Returning to the Paradise I’ve Never Seen

Sunday of Forgiveness, March 2, 2014
Rev. Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, one God. Amen.

Today is called the Sunday of Forgiveness, most especially because of the service that we will celebrate here this evening, Forgiveness Vespers, when all of us will ask each other to forgive what we have thought, said and done in our sinfulness. But there is another theme that is woven throughout the hymns for this Sunday that stands before the beginning of the Great Fast. That theme is also a theme of beginnings, though it may also be thought of as a theme of endings. And what is this theme? It is the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise.

We know what happens when Adam and Eve sin, when they eat of that one thing forbidden to them by their God, when they rip themselves away from the perfect harmony they enjoyed with the Creator—they are driven out of Eden. And God sets up one of the cherubim there at the entrance of the garden with a flaming sword, guarding the Tree of Life.

Although the Scripture does not depict their reaction to this exile, the hymnographers of Orthodoxy have imagined what happens next—Adam sits outside of Paradise and weeps for what he has lost.

There is a common expression: “You don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone.” And perhaps that applies here in some sense to Adam as he sits outside of Paradise. But I have never been to Paradise. How can you know what you’ve lost if you’ve never had it?

We who were born after the loss of Paradise find ourselves on this side of the flaming sword of the cherubim do not know what it is that Adam lost. We are born into this world like people born blind. How does a blind man who has never seen anything know how to understand when someone tries to tell him about what it means to see? Or about sunlight? About color? About beauty?

This is where we find ourselves. This is why so much spiritual exhortation can seem like nonsense. For a blind man who does not know how to see at all, telling him about sights like sunlight, about details like color, or about more transcendent abstractions like beauty is just so much non sequitur. He has no frame of reference, no experience to connect those words to.

Here we stand, at the threshold of Great Lent, and we are being asked to strive, to work, to struggle, to attain to a place we have never been, to beauty we have never known, to behold a light that we do not know how to see. How can Great Lent be a “return” to Paradise when we do not even know what Paradise looks like?

We live here, on the other side, where everything is broken, corrupted, incomplete, wounded.

Those born this side of the Fall of Adam and Eve are born without the memory of Paradise. We do not know what we have lost, because we never had it. We have never seen it. We never walked in Eden, smelled its air, tasted its fruit, named the animals, or walked with our God in the cool of the day. We have never known what it means to love without any selfishness or reservation whatsoever, what it means to have total peace, what it’s like to know that God is there and that He loves us without any question.

The good news of the Gospel that is revealed to us in a particular, powerful way during this holy season of Lent is that there is a light that shines into our blindness, a beauty that shows itself in our ignorance, a music that gets beyond our deafness. For you see, while Adam lost for us what was given to him by God, a new Adam has come.

This new Adam has emptied Himself and by His own will taken up the frailty of our flesh, the weakness of our birth, the exile of our expulsion from Paradise.

Christ’s experience of human suffering, of taking all our sins onto Himself, breaks through the “Catch 22” of trying to find our way back to a Paradise we have never known. Neither the season of Lent nor any part of the Christian life is about groping around for a Paradise that we cannot see, cannot touch, cannot know and wouldn’t know how to recognize if we came upon it. No, it is about connecting with Jesus Christ.

God sees our disconnection, our blindness to the glory of the Paradise that Adam lost. He knows that we are lost, that we are born so lost that we do not even know what to look for. He does not wait for us to find Him. He is finding us. He has come here to us by sending His Son. He shows us the way to Paradise through the Cross and Resurrection.

In seeking out Jesus, we do not have to seek something we cannot know, someone we cannot find. He is here. He is human, just as we are, of the same species as we are. He is present to us, and He has provided us with numerous ways to connect with Him. We do not have to grope around in the dark. In a sense, spiritual life is really quite simple. We just have to show up and do it.

There are so many ways to seek Jesus, to be with Him. We hear His voice in the Gospels. We see His face in the holy icons. We touch Him directly in the sacraments. And when we lay aside our earthly cares through fasting and non-possessiveness, we can experience those things all the more intensely. And perhaps most powerfully and poignantly in this blessed season, when we offer up even our hurt and our suffering and our emptiness and our loneliness to Him, He joins it to His own. For He knows what exile is like. He knows what it means to be far from home.

During His time on this Earth, Jesus was a man of sorrows. He was hungry. He was thirsty. He was homeless. He was hated. He was beaten. He was rejected. He was ridiculed. He was nailed to a cross. He carried all human sorrow within Him. He is the Second Adam. And just as the first Adam brought all this upon us through his disobedience, the Second Adam carried it all through His obedience, an obedience even unto death itself.

That is why we can go to Him, why we can meet Him, why He meets us in our own pain and brokenness. He enters into our darkness. He is accessible. He is present.

And why is it that the key to returning to Paradise is Jesus? Why is it that we seek Him out in order to find the home that we really have never known?

Here is the secret to why this beautiful Lenten springtime works: It is because Jesus is Paradise.

You see, what Adam truly lost was not just residence in a beautiful garden. That may have been true, whether literally or metaphorically, but what is truly lost in the fall from grace is, well, grace. What was lost by Adam was his communion, his closeness with God. That is what made Paradise what it was. It was that there was no separation from God, no imperfection, no corruption, no brokenness at all. There was life and light and beauty and glory, because there was God and because there Adam knew God and was known by God. And when Adam sinned, God comes looking for him and Adam hides himself—not because God did not know where he was or because Adam could truly hide, but because there was now a separation between them.

Thus, the Paradise that we lost in Adam and yet never knew we can gain in the New Adam, for He is that Paradise. And even though in this life it will never be complete, we can still know that beauty, that wonder, that sweetness and consolation, for He is that Paradise that was lost to our blindness. And then one day, we will see Him face to face.

To our God therefore be all glory, honor and worship, to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit, now and ever, and unto ages of ages. Amen.