Tuesday, May 08, 2007
Narnia Easter
Holidays are funny things to me. Too often instead of celebrating the important, they are the ONLY TIME we think about the really important. So, though Easter was a month ago, I think this post from Common Grounds Online looking at some of the Easter lessons in the Narnia books is worth a look right now.
Confession time, I love my God/King, but am most uncomfortable with the idea of myself in such a position, even as an "underKing." Some of that is my Americanism, some of it is my absolute lostness in sin, and a bunch of it I just cannot put my finger on.
But one thing is certain, what God created us to be, what He is making us into, is something much larger, much purer, much better than our conception allows. Whether it is royalty or superheroes, we are so stuck in the here-and-now, that I think the then is beyond our comprehension.
I think we set our sights too low too often. We struggle so hard to just make the immediate decent that we forget altogether the promise that the then will be glorious. When we do try to focus on the then, we let its outlines be defined by the now.
In the end we must focus on God and God alone, for only of Him, through Christ, can we have any decent vision of what the future portends for us. That and the solid promise that it will be far more glorious than I can possibly understand.
Related Tags: future, king, Narnia, Lewis, Perelandra
For it isn’t just in Narnia that all is not right until a human being sits on the throne. This is true of our world too. This is the picture in Genesis 1 where our creation as the “image of God” seems best understood as the way in which humans reflect God’s rulership into the world. This is the picture in Psalm 8 where the psalmist marvels at the royal position granted human beings by God. This is the point the Davidic kingship was supposed to make, even as the reality often made a mockery of the ideal. Eventually Israel’s prophets spoke of a true human king—an anointed one, a messiah—who would rule and reign wisely and well, at whose advent “the evil time [would] be over and done.”The kingship of humanity is a theme well developed in Lewis, best formulated, I think, in Perelandra. It is also a theme that I think Brits understand much better than we Americans, becssue well, we gave all that royal stuff up a while ago.
And this is where the resurrection comes in, the fulfillment of such prophecies. In the biblical way of looking at things, it is at the resurrection of Jesus that humans finally come into their own. Indeed, for the first time in the history of the universe, a human being is sitting on the throne. The empty, abdicated throne of Adam is now finally filled by the Greater Adam, the one ruling as the human representative of God in the way God always intended. And what’s more—here’s the astounding good news—Jesus, our human king, invites us to rule and reign with him. It turns out that the children’s destiny in Narnia is anything but arbitrary; it is the Narnian expression of our Christian hope.
Confession time, I love my God/King, but am most uncomfortable with the idea of myself in such a position, even as an "underKing." Some of that is my Americanism, some of it is my absolute lostness in sin, and a bunch of it I just cannot put my finger on.
But one thing is certain, what God created us to be, what He is making us into, is something much larger, much purer, much better than our conception allows. Whether it is royalty or superheroes, we are so stuck in the here-and-now, that I think the then is beyond our comprehension.
I think we set our sights too low too often. We struggle so hard to just make the immediate decent that we forget altogether the promise that the then will be glorious. When we do try to focus on the then, we let its outlines be defined by the now.
In the end we must focus on God and God alone, for only of Him, through Christ, can we have any decent vision of what the future portends for us. That and the solid promise that it will be far more glorious than I can possibly understand.
Related Tags: future, king, Narnia, Lewis, Perelandra
