The Lion King and the Deep Story of Life - Part 3 - The Stampede

This is going to be a very unusual blog about Christmas. To be honest, it started in my head because during a moment of quiet at Midnight Mass this Christmas Eve, the Lion King popped into my head. I remembered that this clip was the next part I wanted to write about, and suddenly it occurred to me that weird as it was, it’s sort of about Christmas. If you want some context, have a quick look at the clips from Lion King blogs 1 and 2 (http://stuckontherooftops.blogspot.co.uk/2013/11/the-lion-king-and-deep-story-of-life-1.html) then have a watch:

Honestly, even if you’ve seen it a thousand times, it’s worth watching it again – partly because this blog makes no sense without it!

This obviously is a huge moment in the film – it’s so dramatic of course – but it’s worth noticing as well that there’s a sense in which it almost feels inevitable. It might be just that I’ve seen it a hundred times but I don’t think it is: when Mufasa lifts Simba out and gets him to safety, at that moment something in you knows that he won’t just clamber out after him and be fine. That wouldn’t be right somehow, that’s not what real stories are made of.

And I think that’s because we know from all our stories that the greatest acts of love are the acts of sacrifice. Whether it’s Gandalf with the Balrog, Aslan offering himself to the White Witch, Katniss risking her life to save her sister, or Jack at the end of Titanic: the ultimate act of love is to give your life to save another’s. As one great storyteller once said: “Greater love has no one than this, that they lay down their life for their friends.”

Now, for every story like this – every moment where someone makes the ultimate sacrifice – there need to be three fundamental elements to the situation.

1) Someone needs to be in mortal danger, unable to save themselves.

Obviously, Mufasa wouldn’t need to save Simba if he wasn’t in danger. Something I think is really powerful about this particular scene is the symbol of the gorge and the stampede. Simba is stuck, the walls are too steep, and he is too weak, and the stampede is coming, the clock is ticking.

And here, I’ll start explaining the relevance to Christmas – to us and Jesus. Of course in one sense, we’re definitely stuck in the gorge. We’re mortals, and we will die, and there’s not a lot we can do about that. But it’s not enough for me to say that – because if there is a God, why should it be? Why wouldn’t he just let people live forever? I remember thinking about this a while ago, and thinking – imagine it. Imagine that people never died. Would that be better or worse?

Personally, I think the answer is complicated. Because we wouldn’t have the horrible pain of losing someone; but then on the other hand, people are quite as capable of inflicting pain when we’re alive as when we’re dead. If everyone lived forever then people’s cruelty, all human evil, would never come to an end. We would keep on breaking our relationships over and over, and the wounds that we inflict on one another would keep on festering and festering. And physical wounds too: agonising illnesses and conditions would be never-ending. I think that if we couldn’t get healing for our bodies, reconciliation for our relationships, and restoration for our characters – then living forever would be hell.

If we are to be like we currently are – so limited in our ability to live together without inflicting wounds – then it seems like we need to be limited by death as well. I know that’s a big claim, and there are lots of other reasons that I think it’s true – so please message me if you want me to defend that a bit more. But I think that’s the reality, that’s why we can’t escape the stampede.

In fact, Jesus went even further. He taught that death is a full stop, but it’s not the end of the story: that there is a final chapter. He called it his wedding day: when the body made up of ordinary people from every tribe and tongue and nation, every person that wanted him, that loved him, that trusted him, would be his bride. And here’s the thing: he said that we could live forever, and that it wouldn’t be hell because if we’ll let him he is capable of restoring our bodies, of restoring our relationships, of restoring us to the people we were made to be. He promised to craft out of us an eternity which was colourful, and full to bursting with real life, and unscarred by hatred, untouched by tears. He claimed that this was possible because he could reconcile us to himself, to God – and because God is the source of all goodness, all healing and all forgiveness, that out of that one ultimate reconciliation everything else could flow.

But he also warned that without that centre – without us loving him and letting him reconcile us with God – all the other things that would need to happen to make living forever a good thing would be impossible. Our bodies couldn’t be healed, nor could our relationships, and nor could our personalities. CS Lewis expressed this idea in a way that’s strange but quite powerful I think:

“Hell begins with a grumbling mood, always complaining, always blaming others . . . but you are still distinct from it. You may even criticize it in yourself and wish you could stop it. But there may come a day when you can no longer. Then there will be no you left to criticize the mood or even to enjoy it, but just the grumble itself, going on forever like a machine. It is not a question of God 'sending us' to hell. In each of us there is something growing, which will be Hell unless it is nipped in the bud.”

So Jesus warned people – with tears in his eyes – that the stampede was coming. That we are in terrible, terrible danger from ourselves. And the walls are way too steep for us to just climb out of our mortality.

