In my podcast on the life of Christ, The Extraordinary Story, I’ve been discovering all kinds of things I didn’t realize about the life of Jesus and what it means for us. But the most exciting has been the idea of re-Edenizing the world — a concept I learned from Bishop Robert Barron.
Here is the way I look at it: I’m a father of nine, and all my children have sinned. When someone you love sins, you get angry, and you want them to learn a lesson and change their ways. But when they sin badly — or suffer deeply because of the sins of others — you wish you could go back in time and undo the sin. You would give anything to return the innocence they lost and repair their heart’s lifelong wound.
Well, God the Father is, uniquely, a Father who is outside of time and space. He is also a Father who is Love itself. So when he saw the suffering of the children he had made in his image, he didn’t just wish he could go back in time. He did it.
You can see the Father’s restoration of Eden on the cross.
In the richly symbolic Old Testament account of creation, the story of the creation of humankind is told two ways. In one, God creates Adam out of the clay of the earth and breathes his soul into him, then draws Eve from his side.
In the other creation account, God creates man and woman in his image. Everything else he created is pronounced good, but after he created man and woman, it was very good. You get the impression reading it of a loving Father looking with immense pride on his children, and saying something like what he said of Jesus: “This is my beloved son, in whom I am well pleased.”
When the beloved children on whom he had showered love and affection turned around and trusted the devil more than him, the loss was devastating.
You can see just how devastating that loss is on Calvary.
On the cross, the Father carefully undoes his children’s sin, action by action.
In Jesus’ actions on the cross, we see the loving will of the Father. After all, the two share one Divine will, and Jesus says, “He who sees me sees the Father.”
The old Adam, following Eve’s suggestion, ate from the forbidden tree because it looked good; he was naked and became ashamed, and lost paradise for all of us. The new Adam, Jesus, following Mary’s suggestion at Cana, dies on the cursed tree of the cross, stripped and naked like Adam, but promises “today you will be with me in paradise” to a repentant sinner.
After Jesus dies on the cross for sin, he rises and makes it clear that he wants to build a new Kingdom, a new Eden. He wants to see the Father’s “Kingdom come” and his “will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” He wants to give his people their “daily” bread of life, and he wants to forgive them and see them forgive others.
The first things Jesus did upon rising are telling.
When Jesus rose from the dead, first he brought the miracle to the attention of his closest disciples. Jesus wasted no time in building this new Kingdom. After his initial appearances to show his disciples that he had risen, he focused on two things: The Eucharist, and Reconciliation.
First, he made it clear that he was present in the Eucharist to two disciples who were leaving Jerusalem for Emmaus. Then, that evening, he went to his Apostles, the twelve (well, the 10 — Judas was gone and Thomas wasn’t there) and, “He breathed on them, and said to them, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.’”
St. Augustine pointed out that this is Jesus remaking mankind much as the Father did in Eden:
“The One who first gave life to man by breathing and raised him up from the mire and by breathing gave a soul to his members is the same One who breathed upon their face that they might rise up from the slime and renounce filthy works.”
Doing this, Jesus said, “As the Father has sent me, even so I send you.”
From the very first days of the Church, Christians knew they had to do those two things.
St. Paul described to the Corinthians what some of the main duties of the Christians were: The Eucharist and the ministry of reconciliation.
The Risen Christ wasted no time in emphasizing both because he is eager to bring us back to our original relationship with the Father — or, as Paul puts it: “God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself.”
