He asked that Jesus would just remember him. He didn’t ask to be saved, he didn’t ask to be forgiven, he just asked to be remembered. Saved, forgiven, those often have a transactional notation to them. But being remembered…that’s all relational. And Jesus doesn’t say he will be forgiven, born again, or saved, just that he will be with him that day. Maybe what it shows us is the thief is asking to be remembered as the one thing he already was, who he was made as good before the foundations of the world were laid.
All three of them died and we aren’t offered any ideas regarding where the thieves ended up, but Jesus’ body was taken down and laid in a tomb in a garden. And eventually in that garden there was a rumble and a stone was rolled away. And angels were there, no longer barring the way so that no one could find or enter a garden ever again but letting others know that the tomb was now opened and they no longer needed to search for the living among the dead.
So what does it mean for all of us? What are we to do with it all? I think Jesus wants three things for us. First he wants us to stop crucifying ourselves as thieves. Regardless of where our lives have taken us, he doesn’t make bad things and you and I are and were created good. Every time we try to get to God by proving we are good or some thing or someone else is worse, we do violence to ourselves. The cross can end that violence once and for all. Second, in Eden there was a fall and their eyes were opened and they lost sight that they were created good in his image. In the resurrection garden, we need to regain our sight to know that what he’s done is restore our sight to that original image. Sometimes that looks like forgiveness, sometimes being saved, and sometimes it’s being remembered. Finally he wants to whisper your name. Mary Magdalene was one of the first to see Jesus. Because his tomb was in a garden, she mistook him for the gardener. That is, she mistook him until he whispered her name. He’s still standing there breathing out our names. We may not recognize him or can’t even fathom that the voice is god, but he does whisper to us. He exhales our name and in that moment we can know we’ve been remembered, we can walk in the garden again, naked and unafraid, and we can rest in our goodness, not because of some thing we’ve done or haven’t done, something we deserve, but because of whose we are, who made us, and how we were made. When he stands back and looks at us he says, you are good. You delight me. Believe it today. I’m going to.
From The Whale's Belly 