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In the most famous and beloved of C.S. Lewis’ Narnia series, The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, four siblings- Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy- find themselves in the land of Narnia where they must help fight the evil White Witch and restore peace. They return to their own world where, after a year of their lives back home, the are suddenly transported once again to Narnia in the book Prince Caspian.
Their task now is to find and help Prince Caspian take his rightful place on the throne of Narnia, once again bringing peace to the land. As they travel to meet Caspian, they find a fork in the road. One leads up deep through the forest while another leads down by a river which, on all accounts, is the more sensible way to go.
At this time Lucy sees Aslan, the great lion who led the charge against the White Witch and is the stand-in for God in the Narnia series. Lucy spies Aslan on the road leading into the forest, and she urges her siblings to go in that direction. No one else can see Aslan, so they make their way to the lower path instead. Almost immediately they regret the decision as it turns out to be much harder than they expected, and the children loose a day of travel getting nowhere.
After they set up camp for the night, Lucy feels a pull to a place where she finds herself face-to-face with Aslan. He tells her they do not have much time and need to leave now. Lucy immediately blames her family for not having done the right thing. Aslan is merely silent, and Lucy realizes the truth. Her siblings aren’t the only ones in the wrong. She could have left them to follow Aslan. After all, she would never be alone with Him by her side. As she talks further with Aslan, gaining truth from His silences, she realizes that if her siblings continue to refuse to go with her, she will have to make the way on her own to follow Aslan to the place where Prince Caspian currently resides.
Thankfully all ends well. Lucy’s siblings do follow her and eventually see Aslan for themselves. From this experience, Lucy learns that she is not as good as she thought. She is not always right. It is only when she follows Aslan, follows God, that she is doing what is just, even if she is the only one on that course.
Lucy’s own journey with herself mirrors what we see in our Scripture lessons for today. In the Tanakh, the Old Testament, we find two sides. One is the wandering away from God we see in the Book of the Prophet Jeremiah. The other, from the Psalm, envisions a time where we will dwell with God and the happiness that follows. This happiness comes because, as Jeremiah reminds us, the presence of God protects us from the time of trouble, just as Lucy was safeguarded by Aslan. We see the same in 2 Timothy where the writer reminds us that God, standing by us in trouble, can save us even from the lion’s mouth.
This dichotomy between following God and wandering our own way takes an unexpected turn in the Gospel. There we witness two people in the Temple, one a Pharisee, the other a tax collector.
Now the Pharisees were seen as the epitome of following God. They strictly kept the Law given by God to Moses. They modeled their life after trying to do all God said and being good.
Tax collectors, on the other hand, were viewed very poorly in Jesus’ day. They were people given a commission by the Roman Empire to collect everyone’s taxes for the year, except they weren’t paid anything for their services. The only way a tax collector could make a living was to increase what people owed and pocket the change. Roman law meant that no one could do anything about what tax collectors demanded from the people. Some collectors would charge massive amounts, leading the Israelites to see them not only as working with their oppressors but also stealing their livelihood.
Yet something interesting happens in the Temple during Jesus’ story. The Pharisee is self-centered, puffing himself up with claims of his own goodness. The Tax Collector, on the other hand, addresses God with humility, recognizing his own sin.
Paul states in Romans that “We have all sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.” This is true whether we are the scum of the earth like the Tax Collector or a seemingly righteous person like the Pharisee. It is even true for someone as spiritually attune as Lucy, who comes to see her own flaws and shortcomings thanks to Aslan.
The truth is we are all broken. For those of us who have broken a bone, possess scars from surgery, or live with a replacement joint, we know this physically. When it comes to all of us, we just have to look at our lives and the hardships and cruelties we have experienced and inflicted to know something is wrong.
Jesus in His Parable makes us painfully aware of our shortcomings, just as Aslan does for Lucy in their conversation. Yet that is exactly what we need to move forward. When Jesus ends His Parable, He tells us that the Tax Collector is the one who goes “home justified… for all who exalt themselves will be humbled, but all who humble themselves will be exalted.”
Before we can choose the road that leads back to God, we first need to come to terms with our brokenness. Lucy, though spiritually sound, had to come to experience this for herself. The Tax Collector, a more obviously sinful person, needed to witness this for himself too. The only one who fails to understand is the Pharisee, the one everyone in Jesus’ time would have seen as good and upstanding.
No matter how good we may think we are, we all are broken. We all have weaknesses. We all sin and fall short of the glory of God. Instead of puffing ourselves up like the Pharisee, we need to see our limitations and realize that God and only God can help us make it back to dwell in the presence of our Lord.