In our New Testament lesson this Sunday, the brother of Jesus invites us to look at the evil behind the world's problems (specifically poverty and injustice) squarely in the face. It's difficult to look at evil honestly, without blinking.

I have an old print in my office that originally appeared in the first edition of C.S. Lewis' The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. The drawing depicts the lion Aslan being bound and tormented before his execution.

Lewis learned of the woman who drew the picture, Pauline Baynes, from his friend JRR Tolkien, who himself used her to illustrate Farmer Giles of Ham. When Lewis sent her the manuscript of his book to be illustrated, he included no instruction and left no clue as to any deeper meaning the story might contain.

As she came to draw the White Witch torturing Aslan, she found herself stuck. Each time she neared completion of the drawing, she would be so grieved by the evil that her tears would stain and ruin the paper, forcing her to start over again and again. Obviously, she was eventually able to complete the illustrations and be done with the image, but the image wasn’t done with her.

For days afterwards, she found herself, like Aslan, tormented. She was haunted by this scene of evil binding and triumphing over good. Deliverance from her heavy cloud of depression came like a lightning strike when she finally understood the words Aslan spoke after he came back to life:

“…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 has committed no treachery was killed in a traitor’s stead, the Table would crack and Death itself would start working backwards.”

Aslan was the Lion of Judah, the lamb who was slain from the foundation of the world. Most of us approach the Chronicles with this typology in mind, but not Baynes. She, like the disciples on the road to Emmaus, had her heart strangely warmed when she realized that all Lewis had written, like Moses and the Prophets before him, was concerning the Messiah.

I look at the image often because it teaches me, as it taught Baynes, that the subject of evil isn't something we have to avoid. James has us look at evil through resurrection-tinted glasses. For James, evil doesn't have the last word: it can be undone. The church is that place where injustice and poverty and loneliness and despair gets reversed. In the eucharist, we receive into ourselves a magic deeper than evil. We taste death working backwards.

Please join us for a Sunday full of realism, hope, and deep magic!

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