The Grumpy Gardener – part 2

“You hem me in behind and before, and you lay your hand upon me. Such knowledge is too wonderful for me, too lofty for me to attain.”Psalm 139:5&6

The day after the raid on the garden when I was still clearing up the broken leaves and trying to shape the plants again to my satisfaction, my Master came walking in the garden bringing with him a kindly faced man, who came up to me and introduced himself as Rabbi Jesus of Nazareth. He then apologised for the incursion by his followers and the damage they had wrought in the garden. He looked around in some wonder, and asked me to give him a guided tour. I looked around for my Master, but he had gone, so I led Rabbi Jesus to in turn to each of the beds in the four quarters of the garden. I had had to build raised beds for the plants, as the whole city is on a rocky promontory and its soil poor and thin. The raise beds mean that the smaller plants are nearer eye and nose level, and the trees for a dappled canopy above, so I was really happy with the results. I got really enthusiastic when I talked about ‘fine sandy soil’ and ‘manure from camels and donkeys’. I showed him the fragrant citrus plants; oranges and lemons, planted at intervals along the edges of the beds, with the poor date palms at the four corners of the garden. Under trees of almond, cherry and peach, the beds are planted with fragrant roses and lavender, with blue grey artemisia to set off the pinks of the roses, and through the mounds of lavender, in their seasons, are hyacinths and scilla, their blue flowers enhancing the blue of the little lavender flowers. In their season, lilies grow in the shade of the pomegranate and red poppies wave in the gentle winds beneath the old olive trees.

“Where can I go from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence? If I go up to the heavens, you are there; if I make my bed in the depths, you are there. If I rise on the wings of the dawn, if I settle on the far side of the sea, even there your hand will guide me, your right hand will hold me fast. If I say, “Surely the darkness will hide me and the light become night around me,” even the darkness will not be dark to you; the night will shine like the day, for darkness is as light to you.” Psalm 139:7-12

At the end of the tour, Rabbi Jesus sat down on a seat near to the water fountain and motioned me to sit with him. He sat and contemplated the water for a while before saying,

“This is a place of paradise, a heaven on earth, and I am so sorry that it has been violated. What happened here yesterday was my fault. I came to Jerusalem riding on a donkey and my followers greeted me with palm branches and threw their cloaks before me. They see me as their king and messiah. The palm branches for us are a sign of a king, but I am not a king as this world knows it. Although my followers don’t yet know it, this was my final entrance into this beloved city. If my followers had not shouted their greeting, had not strewn palm branches before me, laid their own cloaks on the ground for the donkey I rode to tread on, then the very stones of the city would have shouted out a greeting to me.”

I looked at him in astonishment, wondering whether he was mad or deluded. He continued,

“I will not leave this city again. The Sanhedrin are preparing something for me, a trial and then my death, I believe.”

I looked at him shocked.

“If that is the case, then you must run away. You must escape.”

He looked at me, rather sadly, I thought,

“I cannot escape the task that I was born for. I have known all my life that Yahweh would ask much of me. It is only very recently that I have come to be certain that it is my life he requires.”

“But why are you prepared to give it?” I asked

“For you.” he answered simply, looking me straight in the face, “For you and for the rest of humankind. So that each of you will know and understand that Yahweh forgives each of you your sins, that he has provided me, his son to be an acceptable sacrifice for the sins of the whole world, both now and in the future. Your sins will be wiped clean with my death, and then all you will have to do is turn to Yahweh and love him.”

“But what about all the rules?” I asked

“The only rules I ask of you are, that you love Yahweh with all your heart, mind and strength and that you love your neighbours as you love yourself. These rules sum up everything the Priests of the Temple, the Rabbi’s and Teachers want you to do as a follower of Yahweh.”

With that he kept silence for a few minutes, while I tried to frame just one question out of the many that were bubbling around in my mind. He got up before I could say anything, rested his hand momentarily on my shoulder, and said,

“Any questions you have, wait a week, then ask my friends. They will be able to help you. Thank you for this vision of paradise. I will hold it in my mind as I face these next few days.”

He then released me, turned and quickly walked from the garden.

