Paradise

Earlier this year, I travelled to south eastern Turkey and visited the monasteries of Tur Abdin. This geographical area basically describes a mountain which lies to the north of the vast expanse of Mesopotamia. Roughly translated, the words ‘Tur Abdin’ mean ‘the Mountain of Slaves’ or ‘the Mountain of the Servants of God’. For centuries, the mountain has been the home to monastic communities of the Syrian Orthodox tradition. I visited the monastery of Deyrul Zafaran, the Saffron Monastery, in mid-July. Dating from the fifth century, its stones are the colour of saffron – hence the name, Deyrul Zafaran. And then, I visited the the monastery of Mor Gabriel, where the Bishop of Tur Abdin has his episcopal seat, the monastery of Mor Yakoub d’Qarno, where the wonderful Fr Aho, had rebuilt the monastery, a new school, and these extraordinary terraces down the mountain side, where olive and pistachio. almond and pomegranate trees grow, alongside a few cucumbers and tomatoes.

Each of the monasteries was surrounded by extensive farmland and gardens. From the vines, the monks produce wine which graces the shelves of the monastery shop, where - I suspect much to the surprise of the monks’ fifth century forebears - visiting tourists can sit outside eating pistachio ice-cream in the heat of the day.

Just by the monastery of Deyrul Zafaran about a hundred metres away was a walled garden. I never entered it – it was a space reserved for the abbot and his guests. You could see the rich and luscious foliage growing above the walls. Inside was a small building – an archway which covered a fountain and a pool of fresh water, where one could sit and feel cool in the heat of the day. This walled garden had a name – it was called ‘Paradise’.

Of course, the word ‘Paradise’ comes from a Persian word, which simply means ‘a garden’ or ‘a park’. And Tur Abdin was a place where Persian influences abounded. You could sit on the steps of the monastery of Deyrul Zafaran and look out on the lights of Mesopotamia below, and see the heavy goods vehicles travelling along the border with Northern Syria to Iraq and Iran. Of course, this is also the landscape which inspired the biblical writers. It is no accident that they too speak of Paradise.

‘The Lord God planted a garden in Eden, in the east’ in the direction of the rising Sun. We can read the scriptures as the story of this garden made by God in which his people dwell at peace with him.’

One of my old professors, Nicholas Lash, suggested, with a subtle nod in the direction of the doctrine of the Trinity, that there are three ways in which the overarching narrative of the Bible is told: first, in the beginning, in the Book of Genesis, the book of beginnings, the story of the world is told as God is producing it, as it ought to be, but, as yet, is not: God’s garden. Then, in the end, the story of the world is told as it will be, when God’s peacemaking is complete: in the Book of Revelation, the world is described as a paradise with ‘the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, yielding its fruit each month; and the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations’ (Rev. 22.2). But, then, in between, there is another story of the garden ‘as a place of sweat, and blood, and pleading, and betrayal; a place of darkness, of the night, which is, however, also a place of most, mysterious appearance, a place of freshness and unexpected recognition’. There is the garden of Gethsemane. There is the story of the crucifixion, where Jesus says to one of the thieves crucified with him ‘Today you will be with me in Paradise’. The body of Jesus is laid in a tomb in a garden close by Calvary. And on the first Easter morning, Mary Magdalene mistook the risen Christ for ‘the gardener’.

There is a tendency sometimes to domesticate the Harvest Festival – but we should not underestimate the ways in which it touches on some of the profound themes of the Christian story.

For the monks of Tur Abdin, harvests can be precarious affairs. Precarious, because the weather can sometimes prove inhospitable. The thin soil of that mountainous landscape can be hostile. Water can be scarce. Farming can be disrupted by war and conflict and other external factors. This year, as we contemplate the shortage of grain resulting from the war in Ukraine, the failed crops which have followed the drought of this summer, we too have learned something of the precariousness of our food supply. We live in a world where crops are destroyed by floods in Pakistan, and where crops fail in the drought in the horn of Africa. The world is increasingly precarious and fragile – but the challenge of the Christian story lies in the fact that we live in a world where bread is broken to be shared.

Whenever we sat down for a meal in the monasteries of Tur Abdin, grace was said and then the people would join in saying the Lord’s Prayer. The Syriac spoken in these monasteries is about as close as you can get to the Aramaic of Jesus and his first disciples. Before each meal, we would pray, ‘Give us this day our daily bread’. The word ‘daily’ translates a curious word in Greek ‘epiousion’. It’s a term whose meaning has never been fully clarified. It is found only in this passage in scripture and on an ancient papyrus, where it is also unclear what it means. It has puzzled translators for centuries. The Old Latin translation offers the word ‘daily’. Jerome, in his Vulgate’ translated it as ‘super-substantial’, which was a way of describing the ‘heavenly’ bread, the Eucharistic bread, the bread of life. The Syriac offers two slightly different translations: ‘perpetual’ and ‘necessary’. In the Coptic tradition, the word used suggests the bread to come, the bread ‘of tomorrow’.

The range of meanings offered here suggests to me that the little Greek word ‘epiousion’ is a word which seeks to acknowledge the precariousness and fragility of our lives, caught as most of us are oscillating between those three visions of the garden. We may look back on the beauty of God’s creation. We may look forward with longing to the promise of Paradise, but we also know from experience that the garden can be a place of sweat and blood and pleading and betrayal. It is a place where we learn again and again our need of God.

The disciples in our gospel reading follow Jesus immediately after the feeding of the 5,000. There is a story full of allusions to the Old Testament, the manna given to the Israelites in the wilderness. The disciples seek Jesus out because they ate their fill of the loaves and were satisfied. We too come here like beggars, seeking bread to eat – and yet in this Eucharist we discover not just the scraps of food which provide us with sustenance. We discover that we are honoured guests at Christ’s table. The table is laid for us bountifully and abundantly. In this eucharist, all our hunger, our neediness, our longing, our desire, is satisfied. We discover that the depths of God’s grace are inexhaustible, abundant, overwhelming. Never scarce. An answer to prayer. ‘Give us this day our daily bread’.

Jesus said to them, ‘I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.’