Paradise Regained

As many of you know I have a huge appreciation/ slight obsession with the English Puritan poet John Milton. There are many things I value in Milton’s writing, not least his ability to add clarification and depth to the Biblical stories. His eight volume personal Bible study, Christian Doctrine, is full of such examples. While I wouldn’t claim everything in his most famous poem Paradise Lost as being necessarily true, he illuminated the story of the fall majestically and added new gravity to the nature of “man’s first disobedience.” His follow up to Paradise Lost, the sequel if you will, was another poem titled, aptly, Paradise Regained. I had expected Regained to be about the passion story: the arrest, trial, death, and resurrection of Christ in Jerusalem. Rather than what one would assume, though, the poem is about the temptation of Christ in the wilderness at the hands of Satan.

I was reminded of this poem as I prepared the lesson for my house church meeting this week. We are going through the Gospel of Luke chapter by chapter and this week we covered the first part of chapter four. In the narrative of his life, this comes immediately on the heels of Jesus’ baptism by his cousin John. The Spirit of God has descended like a dove and the voice of the Father declared from the heavens that this is my Son and in him I am pleased. With this affirmation of his deity and vocation, the Holy Spirit leads Jesus into the wilderness for the purpose of being tempted. Scripture is nonspecific on the exact nature and timing of the temptation, alluding to temptation throughout the duration of his 40 day fast, but specifying three specific temptations at the end of his forty days. Christ endures the temptations of Satan, responds with Scripture to each, and Satan leaves frustrated to wait out a better time to seek out Jesus. Christ returns to Galilee and goes forth to start his public ministry.

I will be looking at this passage in a few different ways over the series of a few posts, but for the purposes of this first one, I was considering as I wrote the lesson whether or not I believe Milton was correct in labeling this event as the time when paradise was, so to speak, regained. In a way, the specific time when we can definitively say that paradise was regained is ambiguous and open to different options. It could be said that paradise was regained at the moment of the incarnation: when God became man the dye was cast and sin and death were destined to be defeated. This is true. It could be said to have happened when God the Father declared Christ’s deity. This is true. It could be said to have happened once and for all when Christ endured death on the cross and was raised through the power of God. All true.

Artistically, I think it is clear why Milton uses this event. Paradise was lost not when Adam and Eve were tempted to sin, but when they conceded to temptation and sinned. Temptation is not of itself sin; capitulation to temptation is sin. Therefore, this exchange in the wilderness, when Christ stares temptation down (and he was truly tempted as we shall examine down the road), represents the moment when the new Adam, Christ, overcomes the deficiency and sin of the old Adam. The string of constant human concession to sin was broken. Our new way of salvation was not yet made complete, but after Jesus refused to yield to temptation the certainty of this event was made manifest. If Jesus had given in and sinned, redemption would not have been possible. He refused, though, and the promise of restored paradise followed in his train.