Readings for the Day:
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Before the final battle with the White Witch Jadis in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Aslan goes to meet her at the Stone Table.
It turns out that when Aslan and Jadis made their deal for Edmund, the Pevensie sibling who strayed and followed the witch, this was it. Aslan would give Himself up to Jadis' will.
She and the other monsters and ghouls who follow her take Aslan, shear Him, and tie Him to the Table. Once they have Him at His most vulnerable, they jeer and curse at Him. Then the White Witch takes her knife and stabs Him.
It is horrible and messy and cruel. This is not a good way to die. It is vulnerable and violent. It is petty and tragic. It is gruesome death caused by equally gruesome and evil creatures.
All this is observed by the two Pevensie sisters, Susan and Lucy. Their concern for Aslan keeps them from sleeping, so they follow Him to the Stone Table and, at His request, hide to avoid being seen by the White Witch.
Afterwards they mourn for Aslan. They tend to His body and try to keep it safe.
This isn't for a brief moment. They truly find Him dead. They stay by His body throughout the night so no one can do anything worse to Him. They wait through the night cold, mourning, and afraid.
This death itself isn't merely a small part of the book. The death itself takes a whole chapter, and then half more to go through the aftermath.
Today is about mourning, and like Aslan's story, it is only part of a larger whole. Yet it too is a major part. It is a separate part, and we need to keep it that way.
Jesus truly was dead at the Crucifixion. They laid His cold, dead body in a tomb. The mourning His family and Disciples felt was real. The fear His followers had that they would be the next to be killed was real too.
Jesus' death wasn't clean either. Crucifixion was a horrible way to die. Even today, it is at the top of the list of most painful ways to come to an end. It involved holding yourself up to breathe with nails through your bones and crowds watching close, jeering all the while. It involved being stripped naked for it. When you couldn't hold yourself up anymore, you would suffocate to death. The Roman soldiers breaking the legs of those on either side of Jesus, that would have been a mercy to them after all they had just endured.
Jesus' death wasn't an honorable one. It was how you killed criminals. It was messy and cruel and horrible. It is one of the worst ways you can die.
All this was for us. Just as Aslan dies for Edmund, Jesus dies for each and everyone of us individually. He endures this pain for us. He endures this out of love for us.
We need to take this time to mourn what has happened. We need time to sit with its reality. If we don't, what is to follow will have lost something. If we don't, then what we see ahead will have lost its flavor. If we don't take time to sit in the horror and uncomfortableness of it all, then what is to come will mean nothing.