The Unvarnished Jesus: A Lenten Journey

by Brian Zahnd

Here we also see the unfathomable depth of Jesus’ compassion as he weeps for those who weep for him—even as he is about to be crucified.

God is like Jesus. God has always been like Jesus. There’s never been a time when God was not like Jesus. We haven’t always known this, but now we do.

But Christ is never more Immanuel than when he is wrapped in grave clothes lying in the tomb. Yes, Jesus Christ is God with us in birth and life, but he is also God with us in sorrow and death.

On Holy Saturday Death dared to swallow God, but Death cannot digest divinity. Death’s brazen attempt to swallow Christ will lead to Death’s demise.

Jesus is not a conductor punching tickets for a train ride to heaven. Christian hope is not about getting from earth to heaven, it’s about getting heaven to earth. Jesus is not a lawyer to get us out of a legal jam with an angry judge. God is not mad at sinners. Jesus told Mary to tell his disciples that his Father was their Father too! Jesus is not a banker making loans from his surplus righteousness. Modern people love economic metaphors, but these inevitably produce bad theology. Jesus is a gardener! A gardener cultivating resurrection life in all who will come to him. The conductor, lawyer, banker metaphors are mostly false, giving a distorted view of salvation. The gardener metaphor is beautiful as it faithfully depicts the process of salvation in our lives.

That Jesus is a gardener with a good heart and a green thumb should change your perspective. I promise you that your life is not so blighted that Jesus can’t nurture you into something beautiful. The empty tomb is the open door that leads us away from the ugly world of Gehennas and garbage dumbs and back home to the God-intended garden.

G.K. Chesterton. I always anticipate Easter by reading this passage from The Everlasting Man. On the third day the friends of Christ coming at daybreak to the place found the grave empty and the stone rolled away. In varying ways they realized the new wonder; the world had died in the night. What they were looking at was the first day of a new creation, with a new heaven and a new earth; and in a semblance of a gardener God walked again in the garden, in the cool not of the evening but the dawn.