2) Someone else needs to be able to save them, but only at the cost of their own life.

This is the difference between the emotional depth of your average Bond film – where someone gets in trouble, and then at the last minute Bond does some impressive acrobatic thing and shoots some minor characters and rescues them – and the really deep war movies, or action movies, where for whatever reason the hero pays with their life.

Ridley Scott directed the film Gladiator, and when he was sent the script originally it had a different ending to the one it has now (spoiler alert by the way). Maximus (Russell Crowe) did all the rest of the film the same, and got to the final battle, the duel between him and the bad guy Commodus: and in the original script, he won. He won the fight, turned in triumph to the roaring crowd, and went on to save Rome. But when Scott read the script, he said they had to change the end. Maximus had to die. In the film, he does kill the bad guy, but he gets wounded, and instead of living victorious, he dies victorious. In an interview, Scott was asked why he changed the ending? He said that Maximus had to die, so that we know that he really loves Rome.

As some of you might have noticed it was actually Jesus who said, “Greater love has no one than this: that they lay down their life for their friends.” And he wasn’t just talking about how his followers should live – he was talking about himself – what he was doing. Christmas happens at 1 minute 50 seconds in that video – when Mufasa sees Simba, and jumps down into the gorge to get him. Jesus stepped down and took on our humanity, even our mortality. And it wasn’t that he didn’t know the stampede was coming – that he didn’t realise he was going to have to die – on the contrary he was constantly talking about it. He said that he had to suffer, be rejected and be killed,* that he was laying down his life of his own accord,** and he was giving his life as a ransom for many*** - paying the price to set many people free.

Jesus taught that the reality which we can feel in stories – that someone has to die, that the deepest expression of love is sacrifice – is actually the ultimate reality. That we need God to sacrifice himself to save us.

I know that again, this is a massive idea, it is the claim at the heart of everything that I am convinced of about the world, about myself and about God. It would just be ridiculous for me to try and say everything I have to say about it here, but honestly, if there’s anything I’d love to talk about, it’s this. So please do feel free to ask me.

3) They have to do it.

It’s not enough for someone to be in danger and someone to be able to save them. Mufasa has to do it. And he does it because he loves Simba, and he would give anything for him, even himself.

Same with Jesus. I tend to be so used to the whole thing that I forget that he was a real man, with real feelings, who made a real decision to actually do it. God revealed who he was by becoming a man, so we could see his character – see what he’s actually like and how he really relates to us – and we see him wrestling quietly in the darkness the night before he was arrested, sweating blood with anxiety about what he was about to face, knowing that he had the power to just walk away whenever he wanted. But he didn’t. He loved us so deeply, so completely, that he gritted his teeth and bore the insults, the mockery, the torture, and finally death itself. That’s what God is like. A man who would do that.

And he has done it: everything he needs to do to make it possible for us to be his bride on that wedding day – for our final chapter to be one that never ends, full of unimaginable, deep and delicious beauty.

To be honest at this point the metaphor breaks down a little bit – because Mufasa can only save Simba to live a life without him (well, sort of…). But Jesus bore all the weight of death, and then beat it. So he doesn’t just save us and then leave us – he saves us to be with him. And that means that like in any relationship, reconciliation is a two-way thing. He has offered us his life, real life, but that’s not it – we have to accept it if we’re going to be reconciled, if we’re going to be that bride, if we’re going to be rescued and set free into true joy. We have to accept it.

So that’s where I’ll leave it for now. Sorry it’s been such a long blog, but I felt like I had to do a truth so huge and deep and difficult a bit of justice. And please do message me, I’d love to chat about any questions or problems or anything you like about it!

But for now, that’ll do.

Love,
Mike

*Luke 9:22

**John 10:17-18

***Mark 10:42

Also, bible bit to look at: Isaiah 52:13-53:12

wife-material and the (not quite) leap of faith

I wrote this story on a bus in Africa. I wrote it because my friend Lara had just said to me something along the lines of, “You’ve talked about having an amazing experience of God when you got baptised – I think if something like that happened to me, maybe I could have faith like you do. But I’m not the kind of person who could convince myself of something like that, unless something happened to me like what happened to you.” When she said it I realised that I was not very good at explaining what ‘faith’ actually is. And to be honest, I’m still not. But I like to give it a go anyway.

So the first thing to clear up, is that Jesus was never that big on ‘faith’ just in the abstract. No, what he was constantly going on about was faith in him. About believing in him, trusting in him. Kind of like you trust a person. I heard somebody pointing out the other day that getting married is very much not about certainty. You can’t be certain that you’ll live happily ever after, you can’t possibly hope to know everything about your spouse beforehand, and you can’t begin to know where the two of you will go together, or what shared life you will end up living! All it is, is that you know that person enough to bet your life on them. You know them enough to commit. To say,

 ‘I don’t know everything about you. I don’t know what kind of person loving you will make me, and I don’t know where or to what loving you will take me; but whoever and wherever that is I want to go there, because I trust you.’

