Saving Paradise

A friend and I went to Tulsa recently for a Minister’s Week conference sponsored by the Disciples of Christ and heard Rita Nakashima Brock speak about her new book written with Rebecca Ann Parker. It is called “Saving Paradise”.

Art historians had told them there was no art depicting the crucifixion for a thousand years after Jesus died. They did not believe that was true so they embarked on a five year research trip to the Mediterranean to find whether such a thing actually was so. They were aware that most people of that early age were illiterate and could neither read nor write so all they knew about their Christian heritage was learned from the church leaders and from the art depicted in the churches.

So the pair began in Rome and descended into the catacombs to check the oldest Christian art to be found. There were many scenes painted on the cave walls depicting Jesus in life and at his work of healing and preaching, but none of a crucified Jesus. Next they traveled to the St. Sabina church, where they had heard there might be a crucifix scene. There they found the image of Jesus between two others but they were not on crosses. Their hands were nailed to blocks of wood and they were alive and wide awake. This Jesus depicted victory over death. Finally they traveled to Turkey where there were the crumbling remains of ninth to eleventh century monasteries. They failed to find even one dead Jesus. In the sixth century St. Apollinare Nuovo Church they found the earliest surviving story of the life of Jesus. They examined twenty six panels but found no crucified Jesus.

They found no crucifixions in any of Ravenna’s early churches. The death of Jesus, it seemed, was not a key to meaning, not an image of devotion, not a ritual symbol of faith for the early Christians who worshipped among the church’s glittering mosaics.

So what was the theme of all that early Christian art? It was paradise. Not an otherworldly paradise at all. It was a paradise of this world. Paradise, in this world, they realized was the dominant image of early Christian statuary. Life in this world was the place of salvation. Spiritual disciplines were the key to being at home in the world of paradise. Christians understood that they failed often to live as they should but their failures were not a sign of paradise lost but a sign of their failure to live ethically in it.

As I listened to her lectures, I realized that not much has changed in our failure to live ethically in our world. We all still struggle with that. Our world could still be a paradise if we could all only win that struggle with ourselves. If we were to put our emphasis on living life well in this world, loving one another, winning peace peacefully and working through our differences in the way Jesus taught, paradise would be saved.