The following is the first installment of what I consider some important passages from “A Longing for Home; Rethinking a Biblical Ecological Worldview”–my own Master’s thesis. I’ve been thinking about today’s particular passage a lot lately. There is an interesting metaphorical (as well as literal) relationship in Scripture between the wilderness and the garden; between the times of spiritual desert, and the new life that God wishes to give to all of us. How is it that God wishes to use the painful times in our life to lead us to rejuvenation? What does the one say about the other? This section explores the Old Testament and prophetic relationship of the two.
For centuries in the life of the Church and prior, the desert has held a particularly significant theological place. As we have seen, the desert was often the backdrop for exile, although to merely equate desert with exile would be to lose sight of this ecosystem’s true role. Although the Scriptures focus heavily on the desert during Israel’s Exodus from Egypt, the desert is also portrayed in the Old Testament—particularly through the prophets—as the place where YHWH would woo his people back to himself after they turned away from him like an unfaithful bride. Likewise, it was John the Baptist in the New Testament who fulfilled the role of the messenger whom both Isaiah and Malachi foretold would prepare the way for YHWH’s return. Continuing this tradition, many of the early Fathers of the Church sought refuge in the desert, where they produced some of the most beautiful and meditative theology in Christian history. In Scripture itself, there is no shortage of figures that turn to the desert (or wilderness) for strength, inspiration and holy rest. It is in the desert that Moses meets God face to face, that Elijah withdraws to hear the voice of YHWH. Indeed, it is the place where Jesus himself goes for forty days and forty nights to prepare to inaugurate his public ministry. Even St. Paul goes to the desert to prepare for his own ministry after his conversion in Acts of the Apostles. It should come as no surprise then, that in the Christian tradition, the garden and the desert have always been key symbols.
Why the desert? For many, the desert represents a wasteland; a certain absence of beauty. Vegetation is often sparse, life difficult to sustain. Theologian and gardener Vigen Guroian gives us some insight into the attraction. He points out that “the early Christian writers thought that there is no virtue more profound than the perpetual remembrance of our mortality.”[1] “The Bible”, he says, “recalls past paradise; it also prophecies a future blessedness.”[2]
On the flip side, we might speculate on the crucial role of gardens in Hebrew and Christian history. Every human-made garden, Guroian muses, “grows from a seed of Paradise dropped in memory by Adam’s dolorous lament. Sometimes we yearn to return to it, as though Paradise were an ordinary ‘place,’ as if with map and compass we might find it.” He quotes Jennifer Bennett who says perhaps more properly that “the archetype and perfection of every garden ‘is the place where we knew nature before innocence was lost.’”[3] It is in gardening, he says, that man longs to return to the Garden of Eden, to somehow recreate what has been destroyed. In a certain and very real sense the desert leads man to this desire. It is a stark reminder of what it is that humanity has lost.
Not coincidentally, the desert is also the place where God promised to woo his people back to himself. In Hosea, God says that despite her sin, he will “allure” Israel, “and bring her into the wilderness, and speak tenderly to her.”[4] God chooses to woo his people back to him in the desert because it was the desert where God first revealed himself to his people. Fresh from Egyptian slavery, and surprisingly, right after the golden calf apostasy, God reveals to Moses that he is,
The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but who will by no means free the guilty.[5]
This is by far the most in-depth view of the nature God up until this point in Scripture. Through the prophets, the Lord wanted his people to remember that it was in the desert that this was first revealed. Hosea continues:
[In the wilderness] I will give her her vineyards, and make the Valley of Achor a door of hope. And there she shall answer as in the days of her youth, as at the time when she came out of the land of Egypt.[6]
We see then that the stark reality was not only meant to be a reminder of what mankind had lost in the fall, but also to be a reminder that all hope and trust ought ultimately fall on God. In Isaiah 51:3, we read that
the Lord will comfort Zion: he will comfort all her waste places, and will make her wilderness like Eden, her desert like the garden of the Lord; joy and gladness will be found in her, thanksgiving and the voice of song.
Here, as in a chorus of similar Isaian passages[7], we have no mere metaphor. The Lord led his people to the wilderness to remind them of a real, tangible, touchable, smellable reality that had been lost; and to create a real longing for its return. Guroian concludes,
It was entirely fitting, therefore, that Christ was buried in a garden, a seed planted in the ground that blossomed into the flower of a glorified humanity. The New Adam [Jesus] refurbished the devastated garden that the Old Adam left behind. No wonder at the empty tomb, Christ came to Mary Magdalene as the gardener (John 20:15). For he is the Master Gardener, and we, we are his apprentices as well as the subjects of his heavenly husbandry.[8]
This, he says, in essence, is why we garden.
[3]As quoted by Guroian, 45.
[4] Hos 2:14
[5] Ex 34:6-7
[6] Hos 2:15
[7] Consider Is 32:16; 35:1; 35:6; 41:18; 43:20.
[8]Vigen Guroian. The Fragrance of God. 47.
