“The Lion’s Roar” 

Easter 2008, Rev. Tom Martinez

Easter means many things to many people. For those who aren’t particularly religious it’s a holiday weekend, a time to gather together with family or friends. For students it means a day off, something which prompted Aidan to say Good Friday was, indeed, a “pretty good Friday.” For people who identify with the Christian tradition, Easter is a high holy day, the sacred celebration of Jesus’ resurrection. For pagans and Earth centered folk it’s a time to celebrate Spring and the resurgence of the life force.

And of course these different meanings are ultimately interwoven and intertwined, especially for a diverse faith community such as ours. We take it for granted and are quite comfortable with the notion that our human dramas reflect the cycles and seasons of the natural world. Our experience of ups and downs mirrors the ebb and flow of the oceans and the rising and setting of the sun. 

Like actors on a stage with a backdrop of the changing seasons, the grand theme of resurrection, of Nature’s awakening after a long winter in the blossoms of spring, is reflected in our religious traditions and in our personal lives. We see this especially in relation to the artistic life.

I’m sure Marian can tell us of times in her writing when the well’s dry and it really feels like the death of creativity. Then the inspiration comes and it feels like a miraculous rebirth and you churn out those pages. Remember Gandhi writing so furiously for several hours straight that a portion of his book was written with his left hand because his right couldn’t hold the pen. I’d imagine Matthew and Renee have known creative periods and lulls in relation to their songwriting. When it’s not there you simply can’t force it. You have to walk through the valley of the shadow of death and it’s a lonely journey. But then when the words and music come it’s like a bouquet of spring blossoms.

We experience these themes collectively, too. When the predecessor churches that comprise ASBC sold their buildings how could that not have felt like a death? Deep feelings of loss are elicited and a period of mourning follows. But then as the two churches merged and the momentum picked up there must have been a feeling of re-birth. Suddenly the two predecessor bodies which had died a death of sorts were experiencing new life in the form of this present incarnation here as a house church.

The challenge for each of us, as I see it, is to open to new life in situations touched by death or brokenness. This is ultimately what the power of resurrection is all about: the ability to carry on when all hope seems lost…. It is that creative moment when out of the void a song or a poem or a child is conceived. Often times this requires a degree of creative imagination, to see into the future in a way that imagines Life’s return.

Here’s a small example. Marian has a Buddha in her front yard that you see as you approach the house on a little brick walkway. The other day I noticed that it split in half just below it’s waist. I think it had to do with the freezing weather and water soaking into the stone. But whatever the explanation, it broke. And being a believer in signs and synchronicities I thought to myself, “That can’t be a good sign.” But when Aidan saw it he said, “we should give it to Joan, she’ll make a work of art out of it.” Joan’s a friend of ours who fashions beautiful mosaics out of old pottery and china, especially stuff with sentimental value.

And you know, call me crazy, but I think it’s all right there. Taking an instance of brokenness and finding a way to creatively transform it into something new. What better way is there to think of spirituality than simply that: healing and transformation. And of course I liked the idea of the arts playing a role in the resurrection of the Buddha. Out of the mouths of babes….

I think in a way this is what C. S. Lewis succeeded in doing with his Narnia Chronicles. Writing at a time when literal belief was in decline and liberal theology was beginning to dominate the academy on its way to reaching the masses, Lewis sensed something essential was escaping the grasp of this new methodology. As a writer Lewis also cared about the real lives of real people and was interested in reaching them with stories that had a sort of soulful resonance. As an intellectual in his own right with an appreciation for the power of symbols, Lewis set about to tell a story that would capture the power of the Gospel. 

Most of you know the outlines of the story. A group of four young siblings end up in the house of an eccentric uncle and while playing hide and seek they discover a passageway to a magical world inhabited by supernatural beings.

By having children be our guide Lewis connects us to an earlier, innocent and imaginative dimension of human experience. By having the children discover a secret entrance to a secret world he is suggesting that the journey toward a deeper spiritual experience is not always obvious, but rather it surprises us in unexpected places—when we’re at play.

Once he breathed this imaginary world into existence you get the feeling that he himself watched as a cosmic drama began to unfold featuring the age-old battle between good and evil. In The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the plot turns on the death of Aslan, the Lion King ruler of Narnia and clearly a Christ symbol for C. S. Lewis. 

Not just for Lewis, actually, but for Christian writers down through history. Suzetta Tucker, an authority on the subject explains that, “With the coming of Christianity, the lion like most sun symbols became an emblem of Christ…. One of Christ's biblical titles is "the Lion of the tribe of Judah" (Rev 5:5). The words of Christ are considered as powerful as a lion's roar.

Tucker continues: “Early Christian symbolists managed to make the lion a symbol of God incarnate by using the lion's front half to represent Christ's divine nature and its back half to stand for His human nature. The lion was believed to swish its tail back and forth in order to hide his footsteps. Therefore the lion's tail was considered representative of the way Christ hid His divinity in human clay.

