A woman and a man speak in the garden. The woman in her tear-blurred vision presumes the man a gardener. Recognition thunders through her when he calls her name. Here he is, he who Thursday prayed in anguish prostrate beneath the olive trees, he who Friday stumbled, struggled in staggering steps up to Skull Hill where she heard the hammer reverberate, watched helplessly as he was hung on that leafless tree, himself the bruised and stricken fruit. Sunday she came to the garden under cover of the sleepless dark— what else could she do? But now she had seen him standing before her, heard him speak to her, entrust her with a message to the others. Heart racing, legs and feet flying, mind spinning, she ran to relay the news. How could it be? Did she realize that in the dawnlit dew she with him in the garden witnessed Eden’s transgression transposed into an unthinkable new key? From a forbidden tree, Adam took and ate, then shifted the blame. On a cursed tree, her Rabboni gave himself utterly, opened a path beyond fig-leaf coverings of shame. Here before her the Master Gardener, he who stooped low to clear invasive roots of sin and death, who subjected himself willingly to thorns and the scorching heat of day, who entered the inchoate clay and emerged, piercing through darkness and clearing the way to the Tree of Life at the centre of a new heaven and a new earth. Eve had let the serpent’s words take root, originally reached for knowledge beyond her; but today she ran, the first to bear Easter witness, proclaiming what she knew: “I have seen the Lord.”
Ancient Streams 