Self-Limiting Beliefs
I recently heard the story of a young man in his 20s who runs
into an emergency room with a pill bottle in his hands. He collapses on the
floor just as he arrives, and the medical staff hurry to pick him up. Amid his
gasping, he exclaims, “I took all the pills, I took all the pills!” They rush
him to an operating room to observe him. His vital signs are poor. Blood
pressure dangerously low. Heart rate failing. They think it must be a case of
overdose.
The doctor looks at the pill bottle to see what he’s taken, but there’s no information on the label. The young man mumbles that the pills were given to him in a drug trial. So the doctor calls the people who are running the trial and asks, “What was in those pills? We need to know so we can help this young man get better.” The researchers ask for his name. After a long pause, they respond, “Oh…he was in the placebo group. There’s nothing in those pills.” Dumbfounded, the doctor returns to the operating room and informs the young man. And within fifteen minutes, his blood pressure, his heartbeat—all his poor vital signs—have returned to normal.
It’s a rather extreme example of a rather common truth. What we believe determines what we experience. The student who believes he’s not a good learner and is destined to fail…he doesn’t study and then fails. The woman caught in an abusive relationship who believes that she’s somehow to blame for the abuse…she stays trapped in the destructive cycle. The young man growing up in the projects who believes he’ll never be able to get a “real” job…he settles for life in a gang, selling drugs.
Is Life Cyclical?
In the ancient world, people understood our experience in cyclical terms rather than linear. What that means is, they saw time as a circle. They saw that things are always repeating themselves. And so ancient mythology is filled with stories that explain these cycles. There are stories explaining the cycle of the seasons, why spring follows winter, and fall follows summer. There are stories explaining the stages of human life, how birth and growth give way to decline and death, how sons and daughters take the place of fathers and mothers. There are stories explaining the cycles of empires, how they rise and fall. The common denominator in all these myths is one simple idea: life repeats itself.
It’s not too difficult to see how this ancient way of understanding our experience persists today. As the self-limiting beliefs provided in the earlier examples suggest, we tend to see ourselves as bound by the patterns of our life, destined to repeat our past. I have a Buddhist friend from Burma who likes to say that we humans are like clay. At the very beginning of our lives, we can be molded and shaped. But as we get older, the patterns of our lives seem to fix in place, getting more and more rigid.
Perhaps we can notice this in the some of the self-limiting beliefs that we tell ourselves: “I’m just a procrastinator,” some of us might say, and so we proceed to procrastinate. Or “I’ve missed the boat” on this or that, some of us might say, and so we give up on an old dream. Or “the system is rigged—why even bother?” some of us might say, and so we resign ourselves to the status quo. Just as the ancient myths tell us that life repeats itself, so our own self-limiting beliefs keep us trapped in a cycle.
Gardens
There are so many things that could be said about Easter. Today, I want to narrow our focus to one element that we find only in the gospel of John. In other words, John has something special to say about resurrection that none of the other gospels do.
It all begins before the crucifixion. We find Jesus in a garden. He could flee if he wanted. He knows what’s coming. But he doesn’t. After he is crucified, we find Jesus in a garden again, this time being buried in a tomb. And then finally this morning, we have Mary mistaking Jesus for a gardener. Now, none of the other gospels make any mention of a garden in any of these scenes. Only John. So what’s going on? Why this emphasis on gardens?
If you’ll remember, John’s gospel begins differently than the other gospels. While Matthew and Luke begin with the birth of Jesus, and Mark with the beginning of his ministry, John goes all the way back to the beginning of everything. “In the beginning was the Word,” John intones, taking us all the way back to when God created everything that is in the heavens and on the earth. And if you’ll remember, in the beginning…was a garden. The world as God intended it. A landscape of care, where everything we needed was provided, and where God entrusted us to care and provide for the earth around us. God entrusted us to be “gardeners” in a broad sense. Gardeners with God. Remember that—God created us to be gardeners who would care and provide for the earth around us.