“Another ancient belief was that the lion slept with its eyes open. St. Hilary and St. Augustine found this way of sleeping to be representative of Christ's divine watchfulness which did not slumber even as His human body lay dead in the tomb (Ps 121:4). The open-eyed lion was a symbol of watchfulness, guardianship, and vigilance in many societies. The prophet Isaiah considered himself as watchful as a lion over the Lord's people (Is 21:8).

“[Up through] the Middle Ages people believed lion cubs were born dead and brought to life by their fathers who breathed or licked life into them on the third day after their births. This belief gave rise to the use of the lion as a symbol of resurrection in pre-Christian times. Lions were placed on tombs as emblems of watchfulness and the hope of personal resurrection. Later the resurrected cubs came to represent Christ's Resurrection. 

C. S. Lewis drew on this rich symbolic legacy to create the powerful figure of Aslan. Like the figure of the lion, most of the details and larger plot movements are infused with theological meaning, such as little Edmund falling under the spell of the witch. In Lewis’ mythology, Edmund represents the human vulnerability to sin, which places him in danger so that the great lion has to offer his own life in exchange for Edmunds.

The witch thinks she has won a great victory and proceeds to sacrifice Aslan in a scene so redolent of the crucifixion it’s a wonder the agents of darkness don’t yell out, “Crucify him!” 

In homage to the Gospel accounts—where it’s the women who discover Christ has risen—Lewis puts Lucy and Susan nearby so that they are the first to encounter the risen lion. 
In one of the more theological potent scenes in the narrative, after he has risen from the dead, Aslan explains what it all means to the girls.

“`It means,’ said Aslan, ‘that though the Witch knew the Deep Magic, there is a magic deeper still which she did not know. Her knowledge goes back only to the dawn of time. But if she could have looked a little further back, into the stillness and the darkness before Time dawned, she would have read there a different incantation. She would have known that when a willing victim who had committed no treachery was killed in a traitor’s stead, the Table would crack and Death itself would start working backward….’ (p. 163).” 

This is the point in the narrative where the table turns in favor of the children and the forces of good and of course ultimately the Witch and her evil minions are defeated though in good folklore fashion there are many more battles and adventures before all is said and done. 

Surely this is a central part of the mystery of the Christian story. Down through history countless human sacrifices had taken place. But suddenly the story was being told from the perspective of the victim. Some say this is what is distinctive about Christianity. Though it’s difficult to sweep aside the death of Socrates who was clearly, like Christ, an innocent victim, as were the often referenced prophets who preceded Jesus.

But irrespective of who was first, the salient reality is that something new emerged in western religious ethics involving a new kind of compassion for the victim. With that simple shift, that deep magic that C. S. Lewis wrote of, the capacity of the system to simply make people disappear was called into question, never mind that we are making people disappear again today (sending them to secret prisons, etc.). It is precisely this capacity to call into question the most egregious injustices—the lynchings and gay-bashings, the extraordinary renditions—of innocent people that connects us to the living tradition going back to Jesus and beyond, “to the stillness and darkness before Time dawned.”

The task of the church in every subsequent age is to uncover the faces of the victims. After Aslan explains these things to the girls he proclaims he is going to roar. In her exploration of lion symbolism recall that Suzetta Tucker observes a longstanding connection between the words of Christ and the roaring of the lion. 

This is the power of the western religious tradition. According to Gospel legend it ripped the curtain in the temple signifying that no further sacrifices were required. In Lewis’ tale of Narnia the sacrificial table of stone cracks into two. The message is clear: it is no longer acceptable to round up the innocent for the benefit of the dark powers. There is no justification. In the same breath we roar out the name of Gandhi, of Archbishop Romero, of John Lennon and Martin Luther King, of Rachel Corrie and Dave Fontana. We say defiantly and confidently that there has been enough killing! We invoke the power of resurrection, that deeper magic that forces even death to work backwards.

This is the claim the thrust of western religious ethics makes on the moral universe: that just as the sun rises each day and we are able to begin again, so the cultural and social order will continue to be reborn and transformed by prophets, by the beauty of the Earth, and by every faith community bound together by the power of love. Let us question every justification for violence, whether it be voiced by people far away, or by our own leaders.

After his mighty and terrifying roar, Aslan says simply, “We have a long journey to go.” Indeed we do. May we journey together, with the courage and the heart of lions. Amen. 

    Notes:

For more of Suzetta’s lion symbolism, see: Tucker, Suzetta. "Christ Story Lion Page." Christ Story Christian Bestiary. 1997.  (25 Mar. 2008).

For information re the kidnapping and torture of innocent people by the US government, see the Oscar-winning documentary film (Taxi to the Dark Side) by Christ Church member Alex Gibney and/or listen to this NPR review of the film.