A Garden and a Tree
A Good Friday Reflection
I wrote this reflection for our Good Friday chapel. It is inspired by one of my favorite lines from the late Tim Keller. I hope it sets your eyes on the love of God displayed on a tree.
A couple stands together, in a Garden that can only be described as paradise. The One who rules this beautiful abode not only has designed it for them, but he inhabits it as well. He walks and talks with them. He is near. Close. Personal. They live with no shame. No condemnation. No guilt. Everything is as it should be. In the center of this Garden stands a tree of life.
This Garden is a place of peace.
But then a thought is placed before them…and a seed of doubt is planted in them - what if God is actually holding out on you? What if he is not truly good, and is not giving you his best? What if there is more to this Garden than what has been offered to you? What if you could simply reach out and take it?
You see, in this Garden, there is another tree. The tree. One singular tree.
God told Adam, “I need you to obey me about the tree. When you obey me about this tree, you will live.” They were meant to live with God forever like this. Death? Not a part of the plan. Not like this.
But that tree. Why is God holding out on us like this?
And a voice of reassurance - You won’t certainly die. It will be fine. God is just being stingy like always.
So, in a Garden…they did not obey about the tree but chose instead to say…
…and as they took and ate, just like God said it would, death entered the story. And not just for Adam and Eve, but as Paul would later write: “Therefore, just as sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all people, because all sinned…”
Sin. Death. It is now all of our stories, because, we are all in Adam.
Fast forward to another Garden.
A man stands alone in the dark, in a Garden filled with olive trees just outside the city of Jerusalem. His closest friends are having a very hard time staying awake, despite his plea for them to stand watch with him.
This Garden is a place of struggle.
This man falls on his face before his Father in heaven, sweat dripping like blood, with the sudden awareness of what he is about to experience. He has seen others crucified before. He can feel the weight of what is coming. Is this the cup he is now about to drink?
My Father, if it is not possible for this cup to be taken away unless I drink it, may your will be done.
But what does it look like for him to drink this cup? How will he bear the weight?
A tree. The tree. One singular tree. The Father told Jesus, “I need you to obey me about the tree. When you obey me about this tree, you will die.”
Jesus’ response? He responded in the same way he had previously taught his own disciples to pray to their same Father in Heaven…
Now in this second Adam, Jesus the Christ, Paul reminds us that sin does not get the final word. The death of Jesus will begin God’s great work of redemption…and put death itself to death. He writes: “For just as through the disobedience of the one man the many were made sinners, so also through the obedience of the one man the many will be made righteous.”
Jesus’ own disciple Peter said it this way:
He bore our sins in his body on the tree.
Paul would write elsewhere,
A tree. The tree. One singular tree.
But why?
In his own words...
…that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him.
The love of God, displayed on a tree.
As his disciple John would later declare:
Jesus doing for us what we could never do for ourselves.
The love of God, displayed on a tree.
A tree. The tree. One singular tree.
Making a way for us to come home again.
Although this is an instrument of death,
Truly this is a tree of life.