Deeper Magic

Deeper Magic

I confess, I’ve had a long string of king crushes, starting with the made-for-television bachelor-prince who searched with a slipper in his hand for a girl named Cinderella. After him came kings named Simba, Henry V, Aragorn, Aslan, and Arthur. These and other kings have come and gone, charming though they were. But when I was eight, a greater King stole my heart, and I fell hard. I haven’t recovered; I don’t expect I ever will.

Jesus is my King. It’s as simple as that. He’s come to inhabit my heart and my life, and he paid the ultimate price to make me his. How could you not love a king who would lay down his life to spare yours?

Circumstances have placed me this Easter season in a land called Narnia—a land I haven’t visited in quite some time. It’s as beautiful as I remember. Maybe more. And Narnia’s king—Aslan—still makes my heart beat faster. Bound, sheared, and strapped to a great stone table, Aslan exchanges his life for that of a snarky boy named Edmund; he surrenders to the White Witch and dies.

Edmund’s sisters, Lucy and Susan, run back to the spot of Aslan’s execution and find the Stone Table broken, but they see no Aslan. Then a familiar voice speaks, and Aslan is with them, assuring them he is very much alive. Susan asks him, “But what does it all mean?”

And here, I give you Aslan’s answer: “‘It means,’ said Aslan, ‘that though the Witch knew the Deep Magic, there is a magic deeper still which she did not know. . . . 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.’”^a

I am the traitor. He was the willing victim. Death has come undone and “everything sad is coming untrue,”^b because Jesus, the only Son of God, has become and is ever my now and future King. There’s the deeper magic.

He was pierced for our rebellion, crushed for our sins. He was beaten so we could be whole. He was whipped so we could be healed.

Isaiah 53:5

^a C. S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (London: HarperCollins, 2000), 163.

^b This title of an album by Jason Gray (2009) alludes to J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Return of the King (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1994) in which Sam Gamgee asks, “Is everything sad going to come untrue?” (page 230).