Paradise Lost and Restored
“Today you will be with me in Paradise.”
In those few words on the Cross, suspended between earth and heaven, Jesus speaks not just to a thief, but to all of history. It is the divine reply to humanity’s oldest ache. To understand it, we must turn back to the first garden, where paradise was lost, and forward to Calvary, where it was found again. This is the great reversal of the tragedy John Milton once called Paradise Lost.
When Milton set out in his epic poem to “justify the ways of God to men,” he captured the raw sorrow of exile. In his epic, Adam and Eve stand at the threshold of the fallen world, the flaming sword behind them, and yet, as Milton writes,
“The world was all before them, where to choose
Their place of rest, and Providence their guide.”
That final line, often mistaken for despair, is actually a quiet prophecy. Even in exile, Providence is at work. Man’s fall would one day be met by a greater fall, the descent of God Himself into our darkness.
Paradise Lost
In the beginning, God planted a garden. He did not build a fortress, nor a laboratory, but He planted a garden. It was the first temple, where every tree was a sermon and every breeze a benediction. Adam and Eve walked with God in loving communion and enjoyed the fullness of divine assistance.
Then, with one act of defiance, they broke the harmony of heaven and earth. The serpent’s whisper promised liberation and delivered anxiety. Paradise, that perfect union, was torn like a veil.
Milton paints this moment with majestic pity, Eve reaching, Adam following, the universe trembling. “Earth felt the wound,” he writes, “and Nature from her seat / Sighing through all her works gave signs of woe.” The beauty of his language makes the horror sharper: creation itself gasps when man turns inward from his Creator.
From that moment forward, humanity became a race of wanderers. As Augustine wrote so well, our hearts are “restless until it rests in God.” This search for God can lead further and further from paradise with Him if we wander from the paths He has given us for our salvation. Worldliness and man made religion is the attempt to find Eden without its Gardener.
The Promise
Yet even east of Eden, grace began to work in the world. The Old Testament is filled with memories and foreshadowings of that lost garden. The Tree of Life becomes the Ark that rides above the waters. The Garden becomes the Temple, where the High Priest re-enters, if only briefly, the presence of God that was once enjoyed in Paradise.
The prophets dream of deserts blooming, lions lying down with lambs, creation reborn. The ache of the world becomes labor pains. Every covenant, every psalm, every sacrifice is a cry through the locked gate: “Bring us home to Paradise.”
Milton understood that even in judgment, mercy hid its seed. “Some natural tears they dropped,” he writes of Adam and Eve, “but wiped them soon.” They left Eden not under a curse of hatred, but under a promise: that the Seed of the Woman would crush the serpent’s head. That promise germinated through the centuries, waiting for Calvary and the life-giving Water that would flow from the Savior’s Sacred Side.
Paradise Restored
At last, we arrived at another hill and another tree. Calvary stands as Eden’s mirror image: where one tree brought death, another brought life; where one man grasped for his life, another emptied himself to the point of death.
Between two thieves, Christ the New Adam is crowned with thorns, those cursed blossoms of the ground. One thief mocks, repeating the serpent’s old sneer: “Save yourself.” The other, astonishingly, sees the promise of Paradise in a dying man. “Jesus, remember me when you come into your Kingdom,” he pleads. And Christ answers, “Today you will be with me in paradise.”
The angels must have gasped. The gate long barred has swung open not by force, but by forgiveness. Milton’s cherub with the flaming sword is still there, but the fire now burns in the heart of the Redeemer. The Cross, once an emblem of execution, becomes the Tree of Life replanted on Golgotha.
In that moment, the plot of Paradise Lost is overturned by the plot of Paradise Restored. The exile ends not in despair but in divine companionship. The thief, who stole on earth, now steals heaven itself in his last moments, the most beautiful theft in history.
Our Call
So what does this mean for us in this Great Novena as we prepare to mark the 2000th anniversary in 2033 of Paradise being restored on the Cross?
1. Trust the already-not yet.
Christ has opened Paradise, but we still walk through its outskirts. The Holy Eucharist is a gate ajar; every act of mercy is a small Eden blossoming amid the thorns.
2. Live as guests of paradise.
Joy is not optional for a Christian, it’s the native language of heaven. There is no greater witness to Christ that we can give than to enjoy the Paradise of His friendship in a way that is visible to others, especially in the midst of the suffering of this world. The saints smiled not because life was easy, but because Paradise had already begun in them.
3. Reorder your loves.
The Fall was a love out of order. Conversion is not suppression of desire, but re-training the heart to want what is truly good. Paradise is love properly ordered, and by God’s grace we can experience it on earth and long for its perfection in Heaven.
4. Don’t despair about sin.
If the good thief can make it before sunset, there’s hope for us before supper. The Cross proves that no past is irredeemable.
At the end of Paradise Lost, Adam and Eve descend the mountain, hand in hand, guided by a mysterious light. Milton closes with that haunting line:
“The world was all before them, where to choose
Their place of rest, and Providence their guide.”
For them, the road led away from Eden. For us, because of Christ, it leads back. The same Providence that guided them into history now guides us toward eternity.
The Garden we lost has been replanted in the pierced Heart of the Savior. The flaming sword has become the fire of His Sacred Heart. May we imitate the Good thief each day, seeking the peace of Paradise in the midst of the suffering world, as place our hope in Christ the New Adam. And when our final hour comes, may we, like the good thief, hear that thunderous whisper of grace:
“Today … you will be with me in paradise.”