The Garden as Gospel: From Eden to Revelation, a sacred ecology of resistance and restoration
Scripture opens and closes in a garden. Not on a battlefield. Not in a palace. Not behind walls of empire or under the watch of kings. But in a garden—a place of life, intimacy, and interdependence. Genesis begins with Eden, lush and unguarded. Revelation ends with the Tree of Life replanted at the heart of a renewed world, its leaves healing the nations.
From start to finish, the arc of Scripture is not domination and escape. It is cultivation and restoration.
Yet, in the churches of my upbringing, Eden was framed as a footnote—a fleeting paradise lost, a moral backdrop to the real plot of sin, salvation, and the necessity of a gruesome and gory cross. The Tree of Life, once vibrant, was relegated to obscurity. But I see now, clearly: a garden not as a prologue, but as the story itself. It is the sacred logic of God. It is the place where communion is formed, where life is not earned but gifted, where God walks, and we learn to walk with one another.
Revelation’s final vision returns to what Genesis began, but not as nostalgia or retreat. Revelation describes a world coming down, two worlds joining: creating a city where justice, joy, and generosity flow like rivers; where the Tree of Life, once guarded by a flaming sword, stands open and accessible. No more scarcity. No more shame. Only nourishment. Only healing.
Eden Was Never Escapism
Genesis frames the cosmic story of creation as something that happens not out of necessity, but out of divine desire. It is an act of hope from a God who dares to love something beyond Godself: humanity. Humankind—formed in dust, from the Divine Breath and Heart—are imagined into being and placed in Eden.
Genesis 2:15 uses two Hebrew verbs for humanity’s purpose: avad and shamar. Eden is not a factory. It is a sanctuary—a temple of interdependence. They are not masters, but as priests. They do not exist to dominate, but to dwell. Not to exploit, but to serve and to safeguard.
It is a garden that was labor and rest, community and life. Sky and soil, trees and rivers, beasts and humans—flourishing together in all of its splendor, in all of its differences. As Willie James Jennings reminds us, "God's desire was not simply to give humanity land, but to teach us how to share it."
This is not mere stewardship. It is covenant and communion. Emilie Townes calls it "expansive hospitality," a divine ethic where difference is not deviance but design. Eden's biodiversity—its tangled vines, vivid birds, and flowing waters—is theology. It teaches that flourishing arises not from uniformity, but from sacred multiplicity.
Queer theologian Patrick Cheng pushes us further, arguing that creation itself is sacrament—a visible sign of invisible grace. Eden, then, pulses with the joys of difference, the surprise of beauty, the presence of God outside binary dominion.
Eden is both gift and responsibility. It is a commitment to walk with difference without fear. To laugh beneath the canopy of divine delight. To till not for profit, but for joy. To keep, not as gatekeepers, but as co-creators.
The creation story ends in a rupture, but even as Eden closed following a rupture, God remained: stitching garments and staying present. The One who planted Eden never stopped planting. Never stopped tending. Never stopped hoping.
Jesus and the Garden Way
And Eden’s rupture between humankind, God, and creation didn’t end in Genesis—it echoed through the prophets, psalms, and poetry of the First Testament. Then comes Jesus, a Jewish, brown-skinned Palestinian born under occupation, offering a new way. In Jesus, we step into a new possibility: a Second Testament.
"I am the Way," He says. And His way is rooted in the ground.
He speaks in agricultural metaphors: mustard seeds, vineyards, wheat and weeds, fig trees and vines. He teaches that the reign of God is like a seed sown in soil—it grows slowly, almost imperceptibly, until it yields an abundant harvest.
His life unfolds not in temples of gold, but in gardens and fields:
On hillsides that bloom with lilies.
In the wilderness, where hunger meets manna.
At tables where bread is broken and wine poured.
And in gardens—where betrayal bleeds, and resurrection breathes.
In John 20, when hope fades and this Creator who Sets Free is presumed dead, we find a weeping Mary Magdalene outside His tomb. Empire has taken her teacher. Then, through tears, she sees someone nearby. She thinks He’s the gardener.
