Narrow - A Christmas Reflection

 

Do you ever think what the first garden must have been like.  Consider that the One who had made all plant life; all the types and species, all the fruit and vegetables, all the flowers and trees, designed and planted a garden.   Each plant placed for maximum beauty and function.  Were there grassy lawns surrounded by Poplar trees?  Perhaps a gravel path trailed through a mass of daisies and bee balm leading to a Koi Pond.  Was the sound of the nearby river audible?  The riot of color from the throng of flowers placed in beds of fine soil and massed on distant hillocks would delight the eyes and fill the air with sweet scents.  The trees would have been impressive.  Tall cedars, even taller fir trees and rounder fruit trees. Add into this the fruiting plants, nut trees and vegetables. There were pears and pomegranates, Kiwi and figs, apples and cherries, and masses of berries; black, blue, red; all growing, placed in perfect proportion, in perfect placement.  The eye would travel over the low vines growing along the ground with the delicate purple flowers peaking out.  It would lift to the lower plants; wide leaved hosta, tiger grass, to the roses of a wild array of every color filling the sight with a prism of color.  The garden, east of somewhere we don’t know, was in Eden. Neither its size nor topography is known. But there it was in all is splendor and beauty, home to two people.  It was their place to work, to tend and since weeds were a thing of the future, the work may have been to tend each plant to help it reach its best, its fullest potential.  Everything they needed was there, food, work, friendship and love.  A morning of tending this beautiful place, and afternoons strolling in the garden with the Creator, that was their schedule.    The garden was full, exuberant, and wide and open to them. Everything was there for them, save one tree, one fruit.  There was nothing lacking, nothing missing, they had no need for anything, they had paradise.  Yet that one fruit which they did not need they took and in an instant the wide exuberance began to contract as a funnel winds toward the narrow end.  The garden behind them as the gate slammed shut and only a narrow, dry way ahead of them as they walked away.  Away from the riot of colors, away from the sweet smells at every turn, away from the abundance of fruits and vegetables, they walked.  Now new a schedule that required sweaty, hard, frustrating work in order just to eat was the outline of their day.  Now friendship and love were replaced with a mixture of blame and apologies, of love and hate.  The wideness of the garden became a narrow tunnel through life hemming in the couple and their children and their children.  Narrowing through the ages, an ever tighter squeeze, until it reached another garden, Gethsemane.  Since it is an urban garden, Gethsemane is different from Eden.  It is a garden of olive trees mainly and grassy areas, with paths to walk. It is spare and dry. 

   It was a place for people to go to get relief from city life, from heat and noise.  And it is the place Jesus went when the narrowing of history was at its apex.  Here He was faced not with many choices and only one prohibition, as they were in Eden but with one choice having given up the choice to be powerful, to be ruler, to be wealthy and famous and loved.  Here He wrestled with the one choice to do what was asked of Him, being finally only by Himself, with no companion, no helper, no one to go along with Him.  The narrow way, once He made the choice to obey, lead Him up a hill, into the darkness of death, down a hill and into a closed tomb.  Although it is more accurate to say that the narrow way, the long funnel of time, lead through a tomb, out into the sunlight in a new morning, a wide morning, an exuberant morning.  From a bountifully wide garden to a blasted field through a stone cave, He leads all who will to the exuberant paradise, the new garden where joy is the air to breathe and love is the common language.  Life is no longer narrow, dull of color and frustrating for there is joy set before us and hope as sure as the sunrise.  And that is why I celebrate Christmas.