1-sided Jesus the Heavenly Gardener with Sapling Garden Flag

If Jesus is The Good Shepherd, He is also The Heavenly Gardener. Much less often portrayed in the Fine Arts than in the minor ones, the boy or the youth Jesus tending a garden was a motif popularized on late 19th-early 20th century devotional prints or, in common parlance, holy cards. While some series that included such images were clearly aimed at children, other images were printed with adults in mind. This is a version aimed at adults. + Jesus’s upbringing in Nazareth must have included growing things. His parables are replete with references to agricultural practices—from plowing to sowing wheat, from watering and weeding to reaping and harvesting as well as from pruning vines to crushing grapes. Though an artisan by trade, Jesus knew at least the basics of agrarian life possibly gleaned from watching neighboring farmers at work as a boy. Too, His home at Nazareth probably included a vegetable patch and, perhaps, even a flower garden. + Here, a cruciform-haloed Jesus is fastening a sapling to a tall, thin cross. He wears an artisan’s leather apron over a bright aqua robe. He wears a pruning knife on his belt. A gardening spade lies at his feet. Behind Him are a watering can and a primrose bush. + This scene has no direct parallel in Scripture, but the motif’s popularity suggests it carries some deeper meaning than just being a pretty picture. (Cf. our BK 017 for a contemporary devotional print from another publisher.) Two possibly allusive passages come to mind. The first, John 15:2, is suggested by the presence of the pruning knife. “Every branch in me that doesn’t bear fruit, he takes away. Every branch that bears fruit, he prunes, that it may bear more fruit.” True, the parallel is inexact. The quotation refers to God the Father pruning grape vines. But, the sapling has been pruned and has no extraneous offshoots. Is the sapling a metaphor for rearing a child in The Faith or, more broadly, for the Christian’s Faith Journey? That is, does being tied to the Cross result in growing straight and tall in righteousness? Perhaps. The scene certainly calls to mind a second passage (from Proverbs 22:6): “Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it”. + Image Credit (MH 006): Antique image in chromolithography captioned in German as Jesus der Himmlische Gärtner [Jesus the Heavenly Gardner] from a late 19th-early 20th century devotional print (Series No. 2151), originally published by M[ax] H[irmer], Munich, Germany, from the designer’s private collection of religious ephemera. + Quotations (John 15:2 and Proverbs 22:6): The Biblical passages are quoted from the World English Bible (WEB) which is in the public domain.