Of all the things He could be—a soldier, a spirit, a stranger—no, she assumes He is the one who tends the soil.
And maybe, just maybe, she was right.
And then—He speaks her name.
“Mary.”
And in the tender utterance of her name, something opens. Her eyes. Her heart. Her memory. The truth floods in.
It is Jesus. Alive.
I keep returning to that earlier moment:
She thought He was the gardener.
I’ve passed over that detail so many times—tucked in a sentence, a misrecognition quickly corrected. But maybe it deserves our attention. Maybe it wasn’t a mistake at all.
Because Jesus doesn’t return as a conquering warrior or robed king.
He returns as someone close to the earth, who speaks truth to power.
He tends. He restores. He plants new life in the place of death. Jesus said:
“I am the Way, and the truth, and the life…” —John 14:6
Jesus, the Gardener of God's New Creation
To be a gardener is to be attuned to the rhythms of season, of soil, of slow growth. To be a gardener is to draw close to the ground. To observe. To prune. To heal. To wait. A gardener doesn’t force fruit. They create the conditions for it to emerge. In my previous post, Jesus described the Father in this way. Now, this identity belonged to Jesus Himself, the Gardener of God’s new creation.
And this has been Jesus all along. Like a gardener:
He sees what others overlook—sparrows, widows, lepers, mustard seeds.
He works in obscurity—thirty years of silence before three years of ministry.
He prunes to heal—never to shame, always to restore.
He invites community—a table, not a throne.
He digs deep—into grief, into longing, into wounds.
He does not force fruit. He fosters it. He creates conditions that allow life to emerge.
In a world obsessed with power, Jesus chooses presence. In an age of domination, he practices patience. In a time of consumption, he cultivates communion.
Mary mistook Him for the gardener. Or maybe, she saw Him exactly as He was.
In God's New Creation, There Is Enough
However, Jesus is not only the master gardener. He is also Bread of Life (John 6:35). He is Living Water (John 4:14). He does not speak in abstraction. He offers sustenance.
In the wilderness, He feeds the hungry.
At the well, He offers renewal.
At the table, He shares without scarcity.
Jesus is enough.
Enough bread. Enough water. Enough grace. Enough for all.
He doesn’t escape the earth. He comes close to it and nourishes it. He doesn’t dominate the garden. He restores it. Where empire devours, he gathers leftovers. Where empire demands, he blesses. Where empire says, "You are not enough," Jesus whispers, "Come to me."
“Come to me,” Jesus says—not as a command, but as an invitation. Not to the strong or the secure, but to “all who are weary and burdened” (Matthew 11:28). These words were first heard in occupied Judea, under empire’s shadow. They took root in the soil of the Matthean community, offering rest to a people pressed by religious legalism and political domination, an invitation that didn’t stop there. It stretched outward—beyond Antioch, beyond Galilee, beyond the known borders of Roman maps.
Revelation and the Return to the Garden
That call, “Come to me,” lives again in the Book of Revelation—not as a whisper of personal solace, but as a thunderclap of collective hope.
Often, Revelation reads like disaster cinema—beasts, blood, and brimstone. A spectacle. But it is something so much more. Not doom, but deliverance. Not destruction, but defiance. Revelation is protest in poetic form. It is resistance lit with holy fire. A dream of liberation disguised in symbols to outmaneuver the censors of empire.
And at its heart is the same invitation:
Come.
Come out of Babylon.
Come into the garden.
Come to the river.
Come to the Lamb.
Where Matthew gave us Jesus’ call to the weary, Revelation gives us Jesus among the wounded, bearing scars, calling the church to embody faith not through escape but through endurance. This is not a narrowed gospel bound by borders or doctrines—it is an open table in a new Jerusalem, where the leaves of the Tree of Life are for the healing of the nations.
“Come to me… all,” Jesus urges.
All. Not just the righteous. There is no protected class. All who have been displaced, disenfranchised, dismissed—”come.” All who hunger and thirst. All who long for justice to roll like rivers. All who refuse to let empire have the last word—”come”.