“For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well. My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in the secret place, when I was woven together in the depths of the earth. Your eyes saw my unformed body; all the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be.” Psalm 139:13-16

Rabbi Jesus was right. On the Friday morning when I went to the market the place was buzzing with the news that overnight Rabbi Jesus had been arrested and tried and today he was going to be crucified. I rushed back to tell my Master, and together we went to Golgotha, the place of the Skull, where cruel Roman justice was meted out. There on a cross, between two thieves, was the man who had sat with me in my garden only a few days earlier, and opened my eyes to all the possibilities of loving Yahweh. I almost wanted to reject everything that he had taught me about the love Yahweh has for me, but he had told me that this was going to happen, and that in the end everything would be alright. Standing at the foot of the cross looking up at Rabbi Jesus hanging there wanting desperately to believe in and love Yahweh, and have his love in return, at that moment I didn’t see how it was possible.

“Search me, God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts. See if there is any offensive way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.” Psalm 139:23&24

The Grumpy Gardener – part 1

AN HISTORIC PARADISE GARDEN

“You have searched me, Lord, and you know me. You know when I sit and when I rise; you perceive my thoughts from afar. You discern my going out and my lying down; you are familiar with all my ways. Before a word is on my tongue you, Lord, know it completely.”Psalm 139:1-4

The first time I heard these words I was standing in the portico around the Court of the Women, in the Temple in Jerusalem, and was listening in the distance to the Priests chant from their sacred scriptures. I had accompanied my Master to the Temple, as I regularly did, as I was fascinated by his god Yahweh. He had gone on through the Nicanor gate into the Court of the Israelites, to which he was entitled as an Israelite. I was and am a Gentile, a stranger in this land of Israel. On that day hearing those words I longed with all my heart to be able to be an Israelite, to be known by and to know such a powerful and loving God. But in order to be one, one has to be born of an Israelite mother. If you want to learn to become one, there are rules, lots and lots of rules, and the primary duty of an Israelite is to obey God’s rules. I am not good with rules. On that day I was unutterably sad.

“If only you, God, would slay the wicked! Away from me, you who are bloodthirsty!” Psalm 139:19

I am the least violent man that I know, but on this particular day I didn’t know whether to cry or to take my sharpest pruning hook, and go after the men who had clambered over the wall into my Master’s garden, the garden I have spent half my life creating for him. There had been a lot of chanting and shouting in the passageway outside the garden wall. The crowd, which judging by the volume seemed to grow with every new shout, seemed to be crying ‘Hosanna to the Son of David’. I had no idea what they were on about, so I just carried on tending my plants.

Then these men appeared at the top of the wall. They must have been pushed up on to the wall from the passageway below. They jumped down into the soft earth of the beds below, took their knives from their belts and hacked at the branches from the palm trees set in the corners of the garden. They took them and threw them back over the wall to friends outside who shouted for more. These were trees which I had carefully tended from seeds. They had not reached anything like the 100 feet or so that they should do when they are fully mature. It was not as if there was a lack of palm trees around the place, the Kidron Valley just outside the city wall was studded with hundreds of palm trees. Mine must have just been more convenient. When I ran towards the men to try and stop them killing my precious trees and trampling the plants in the beds, one large man wrapped his arms around me and held me kicking and shouting until they had taken all they wanted. When they had finished he dropped me back on the ground, and following his companions hopped nimbly back over the wall. I looked around numbly at date palm trees with no branches, with beds of flattened hyacinths and scilla, and I fell to my knees and wept. A life times work ruined in the matter of minutes, and for what?

“I have nothing but hatred for them; I count them my enemies. Psalm 139:22

My master was very forgiving when he came to walk in the garden in the cool of the evening. The garden is everything to him. For much of his long life he had been a merchant, travelling from China to Turkey, to Rome and the lands of the Franks and Britons. He found me in Persia working in a garden of such beauty and age that he was staggered. My teacher assured him that I was learned and strong, and that if he wished me to, I could create a garden such as his in his own country. So I came here, and with the help of local labourers, I have fashioned a garden here in Jerusalem.

All gardens in my country have water at the heart of them. It bubbles and runs and soothes the restless spirit. Building the rills and waterways, stepping them down the slope was easy, getting water to the top of the rills was much more of a problem. The water supply for Jerusalem comes from the Gihon Spring, but unlike any spring I have ever come across before, it only produces water intermittently, changing the number of times it flows each day depending on the season of the year. Back in antiquity the Israelites overcame the difficulties this brought to them trying to live in this barren place, by building a tunnel. In the days of King Hezekiah, the Tunnel of Siloam was built from the spring to a great reservoir known as the Pool of Siloam. My Master was given permission to build a small reservoir at the top of his garden with piping from the Pool of Siloam. Any water that we did not need was directed out into stone troughs outside the walls of our garden, from which local people could collect their water. I arranged the water so that it flowed down and across the garden, and bubbled up through a fountain that I had had carved for the centre of the garden.