What Are You Looking For?

Gospel: John 20: 11-18

Mary Magdalene is wandering through a garden looking for the Lord.  At first she is distraught because she has had no success.  The empty tomb just has an angel telling her what she already knew.  Then she runs into a man who she thinks is the gardener, and she is right!  It is the gardener - the Lord Jesus - whom she finds in the garden of her soul when he speaks her name.  It is where we will find God as well, for we are all Mary Magdalene searching for God.

Recall that our spiritual journey began in a garden called Eden.  Recall too that God never left that garden; we did.  That garden is the garden of our soul that God has cultivated and tended and where God has remained all along.  We left the garden in search of a god of our own image.  We built a great city of Babel, wandered aimlessly in a desert, established complex laws and liturgies, developed a kingdom, and experienced exile and occupation by outsiders.  God was found in none of our own designs; we found only our own wretchedness and occupation by forces of evil.

But God was in the garden of our souls all along.  Mary, who herself had been occupied by seven demons and found liberation, now finds God where God has been all along.  It was we who erred and strayed seeking a god of our own making.  But now through the death of Jesus we find God resurrected within us in the garden created by God and for God where God has always been and where God will always be - in the garden of our hearts.