God loves a good garden — especially if that garden is on a mountaintop. In fact, God’s great story of redemption is largely a tale of two gardens. The tale begins and ends in the garden of Eden, which starts as an arboretum and ends as a paradisal city. But between the Bible’s bookends, we stumble into a very different garden: Gethsemane.
On this Holy Thursday, as we remember the agony of Jesus under the olive trees, what fruit might we glean by comparing Eden and Gethsemane?
Two Gardens
On the surface, the two gardens appear worlds apart. Eden was “the garden of God” (Ezekiel 28:13), full to overflowing with every pleasure imaginable (and perhaps many that are not). God had grown there “every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food” (Genesis 2:9). Multiple rivers meandered under that dappled canopy, watering paradise. It must have been a place thick with green and gold, heavy with the living aroma of spring, dancing to the music of water over rocks and wind in leaves. Eden was a world of yes — and but one no.