Of course, we know how that story ends. Adam and Eve do not trust God entirely and seek instead to be in control of things. Their overreach results in a catastrophic breakdown of relationships: between each other, between them and God, between them and the earth. This episode comes to be known in both Jewish and Christian traditions as “the fall,” in which humanity is put under a “curse.” As though we’re doomed to live in conflict. Doomed to live in alienation. Doomed to live in hard, fruitless labor. In one sense, this “curse” that we see at the beginning of our story comes to define our story, to limit it. All those self-limiting beliefs, all those self-accusations—I’ll never break free from this habit, I’ll always be rejected when it matters, I’ll always fall short at the end—are just part of the larger circle of sin that we believe ourselves doomed to repeat.
But another way to read the story of what happens in the garden of Eden—and “Eden” by the way, is just a word that means delight, so that the original garden is a garden of delight—another way to read what happens in the garden is to recognize that the conflict and alienation and hardship that follow from humanity’s failure to trust God is not so much a curse as a consequence. God simply tells the humans the results of their lack of trust—how life will be when they do not live in God’s care and in care for one another.
In fact, the rest of the biblical story can be read as God’s attempt to restore the garden, to renew the original paradise that humanity enjoyed with God and all creation. What else is the story of Abraham, whom God charges to be a blessing so that all the families of the earth might be blessed, than a story of God restoring the goodness of creation? What else is the story of Israel, whom God charges to be a holy people modeling the way of God for all the world, than a story of God restoring the goodness of creation? The problem is that humanity seems to believe itself doomed. It seems to believe itself destined to repeat the past. To live a life outside the garden.
All the Difference
The good news according to John is much more than a tale of isolated resuscitation. It’s much more than a single heroic figure, rising up from the ashes. For John, the resurrection is absolutely cosmic in scope. It changes the narrative completely. It changes the story the world has been telling itself. When Mary encounters the risen Jesus in the garden, her mistaking him to be the gardener is no mistake. It’s part of John’s message: in Christ, we have returned to the garden.
That ancient, deeply engrained way of thinking—that life is cyclical, that we are doomed to repeat the patterns of the past, that we are trapped in a cycle of sin—that way of thinking that has us rushing into the emergency room like that young man, thinking we’re on death’s doorstep…that way of thinking is ruptured in the garden that first Easter morning. It’s no coincidence that Paul refers to Jesus as “the last Adam.” Whereas the first Adam led us onto a path that we felt doomed to repeat, forgoing God’s care in order to wrest what control we could over our surroundings, Jesus as “the last Adam” has broken the cycle and brought us back to the garden. In Jesus—whom Mary supposed to be the gardener—humanity has a clear path, a clear way, to return to being who we are created to be. “Gardeners.” Not just in the literal sense, but in the full sense of people who live in and care for the life of the world around them.
Early Christian paintings and depictions of the resurrection regularly show the risen Christ in a garden paradise, Adam in one hand and Eve in the other. The message is clear: Christ has restored us to paradise. Not just later, in some afterlife, but now, if we would have eyes to see it. These paints show sheep, doves, shrubs, streams of water, starry skies. And at the center: Christ. The good news of Easter is that Christ is alive, and all the world in him. Christ leads us back to the garden.
As we saw with that young man who rushed into the hospital, convinced that his life was ebbing away, the story that we believe about ourselves and the world may make all the difference between life and death. If we believe ourselves doomed to repeat the past…then we very likely will. But in the risen Christ, we discover that our stories of doom are misplaced. God never wanted us out of the garden. In Christ, we receive God’s clear invitation to return.
Friends, wherever you are in life this Easter morning, please hear this good news: we are not doomed to a circle of sin and suffering. Life is not destined to repeat itself. There is a way back to the goodness of life that sometimes seems so distant.
And it all begins with the risen Christ, who restores us to be the “gardeners” we were always meant to be.
Prayer
Who does not leave us doomed
To repeat the patterns of the past
…
May the risen Christ inspire us
To see your garden of paradise in our midst
And to live as your gardeners
In the way of our Lord Jesus Christ,
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