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At the end of C.S. Lewis’ The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Edmund, Lucy, and their cousin Eustace come to the very edge of Narnia, nearing what they believe to be Aslan’s Country.
As they make their way to this spot, they find a Lamb, who beckons them to come and eat.
When the children ask if this is the way to Aslan’s Country, the Lamb tells them that they must find that door in their own world, for all worlds have a way to Aslan’s Country. Then the Lamb’s appearance shifts, revealing Aslan, the Lion Himself, in front of them.
Aslan gets ready to open the way back to our world for Edmund, Lucy, and Eustace. First, though, Lucy wants to know if they will ever return to Narnia. For her and her brother the answer is no.
Lucy is despondent, connected as deeply as she is with Narnia, but Aslan assures them it is time for them to start connecting to their own world, and that they will see Him again.
Edmund then chimes in to ask “Are- are you there too, Sir?” Aslan replies, “I am, but there I have another name. You must learn to know me by that name. This was the reason you were brought to Narnia, that by knowing me here for a little, you may know me there better.” Lewis, in writing this, is making Aslan a stand-in in the Narnia series with God.
After all their journeys, Edmund and Lucy thought they knew Aslan, but turns out He was much bigger than they could ever imagine. He is beyond their loyalty to Narnia and even beyond the bounds of that world. Aslan is not confined to a place or a people.
Edmund and Lucy didn’t have a full understanding of how Aslan goes beyond any limits they could have put on Him. The same is true for us with God.
Even the great King David had a hard time understanding God. There were limits on what he could comprehend. To understand why, we first have to understand that we, as human beings, are very tribal. That often comes out concerning what group we belong to or what team we support or even what area, in the country or even the world, where we were born.
Some of these thoughts seep into how we view God. It makes us try to limit who God is. God is our god, we often want to say. Yet this isn’t anything new. This is what we see with the ancient pagans. They thought they had their own gods, tied to the land, who if they prayed to, sacrificed to, and made happy would offer them protection, wealth, and all good things imaginable in life.
Sometimes this way of thinking seeps into our own thoughts today. This isn’t new either. We see this way of thinking impacting David’s own view and his desire to build God a house. David is thinking like those pagans around him. He’s thinking God is tied to the land, to his tribe even, and that, like the pagan gods, the Lord needs a place to “hang His hat”, if you will.
But God isn’t limited by space. God is everywhere, and the Lord essentially tells David this through the words of the prophet Nathan. God isn’t tied to the land of Israel. God was there in Egypt with David’s ancestors, and has been traveling with his people all this time. God, as we hear in the words give to Nathan, is traveling still.
Even in Jesus’ day, the power of God was almost seen as that of a genie, granting healing and whatever else was needed when it was needed. That’s not the point of Jesus’ work in this world. That wasn’t His purpose. He came here to help teach us. He came here, for when we failed to listen, to die on the Cross for us so that we wouldn’t have to. Jesus isn’t here to offer us miracles. Jesus is here to offer us something much greater.
And yet, as Jesus sees the crowd searching for Him, just after the Lord sent out the Apostles to the neighboring villages as we heard just two weeks ago, He takes pity on them. Jesus, we are told, “saw a great crowd; and He had compassion for them, because they were like sheep without a shepherd.”
God makes allowances for us in our attempts to limit, though. He does tell David that his son will build a house for God. Yet God also doesn’t detract what was said about the Lord roaming around. It isn’t simply a house for the Lord that will be built, but instead, as God says through Nathan, “a house for My Name”.
Jesus does perform miracles and healings, one being the feeding we will hear about next Sunday. He also provides teaching. He gives an allowance for the people in how they view Him, yet He also remains true to His real purpose among them.
We may try to limit God, and God may provide for us in our weakness. Yet God is not bound by land or tribe as we are. We see this in Ephesians. God is calling all to God’s Self, the circumcised and the uncircumcised, the Jews and the Gentiles, those who are near as well as those who are far off.
God is the God of all. It is now up to us to accept that truth.
God cannot be bound in the ways we attempt to bind our Lord sometimes. God isn’t tied to this land or another. God isn’t tied to our parish or any other down the road. God isn’t even bound by denomination. God isn’t a wish-giver or thing-provider. God is above all that.
The best we can come to understand God is to remember this: God wants to be in relationship with us, even though we constantly push our Lord away. To make that relationship possible, God came down in human form and died in our place in order to pave the way for us back to the Lord.
We should not try to bind God, but rather we should allow ourselves to be bound to the Lord. We don’t have any ownership over God. God is not bound by us. If we can allow ourselves to see that and if we can accept that God is God of all, then we can be open to the path God has paved us leading us back to God’s Very Self.