The White Witch and that Turkish Delight

By Jon Hagen

It was more than thirty years ago when, as a boy, I received a gift-boxed set of the Chronicles of Narnia. Renderings of various scenes from the stories covered three sides of the slipcase, and the pictures still capture my imagination. My old set now sits on my ten year-old son’s bedroom bookshelf. The Chronicles of Narnia are stories that my immediate family have enjoyed for some time, so when we learned last year that one of the books, The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, was going to be made into a movie, we knew we had a date with the theater coming.
 
Even if you’re not a reader of C. S. Lewis, I would still recommend seeing the newly released movie. Like his friend J. R. R. Tolkien, author of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, Lewis deftly weaves a biblical worldview into his stories. While I would personally not recommend that children under 12 watch Lord of the Rings (PG-13 evil is realistically and graphically portrayed as violent and grotesque; the biblical analogues need much explanation in order to value and appreciate them), the Narnia movie is much more child-friendly across all categories (so the PG rating). My eight and ten year-old sons both loved and understood it. Apart from two or three short scenes where the cinematography was very poor (the backdrop was clearly a screen with the actors standing in front of it), it was an excellent picture that I can endorse without reservation.
 
Because we’ve read the books, the ride home from the movie proved to be a lively discussion. First, as we were walking through the parking lot to our van, we noticed a large group of children piling into a church van. Since we saw those same children in the theater with us, I asked my sons why a group of church-related kids would be coming to see the Narnia movie. My eight year-old piped up quickly and said, “Because it’s about Jesus!”
 
After having read and talked about the book, it wasn’t difficult for Marshall to see the parallels between Aslan in the Narnia story and Jesus in the New Testament. In a land that’s overtaken with evil, where it’s always winter but never Christmas, there is spreading news that a Redeemer is afoot. Whatever He chooses to touch or breathe into, regeneration bursts forth. And when a traitor is found in their midst (we’re all Edmund in that sense), payment must be made for the capital offense. Like the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the lion Aslan of Narnia intervenes and provides himself as an innocent substitute for the accused. The mocking, maltreatment and eventual murder of King Aslan is a far cry from what King Jesus endured, but children can make the connection and adults will still be moved to tears when they understand what Lewis is attempting to describe. The story comes full circle when Narnia’s “deep magic” works to bring Aslan back to life; all real Christians will identify the resurrection power as the living hope that Christ embodies for us.
 
A few more scenes from the movie were discussed as we were making our way home, and then Nick asked, “Daddy, why was the White Witch so beautiful and all her workers so ugly?” Lewis himself had an answer for that question, but for a ten year-old there was some paraphrasing to do. If the White Witch were as externally ugly as the evil within her, Edmund wouldn’t have given her a second look; if the Turkish delight she created didn’t satisfy his cravings, Edmund would have looked elsewhere for joy. I’m taking these thoughts from Lewis’s sermon-turned-essay entitled, “The Weight of Glory,” which deserves multiple readings because its grand insight is deep enough to require reflection and worthy enough to require our time.
 
Here’s the Lewis excerpt I had in mind when talking to Nick: “Now, if we are made for heaven, the desire for our proper place will be already in us, but not yet attached to the true object, and will even appear as the rival of that object [i.e., beauty itself is not the error; not discerning beyond the surface is]. If a transtemporal, transfinite good [a good that exceeds both time and space] is our real destiny, then any other good on which our desire fixes must be in some degree fallacious, must bear at best only a symbolical relation to what will truly satisfy. The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust in them [i.e., trust them to yield lasting joy]; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself [i.e., for Christ Himself], they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers.” And that’s what Edmund discovered at great expense both to himself and to those near him.
 
The conversation we had around Nick’s question and my reply was similar to others we’ve had in the hope that it would nurture a growing spiritual discernment within each of us. People and situations are not always what they appear to be on the surface; couple that with the fact that the internal cravings of the human heart are hard to discipline, and the prospects are high that any one of us might easily be duped both by divines and/or desserts. Edmund wasn’t discipled well enough to know the difference, so “no” was not an option.
 
Once again, my aim here as it was with my son then is to think discerningly about all of life—from our food to our finances, from people to possessions. If we start with the sober truth that we should not trust ourselves (“Whoever trusts in his own mind is a fool,” Prov. 28:26; “Cursed is the man who trusts in man,” Jer. 17:5), we should then assume we are in need of outside help to “see” things as they really are. Enter Jesus. Jesus is The Wise Man, and the closer our relation to Him the more wise and discerning we become (obviously, the farther we are from Him in our functional trust—the more we want what we want—the more fooled we become by both our own desires and by the external gifts we mistake as being an ends in themselves).
 
One of the benefits we’re given through our relationship with Jesus is wisdom (a subset of wisdom is discernment) and an association with other believers to aid us in our journey down the road to Cair Paravel. This is not to say unbelievers are stupid; it is to say they cannot and have no desire to orient their life under God’s rule. Author, professor, and pastor Sinclair Ferguson puts it this way: “People do not see issues clearly and are easily misled because they do not think biblically. Discernment is like the physical senses; to some it is given as a special grace gift (1 Cor. 12:10), but a measure of it is essential for us all, and must be constantly nourished. This is why the psalmist prays, ‘Teach me knowledge and good judgment’ (Ps. 119:66). [Discernment is] the ability to ‘weigh up’ and assess the moral and spiritual status of individuals, groups and even movements. Christ’s discernment penetrates to the deepest reaches of the heart, but it is of the same type as the discernment the Christian is to develop. Doubtless [Jesus’] discernment grew as he himself experienced conflict with, and victory over, temptation and measured what is by what ought to be. Discernment is learning to ‘think God’s thoughts after him,’ practically and spiritually; it means having a sense of how things look in God’s eyes, and seeing them in some measure ‘uncovered and laid bare’.
 
“How is such discernment to be obtained? We receive it as did Christ Himself—by the anointing of the Spirit: through our understanding of God’s Word, by our experience of God’s grace and by the progressive unfolding to us of the true condition of our own hearts. That is why we should pray, ‘I am your servant, give me discernment’ (Ps. 119:25).