How do you picture Paradise? A garden for "those who believe and do deeds of righteousness"? With springs of pure water, and a tree bearing abundant fruit at every season? How about the rivers of pure milk and fine wine, and the chaste maidens?
Ah, you've guessed it. This is not the Paradise of the Bible, it is the Paradise of the Koran, alluded to or described in 25 of its 114 chapters. (Strictly speaking, the Koran refers to Paradise as a corner of this garden reserved for "the most pious".) The Koran lingers on the physical details of Paradise, a place rich in physical comforts and material delights, a place in strong contrast to the rigours of the Arabian desert. Even the Old Testament prophets look forward to a future time when the parched country will overflow with "rich food and well-matured wine". Is this what we Christians believe too?
Let's leave aside for a moment the question of whether Heaven and Paradise are the same place. The New Testament uses the Greek word paradisos three times, and the Greek version of the Old Testament, the Septuagint, uses it some ten times. The word may have come into Greek from ancient Persian, and literally means a place with walls around - we would probably call it a park. This is the sense in which it is used in Ecclesiastes 2:5: "I made gardens and parks, and planted in them all kinds of fruit trees."
But the Greek Old Testament also uses the word to describe what God planted in Eden (Gen. 2:8) - a place where the man and the woman he had created would be at home, and out of which they were cast after their disobedience. Around Jesus' time, this garden became a symbol for future blessedness, as at the end of Ecclesiasticus 25 - a book which just made it into the Greek Bible, or the Psalms of Solomon 14:2 (which didn't make it!) (Another Old Testament reference is in the Song of Songs (4:12).)
Jesus shared this view that even after death, there was a place reserved for those whom God had blessed. He promised to the repentant thief on the Cross that "today you will be with me in Paradise." (Luke 23:43) This very comforting promise has led to some very uncomforting disputes.
For one of our Creeds declares that between the Crucifixion and the Resurrection. Jesus "descended into Hell". Not a good place, you might think, for the thief to be! But on closer inspection, this is not what the Creed says: the place to which Jesus went was not a place of punishment, but the abode of the dead who had not known him, the "souls in prison", in the words of 1 Peter 3:19. They too could share the joys of Paradise.
And the Reformers, appalled at the excesses of the popular mediæval beliefs about purgatory, were unwilling to acknowledge a state of waiting between this live and life in heaven. Or if there was such a state, Jesus would not be there, but in heaven. And if the thief could go straight to heaven, did this mean that some people might escape the Last Judgement?
Jesus warned his followers not to speculate about these things. It was more important to "be ready", like the wise bridesmaids. In the same way, we should not speculate where "the third heaven" of 1 Cor. 12:2 (which is presumably the same as the "Paradise" of 1 Cor. 12:4) is, or how it differs from the second or the fourth heaven!
Even though we cannot speculate about the where or the when, we can still picture Paradise, though. The third New Testament use is the promise in Revelation 2:7: "To everyone who conquers, I will give permission to eat from the tree of life which is in the Paradise of God." Here we return to the Garden of Eden, the place God made for us, the place where we are truly at home. Later, in chapters 21 and 22, the writer of Revelation pictures the tree of life in the midst of a heavenly city.
Garden or city, it does not matter, for Paradise is where God is, where "all manner of things are well." The delights of Paradise are not, as one reading of the Koran might suggest (or indeed any reading of the Watchtower!), material, but spiritual. The core of Jesus' promise to the thief is not "you will be in Paradise", but "you will be with me in Paradise." May we all come to share this company.
HD