In the third chapter of Genesis, the first act of shame is also the first act of religion. Adam and Eve reach for fig leaves — not to clothe themselves in beauty, but to hide. The leaves were not a gift; they were a cover-up. Humanity’s inaugural instinct after the fall was not to run toward God, but to construct something — anything — between the self and the gaze of holiness.
We have been sewing fig leaves ever since.
But Easter Sunday announces something that overturns that ancient reflex entirely. The stone is rolled away. The grave clothes lie folded. And the One who bore our shame walks out of the tomb in the full light of a new morning. The resurrection is not merely a miracle — it is a declaration. Death has been swallowed. Shame has been answered. The fig leaves are no longer necessary.
The opening verses of Genesis locate us in a world of formless darkness, with the Spirit of God hovering over the face of the waters. Then: Let there be light. Creation is spoken into being. Order emerges from chaos. Life is breathed into dust.
John opens his Gospel in deliberate echo of that moment: In the beginning was the Word (John 1:1, ESV). He is not simply narrating the life of Jesus — he is announcing a new creation. The Word who hovered over the formless void in Genesis has now taken on flesh and pitched His tent among us. What God began in a garden, He is completing in person.
The resurrection of Jesus Christ on Easter morning is the hinge-point of that new creation. It is not a recovery of what was lost — it is the inauguration of something the world has never yet seen.
In Revelation 3:14, the risen and exalted Christ identifies Himself to the church at Laodicea with a title that stops the reader cold: the beginning of God’s creation (ESV). The Greek word is ἀρχή — origin, source, first principle. This is not merely a chronological claim. It is an ontological one. Christ is not simply the first item in a sequence; He is the generative ground from which all things proceed.
The echo is unmistakable. ἐν ἀρχῇ — in the beginning — opens Genesis. ἐν ἀρχῇ — in the beginning — opens John’s Gospel. And here, in Revelation, the One who stands at the end of all things declares Himself to be the same ἀρχή who stood at the beginning. Alpha and Omega. First and Last. The origin who is also the consummation.
This is the theological gravity beneath Easter morning. The resurrection is not a footnote to creation — it is creation’s culmination. The same Word who called light out of darkness has now called life out of death. And He calls us into it.
The Apostle Paul reaches for the most intimate language available to him when he tries to articulate what baptism has accomplished:
I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me. (Galatians 2:20, ESV)
Notice the tense. I have been crucified — past, settled, done. The old self that wore the fig leaves, that hid in the garden, that constructed elaborate systems of self-justification and self-protection — that self has been put to death. And in its place, something new inhabits the same body, breathes the same air, walks through the same days: Christ Himself, resident and alive.
This is the overarching theology of baptism and of Easter together. Living without shame is not a therapeutic achievement or a spiritual discipline. It is a consequence of death and resurrection. The shame that clung to the old self was buried in the water. It has no claim on the one who has been raised.
I have heard it said of some tribes in Northern Africa that they hold the tradition of treading on fig leaves as they leave the baptismal font — the newly baptized stepping deliberately over the scattered leaves as a symbol of treading on the shame of their former lives, embracing the truth that they are newborn. The theology embedded in that single gesture is striking in its precision.
The fig leaves — humanity’s first instinct toward shame and self-cover — are not reverently preserved. They are walked over. Crushed underfoot. Left behind at the water’s edge.
That is exactly what the resurrection makes possible. The one who has been buried with Christ and raised in newness of life does not carry the old wardrobe out of the water. The fig leaves stay behind. What rises is someone dressed differently — clothed, as Paul elsewhere says, with Christ (Galatians 3:27, ESV).
On Easter morning, when Mary stands weeping outside the empty tomb and mistakes the risen Christ for a gardener, she is not wrong about the setting. She simply does not yet understand who this Gardener is.
He is the new Adam, standing in the new garden, on the first day of the new creation. He is not recovering what was lost in Eden — He is inaugurating something Eden itself was only ever pointing toward. He is the ἀρχή made flesh, the beginning who has broken open a new beginning for all who are joined to Him by water and faith. The shame that began in a garden ends in a garden. The fig leaves that were woven in fear are crushed beneath resurrection feet.
To be baptized into Christ is to be drawn into that inaugurating moment. To be raised with Him is to stand, blinking, in the light of a world that death no longer governs. The liturgical declaration over the newly baptized is not ceremony — it is news. The best kind of news.
Buried with Christ in death.
Raised again in newness of life.
The fig leaves stay in the water.
Walk forward.
From one man He made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and He marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands. God did this so that they would seek Him and perhaps reach out for Him and find Him, though He is not far from any one of us. Acts 17:26-27