The Secret Garden of Paschaltide: Easter Sunday
O God, who on this day,
through your Only Begotten Son,
have conquered death
and unlocked for us the path to eternity,
grant, we pray, that we who keep
the solemnity of the Lord’s Resurrection
may, through the renewal brought by your Spirit,
rise up in the light of life.
Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son,
who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
God, for ever and ever.
– Collect, Easter Sunday of the Resurrection of the Lord –
There is a well-loved children’s story written in 1910 by Frances Hodgson Burnett called “The Secret Garden”. It is the story of an orphaned girl, Mary Lennox, brought back to England from India to live with her uncle in a big, old estate, isolated on the Yorkshire Moors. The master of the house himself is often away, running from the painful memory of the past of his wife who died in an accident in her cherished wall-in garden. Mary learns of this secret garden and spends many a lonely hour looking for a way to get into, to break down the door. One day, she finds the key buried in the ground and then once inside the abandoned and neglected garden, secretly begins to restore it to its former beauty. There is another important aspect to this story which I’ll leave you to find out on your own!
During these last 3 days we entered into the ultimate battle Christ fought with sin and death. The first battle began in a garden, the garden of Eden, when our first parents engaged in the illusion of being equal with God. Genesis tells us that God drove Adam and Eve out from the garden, leaving a Cherubim with a flaming sword to guard its entrance and the path to the Tree of Life. The garden was definitively locked, off limits for humankind.
In another garden, another Mary searches for her Master, himself the key to eternal life. The final battle with death, brought about by Adam’s disobedience and subsequent banishment from the Garden of Eden, was won on the Cross, and this Cross became the key that opened the door, the door of Jesus’ pierced side, to the way to eternal life and eternal glory—ours because in Jesus’ passion we became “sons in the Son”, adopted children of the Father, truly co-heirs with Christ.
Our Easter collect asks the Father, “that we who keep the solemnity of the Lord’s Resurrection may, through the renewal brought by your spirit, rise up in the light of life.”
The solemnity of Easter, celebrated not just one day in time but for eight days, is an eternal day, an eternal now. Buried and raised to a new life in Christ, we keep the solemnity of the Lord’s Resurrection each day, until we ourselves will rise again on the last day into the eternal light of life.
In time, Mary of Magdalene searches for Jesus in the garden, not recognizing him until he calls her by name. In a way we have even more. We ourselves are the garden that Jesus recreates, renews and makes beautiful, first in our being baptized into him, and then planting all the theological and moral virtues in the garden of our souls. We need to dig and fertilize and weed and so participate in our salvation, but it is Jesus who makes this garden beautiful and life-giving.
On this most sacred and joyous of all days, “the day that the Lord has made,” we wish you much joy and gladness as together we celebrate the day of our salvation. “Haec dies!” “Let us be glad and rejoice!”
