DEW ON WINTER ROSES [T, 2-1-22]

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter

There is no dew on roses in the time of winter.

In seminary we made fun of C. Austin Miles’ 1912 song, “In the Garden.” We called it “Andy.” “Andy walks with me, Andy talks with me, Andy tells me I am his own.” Someone said that it had been composed as a popular love song but had not made it, so the composer went to the religious market with it, where it became one of the great all-time hits. That was not true, but truth has little weight when we want to ridicule something.

I enjoyed making fun of the hymn, in the same way children enjoy making fun of the odd kid at school. I was a budding theologian, and this did not qualify as theology. It was a love song, not a theological song. It was romantic. It carried nothing of the realism and suffering and sacrifice and scandal of the real Gospel. It was the worst of self-centered Protestant individualism: “The joy we share as we tarry there, none other has ever known.” Talk about exclusive! It was dew on roses, not blood on a cross.

Miles intended it as a hymn from the beginning, but it is also clearly a romantic love song. By Miles’ own account, it is a depiction of Jesus and Mary Magdalene, after Jesus’ resurrection, meeting “in the garden,” to share a joy that “none other has ever known.”

It is popular, and not unreasonable, to think that the time after the Resurrection was springtime for Jesus. After all, he was going home, to “reign in glory,” and all that. But if you are the savior of the world, can you sit in heaven and be content with the world as it has been for these past two thousand years? No, this is a long hard bitter two-thousand-year winter time for Jesus.

It is a barren winter time for our culture, too, for we have removed romance from sexuality. Sex is physical contact, only. It has little, if anything, to do with relationship, with love, with romance. People who look at Jesus and Magdalene assume either that they had a conventionally modern physical relationship, or that Jesus was beyond all that sexuality stuff. They forget about romance.

One of the great things about “In the Garden” is its romanticism. Considering this long despairing two-thousand-year winter Jesus has had to endure, mostly at the hand of those who invoke his name as savior, I cherish for him that short romantic time with Mary Magdalene in the garden.

One remembered moment of true romance, of a time when there was dew on the roses, can sustain a body, even a resurrected one, through the cold of winter.

John Robert McFarland