Jesus’ invitation is a public revolution. That rest is not passivity, but resistance. That healing is not escape, but restoration—of land, of community, of dignity.
It is not terror. It is testimony.
And it is in this context John testifies of Jesus in Revelation, as one running out of time, as one writing with an instrument on fire. Not from a pulpit, but from a prison—a barren island on Patmos turned into a penal colony. He writes in exile with chains on his wrists and his body on the line. Criminalized for his witness. He’s not a prophet above, but a sibling alongside. His body is bound, but his vision is free to see:
The Church—fragile, flickering communities that were complicit, exhausted, and many of them compromised, forgoing truth for power.
Empire's cruelty—the seductive nature of its logic within the Church itself unmasked. A reminder that oppression is both an external force and an internal temptation.
The Lamb—not the beast—lifted up. Caesar is not lord. Empire will not conquer. Empire will not win.
Lastly, John sees the garden returned.
And seeing all these things, He begins his letters, urging the Church to flee the world. He calls her to faithful resistance within it. To testify with her life. To remember who she is when empire tries to make her forget. To resist the seduction of comfort bought with the currency of compromise. He calls her not to align with Caesar, but to follow the Lamb—slain yet standing. Not into fire. Not into flight. But into a garden. A garden where healing flows, where the Tree of Life blooms again, where justice takes root and resurrection grows wild.
"Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life... On either side of the river was the tree of life... and the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations" (Revelation 22:1–2).
The Tree of Life reemerges—not as nostalgia, but as prophecy. It is not a relic of Eden, but a vision of what can be. Its fruit is not commodified for profit, nor its leaves hoarded for control. They are given for the healing of the nations (Revelation 22:2). This is not a return to paradise lost, but a revelation of sustenance sustained—where the fruit is nourished by the body of Jesus, broken and shared. Where abundance is not scarcity delayed, but justice embodied. There is enough.
Where Babylon falls, the Tree still stands, and the Lamb feeds. This is the gospel. A gospel that plants itself in and among the suffering. A gospel that roots itself in accomplice-ship. A gospel that dares to restore what empire destroys.
The Garden as Resistance
When empire fences land, extracts profit, and turns people into product, the garden subverts.
It says land is not commodity, but communion.
It says food is not earned, but shared.
It says dominion is not destiny.
It says difference is divine.
We live in a time where Christian nationalism cloaks empire in Scripture, where domination masquerades as faith. However, the biblical witness centers not on Caesar, nor power, but on humble seeds, acts of justice, and fierce compassion. Not sword, but soil. Not hierarchy, but harvest.
Closing: The Gospel as Cultivation
So we do not ascend into privilege, we kneel. We dig into the earth. We plant new trees in ash and drought. We prune what no longer bears justice. We cultivate communion, not empire.
Because the garden is not past. It is promise. It is protest. It is gospel. It is here. And it is now.
In Genesis, God walks in the garden. In Gethsemane, Jesus prays in one. In Revelation, the Tree of Life grows again. Its leaves heal. Look. See. “I make all things are new!” (Revelation 21:5).
Footnotes:
Jennings, Willie James. The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race. Yale University Press, 2010.
Townes, Emilie M. A Troubling in My Soul: Womanist Perspectives on Evil and Suffering. Orbis Books, 1993.
Cheng, Patrick S. Radical Love: An Introduction to Queer Theology. Seabury Books, 2011.
📖 Up Next in the Series: Coming August 8, 2025
The Politics of Pruning: Discernment in the Age of Trump 2.0 → Expected August 8th
We’ll explore what happens when political leaders disguise domination as reform—and how to discern the difference between pruning that bears fruit and pruning that harms the vine.
📖 Previous in the Series:
← Roots in Water: Gardening as Protest, Care, and Hope
We explored how growing kale and cucumbers in water has taught me about justice, hope, and resistance in a world that often feels barren.
If this post has moved you, please share it below. To receive the next post, enter your email and hit the Subscribe button at the bottom of the page. Thank you for reading!
