by Jill Carattini
"Please—Mr. Lion—Aslan—Sir?" said Digory working up the courage to ask. "Could you—may I—please, will you give me some magic fruit of this country to make my mother well?"
A child in one of the Narnia books, Digory, at this point in the story, had brought about much disaster for Aslan and his freshly created Narnia. But he had to ask. In fact, he thought for a second he might attempt to make a deal with Aslan. But quickly Digory realized the Lion was not the sort of person one could try to make bargains with.
C.S. Lewis then recounts, "Up till then the child had been looking at the lion's great front feet and the huge claws on them. Now in his despair he looked up at his face. And what he saw surprised him as much as anything in his whole life. For the tawny face was bent down near his own and wonder of wonders great shining tears stood in the lion's eyes. They were such big, bright tears compared with Digory's own that for a moment he felt as if the lion must really be sorrier about his mother than he was himself."
Dickens often spoke of his characters as beloved and "real existences." I have often wondered if the "safe but never tame" Lion ministered to C.S. Lewis half as much as this Christ figure has ministered to others. Lewis was a boy about the age of Digory when his mother lay dying of cancer and he was helpless to save her.
"My son, my son," said Aslan. "I know. Grief is great. Only you and I in this land know that yet. Let us be good to one another…"
The tremendous figure that fills the Gospels towers above all attempts we have made to describe him. Yet had we been in charge of writing the story of God becoming man, I doubt it would have been Christ we described: "He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows, and familiar with suffering. Like one from whom men hide their faces he was despised, and we esteemed him not" (Isaiah 53:3). He was not the stoic, man of nerves we might have imagined. Nor was he the ever-at-peace teacher we often describe. He was, among other things, a man of sorrows.
There is, for me, immense comfort in a Christ who wasn't always smiling. As I picture his face set as flint toward Jerusalem, my fear is unfastened by his fortitude. As I imagine the urgency in his voice as he defended a guilty woman amidst a crowd holding rocks, my shame is freed by his mercy. And as I picture him weeping at the grave of Lazarus, and sweating blood in the garden of Gethsemane, my tears are given depth by his own cries. I don't grieve alone.
"But you, O God," cries the psalmist, "do see trouble and grief." Becoming man, the character of God was not compromised or misrepresented in any way. God cannot be something other than Himself. As Jesus knew tears, the heart of God is one that knows grief: "Surely he took up our infirmities and carried our sorrows, yet we considered him stricken by God, smitten by him, and afflicted" (Isaiah 53:4). "Then [Pilate] released Barabbas to them. But he had Jesus flogged, and handed him over to be crucified" (Matthew 27:26).
Perhaps mourning hearts are blessed because they are at this point closest to the deepest wound of the heart of God. "My son, my daughter, I know."
Comments