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One reason C.S.Lewis wrote his Narnia books
was that he shared the feeling a lot of people have
that the story of Jesus, the story of the Gospels
was so familiar people didn't notice any longer just how extraordinary it was.
It was the same kind of reasoning that made Lewis' friend,
Dorothy Sayers, write her great series of radioplays, "The Man Born to be King", about the life of Jesus.
She felt that people had simply forgotten what an extraordinary story it was.
Well, Lewis goes one step further than Dorothy Sayers.
He says, "Let's try and imagine the Christian story
in a completely unfamiliar setting, literally another world;
let's imagine Jesus not just as a figure from a stained glass window
or a Sunday school print.
Let's think of Jesus as a great, wild animal,
governing this other world.
Let's try and get back to what it really felt like
to experience Christianity not as just Good news, but as Good News —
something that nobody ever thought of before."
So part of the point of the Narnia books
is helping us to be surprised once again
by the Gospel, by the Good News —
as if it truly were news.
Not as something that was vaguely familiar
or even something that was very deeply familiar —
because for all of us, however deeply we love the Lord,
however deeply we feel involved in the practice of our faith
there is always that risk of it getting stale at one point or another.
And that's, perhaps, why the Church every year
makes us read through the story again,
makes us go through the motions again,
through the steps of the story.
"In case you'd forgotten, this is what happened when Jesus was born,
in case you'd forgotten, this is what happened when Jesus died and rose from the dead."
And Lewis helps us do this by saying
"Well, what if you have never heard the story?
What if this was as unfamiliar as it might have been to somebody
listening to the story of Jesus in the first century in some little town in the Mediterranean."
It's a very bold, very ambitious thing to try.
Lewis, I think, succeeds remarkably just by that
stratagem of taking us into another world,
by showing us Jesus by another name, with another face.
And of course towards the end of the great series of stories
Aslan, the Lion, the King of Narnia
says to the children that he has been slowly getting used to him, to his presence:
"When you get back to your own world, you'll see me there,
you'll know me there in another form" —
as if all this wonderful, elaborate, imaginative story about anoother world is
simply to get us back to where we started,
to our own world
and open our eyes here to the strangeness and the excitement of Jesus.
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