Four hundred years ago the great Bishop of Winchester, Lancelot Andrewes, preached the Easter Day sermon in Whitehall before King James I and the members of his court. It was 1620 and Andrewes was by that time resident at Winchester House on what is now Clink Street, alongside what is now Southwark Cathedral, where he is buried.
I was reading part of his Easter Day sermon yesterday after I had posted my blog about the garden. So I was thrilled to read these words and thought you might be too.
Christ rising was indeed a gardener, and that a strange one, Who made such a herb grow out of the ground this day as the like was never seen before, a dead body to shoot forth alive out of the grave.
But I ask, was He so this day alone? No, but this profession of His, this day begun, He will follow to the end. For He it is That by virtue of this morning’s act shall garden our bodies too, turn all our graves into garden plots; yea, will one day turn land and sea and all into a great garden, and so husband them as will in due time bring forth live bodies, even all our bodies alive again.
Mary Magdalene standing by the grave’s side, and there weeping, is thus brought to represent unto us the state of all mankind before this day, the day of Christ’s rising again, weeping over the dead. But Christ quickened her, and her spirits that were as good as dead. You thought you should have come to Christ’s resurrection to-day, and so you do. But not to His alone, but even to Mary Magdalene’s resurrection too. For in very deed a kind of resurrection it was wrought in her; revived as it were, and raised from a dead and drooping, to a lively and cheerful estate. The gardener had done His part, made her all green on the sudden.
Lord, make us your pleasant planting,
quicken us
that we may live in the garden
of your delight.
Amen.
LIVING GOD 
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