That is faith right there. And it’s the same sort of faith that it takes to commit to God.

But please hear me that this is not a Vegas marriage – it’s not irrational and whimsical and misguided – it’s thought through. In fact, let me tell you my secret list of criteria that someone needs to fulfil before I will marry them:

Things I don’t need to know:

- What their hair looks like first thing in the morning

- Whether they secretly watch ‘Made in Chelsea’
- Whether they can currently, or will ever be able to, bake an apple strudel

- Whether they will always or ever earn any money

- Precisely what they will be like in 50 years time.

Things I do need to know:

- That they are good, that deep down they are trustworthy and true, that fundamentally their desire is to become more like Jesus and to love others as much as they love themselves, and…
- That they love me.

That’s it. I reckon to bet your life on someone you’ve just got to know that their deep down nature, their character, is the best one you have ever found, one that’s worth your trust; and that they love you back.

And it’s the same with God. There’s a weird bit where St Paul writes that while he was introducing this bunch of people to Jesus he “resolved to know nothing except Jesus Christ and him crucified.” He’s telling all these people about God and they’re having all these conversations – and Paul’s got so many complicated, brilliant philosophical and theological answers to all these really important questions, but he refuses to remember them. Instead he decides just to stick to this one thing: Jesus Christ and him crucified.

To be honest, I’ve always thought that the approach was less than helpful! But I’m realising now that in a way it makes sense: he was saying, look, there’s loads of questions, loads of difficulties and ambiguities and uncertainties, and yeah there are answers out there, but there’s only two things you really need to know. You need to know deep down what God’s like, and you need to know that he loves you. And Paul reckons you can see both those things by looking at Jesus Christ on the cross.

By looking at Jesus, because he said himself that by looking at him we can see exactly the character of God. We think to ourselves, ‘if God became a person, what would he be like?’ And Jesus says, ‘I did, and I’d be like this.’ As he said to his friend, Phillip: “Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father.”

So what is he like then, this God? Well we can look at Jesus’s whole life, of course, and it’s incredible, but most of all we can look at the cross. And we see there someone who is utterly selfless – who literally pours his life out for the sake of others. Someone who is completely faithful – who endures the worst imaginable agony rather than fail his Father and his friends. Someone who is incredibly gracious – who prays for the very soldiers that have driven the nails into his hands. Someone who loves, outrageously. Unstoppably. Unquenchably and undefeatably. Almost unbelievably.

And we see that he loves us. He told his friends that he came “not to be served but to serve and give his life as a ransom for many.” A ransom back then was not so much for kidnappings, it was the price you had to pay to buy a slave’s freedom. So Jesus said that he was giving his life to buy us our freedom. And not even just the freedom right now, from meaninglessness, and fear, and guilt, and delusion and shame, but freedom forever from the power of death – freedom to share in the life that raised him from the grave three days later.

He is good and he loves you. And if you get that, I think the two of you can work out all the other stuff together.

Now I’m not expecting you just to take my word for it – the whole Jesus thing – I’m hoping that you’ll investigate it. Because the beautiful thing about it is that its not just a private assertion – not one dreamer’s vision, or one sage’s teaching – it’s a public life, a public death, a public resurrection that we can submit to genuine scrutiny. Of course it takes some effort – it takes effort to get to know other people, it takes effort to know things about history, it takes effort to learn how to walk – but it’s not impossible. Maybe message me and ask about it, or read a book about it, or pick up the bible that’s in your drawer somewhere and have a look at Luke’s gospel about it. Because I’ve looked at this stuff quite a lot and I’m seriously convinced that there is sufficient evidence to bring you to Jesus. Of course it can’t force you to trust him – it’s not literally compelling – he’s not going to break down the door and blind you with heavenly light. When you’ve done the thinking and the looking and you’ve seen him, the trusting part is up to you. But you don’t need to take a flying leap of faith across some huge chasm of ignorance, you just need to start with a genuinely open mind and look at the evidence. A book I just read which is brilliant is ‘Why Trust the Bible?’ by Amy Orr-Ewing. I would love to lend it to you or send it to you if you’d like!

Anyway, that’s the end of this blog, but originally I was supposed to be introducing a story I wrote a while ago. I blogged it before, so some of you might have seen it back then, but if not, here it is. It was my attempt to explain in story form, all of this stuff about faith, and investigating, and trust. Hope you like it!

