As Jesus is crucified in a garden, we are invited to look to him and see how life and death are intertwined.
Vicar Erik C. Nelson
April 3, 2026
Texts: Isaiah 52:13-53:12; Psalm 22; Hebrews 10:16-25; John 18:1-19:42
Beloved in Christ, grace to you, and peace in the name of the Father, and of the + Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen
One of the Bible’s favorite places to take us is into gardens. The book starts with Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. The book ends with a description of the eternal city of God, full of trees and water and plants. The eternal city of God is not a concrete jungle, but a garden city.
The Bible starts and ends with gardens. And so does tonight’s reading. It starts with Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, after he has just finished praying for his disciples. And this is the place where Judas leads the soldiers and police to arrest Jesus.
And when it gets to the end, after he’s been crucified, when he’s being taken down from the cross, it says, “there was a garden in the place where he was crucified.” Which was a surprise to me because when I think about Golgotha, or Calvary, the Place of the Skull, I often think of a barren, empty mountaintop. But John the Evangelist tells us that there was a garden right there.
Gardens are a powerful image and setting throughout Scripture because of the beauty and delight that you find there. But a garden is even more powerful tonight because it’s a place where life and death are intimately intertwined.
Think about how trees and bushes are kind of always dropping leaves. The compost we use to make plants grow is the remains of other dead plants. When you pick a flower, you kill it.
Life and death are fully co-mingled in a garden. And that’s something we often overlook because we just admire the beauty and the nice smells.
But Good Friday is a time when we can’t ignore the death in the garden. We can’t look away. Jesus Christ, the eternal God of the Universe, dies on a cross tonight. God gets the final piece of the human experience: death. In that death, we are reminded of our own death.
In that death, we are reminded of our sins that separate us from God and from one another. And we see the extreme lengths God went to overcome our separation. God entered the universe as a human being, lived a full, beautiful, complicated, difficult life, and experienced the suffering, the pain, that we all know all too well.
And even though we all know we will die, even though we know suffering, our society tries to make us forget. We don’t talk much about it. But we do talk about anti-aging creams and uploading our consciousness to the cloud and putting our bodies into cryosleep.
I think we hide from death because if we acknowledge its reality, we’re afraid we’ll just get stuck in a spiral of despair and hopelessness. If we acknowledge the reality of death and suffering, we won’t be able to stop seeing it all around us.
So we sit in our own gardens, dulling our senses and numbing out, because it’s too hard to look death in the face.
And yet this is what God invites us to tonight. As we remember our Lord’s suffering and death, we have an opportunity to be honest. To be honest about our own sin, the ways that we cut ourselves off from God and one another. The ways we don’t love our neighbors or ourselves.
We can be honest about the intolerable suffering in the world. We look at the ways that there are countless little crucifixions happening every day, in every country, every city, every neighborhood.
And that can be overwhelming and fill us with dread. But that is why God came into the universe. That is why Jesus died on the cross. That is why we’re here tonight.
Because the gardens remind us that even when there is death all around us, there is new life as well. As Jesus is dying on the cross, he sees his mother there. As he saw her heart being broken, I’m sure it broke his heart as well.
So he did a little miracle there. He brought his mother and his beloved disciple together, giving them to one other, making a new family, new life, in the midst of pain and death.
And after he died, his side was pierced, and out flowed water and blood. Many traditions have arisen connected to this moment, pointing out that blood and water also often accompany birth.
And together with the Word of God, water brings us into God’s family in baptism and wine becomes the Blood of Christ, shed for us, in the eucharist. In the midst of death, even after Jesus’ own death, he is making new life. Giving new life to us.
Because Jesus’s death was like ours but also entirely unlike ours. He died as a man, but that’s not all he is. He is the Lord of Life, the uncreated Second Person of the Trinity, the eternal Word of God. He died like us, but his death shows us that death never gets the final word. It feels dark and gloomy tonight, but the Lord of Life has something else coming.
This pain, this grief we feel tonight is familiar because we live in a world where it often feels like death is winning. It can feel like God is far off, just watching from a distance, unable or unwilling to intervene.
So I say, if you’re wondering where God is in our suffering, in this broken world, look to Jesus in the garden.
Look to Jesus in the garden, praying for us, even as we betray him. Look to Jesus in the garden, with his own broken heart, grafting his mother and his friend into one new family.
Look to Jesus in the garden, dying a death like ours, so that we might join his eternal life. Look to Jesus in the garden, being buried in a tomb … our tomb … so that death … our death … cannot have the final word.
May it be so.
