BBC Radio 4 2016-10-25

Good morning. One of Europe’s most magnificent medieval paintings, The Ghent Altarpiece, has recently been restored. The central panel is a vast representation of paradise. People from all nations, races and cultures stream in towards the centre from the four corners of the painting.

That altarpiece is a radiant representation of Christian hope. It’s an inclusive vision of reconciliation, beyond all the divisions and conflicts of history. It expresses our human yearning for peace and unity.

The painting’s inward gathering of people towards the source of life seems the very opposite of what’s happening in Calais as the camp there is demolished. The French authorities are trying to cope with a humanitarian nightmare, weeding out violent infiltrators from genuine refugees as they process applications for asylum and relocate people from what was a squalid and dangerous place. But many migrants will once again experience the trauma of displacement and loss. Fragile new communities will be torn apart. Terrified children will be sent to survive as best they can with yet more strangers.

There are those who say that Britain is no longer a Christian nation. Some say it with nostalgia, others with pride. If the Ghent altarpiece is indeed a Christian vision of paradise, then the hostility towards immigrants that has become part of our public discourse would suggest that those people are right. We are no longer a Christian nation.

But there’s no such thing as a Christian nation. Christianity isn’t a badge of national identity, but a way of life. The challenge of migration needs an international solution. Churches have a vital role to play in responding to the refugee crisis, but the catastrophe unfolding in France demands that all the nations of Europe work together to find a solution. For too many people, Europe’s borders have become a living hell, a far cry from that imagined paradise of the Ghent altarpiece, a European masterpiece created out of the symbols of the Christian faith.

The painting evokes a verse from Isaiah which speaks of all nations streaming to the mountain of the Lord. It’s a vision which suggests we might find ourselves for all eternity living among people of every race and religion, culture and nation, without borders or divisions. If that’s what paradise looks like, maybe it’s time we started celebrating it here and now, in the rich diversity and the vulnerability of people who are not like us.