The Journey

Anna lived at the foot of Too-Tall Mountain. She lived in a little town on the flat ground in the shadow of the mountain, and it was the whole wide world. To Anna, its cobbled main street was the great Silk Road, its old well was the ocean, and its people were the human race. The only other thing was the mountain.

One day a little boy, about Anna’s age, nine or perhaps ten, wandered up to her as she was mending her raggedy doll on the back step of her little house. He introduced himself as Cescu. She told him her name was Anna, and then suddenly, as if there was no time for small talk, he rushed up beside her and whispered something in her ear. And what he whispered was a rumour. But not your average every-day nasty rumour. This was a beautiful rumour. A glittering rumour that made her heart leap and her eyes grow wide and her toes wiggle. He whispered that he had met a man – a strange and wonderful man – who claimed to be from the top of the Too-Tall Mountain. Not only that, but he said that he had not been alone up there, that at the very top of the Too-Tall Mountain, above the clouds of fog, there was a great city of gold. A shining city, where the people laughed and danced and feasted, where their faces almost seemed to reflect the light of the sun. And as the whispers poured into her head like a sparkling stream they seemed to awaken a startling array of dreams and hopes and hungers that somehow she knew had been there inside her all along. It was as if the whispered words were the first songs of spring, and now a hundred tiny creatures of her heart, that had been in hibernation for a winter that stretched back as long as she could remember, were stretching their dewy limbs and joining in the chorus. Yes – they sung – there might be a city beyond the clouds! There could be a land where the sun was warmer, and the soil was deeper, and even the tears were brighter! There should be. But then a new thought loomed up on her like a big, dark cloud.

“It must be a very long journey to the top of the mountain. Far too long. We’ll never make it.” But then another thought, “Maybe this man you met could carry us? He must know the way. Maybe he could carry us up the mountain while we sleep – I’m sure we couldn’t make it by ourselves!”

The little boy looked puzzled for a moment, but he slowly shook his head. The strange man had spoken about the way up the mountain. He said that to reach the city – to truly reach it – a person had to walk. Even a person with little legs. He said that in the days long ago some people had been carried to the city in their sleep, but when they awoke something was always wrong. The richly coloured streets and houses seemed dull to them, almost translucent, and they could never bring themselves to sit, or lean, or lie down to rest on anything in the city for fear that they would fall right through. He said the only way was to walk the mountain.

She wondered, rather loudly and with a troubled frown, how on earth, if they were not to be carried, they would ever find the way.

But Cescu remembered what the strange man had said about that as well. He said that the way to the city was easy to recognise. The path that leads to the city, he had said, is the steepest, narrowest path, and also the most beautiful. If you find yourself on a path that is easy, or wide, or ugly, you have taken a wrong turn.

Now Anna was not sure she liked the sound of that at all, but as she looked up at the Too-Tall Mountain, she found herself unable to stem the awful flood of hope that gushed through her chest and into the tips of her toes.

She looked at Cescu.

“Well,” she said, “I still don’t think we’ll make it.” She thrust her grubby hands into her pockets and grinned. “But it looks like we have to try.”

Now, to tell the tale of all their twists and turns, of all their bruises and blisters, would take many more words than I am prepared to write, or you are prepared to read, and perhaps will serve to make a tale of its own one day. So for now we will hear of just the greatest incident of the long, steep road.

The two young travellers had begun to notice, as they passed out of the foothills and into the real mountain, that more and more they swore they saw distant glimpses of the strange man on the path ahead of them, and although it seemed improbable, they began to stumble across marvellous gifts – sometimes big and sometimes small – piles of refreshing wild-fruits for them to eat, or little shelters of branches and leaves for them to rest in. And this strange and unexpected kindness came and went until one day they found a note, carved into the sticks of a shelter they had found:

SOON COMES THE CREVASSE.
YOU MUST NOT LEAP TOO SOON.
BUT YOU MUST SURELY LEAP.

Now this message both confused and worried the young pilgrims. So much so that they carried the engraved sticks with them as they continued in hopes of deciphering the mystery as they journeyed. And indeed they did, when the path brought them to a great divide in the mountain. The rock they were walking on suddenly plunged away in front of them, and only emerged again what must have been nearly ten metres away. Lying flat their two little bodies put together couldn’t have bridged the divide. They edged fearfully up to the brink, and peered down into the deep, terrifying darkness of the crevasse. They quickly stepped back and stared at each other, eyes wide and hearts pounding. Anna looked down at the stick she was holding.

“You must not leap too soon,” she said, calming a little.

“But you must surely leap,” said Cescu, fear heavy in his unbroken voice.

After a moment though his eyes wandered past Anna’s to what lay behind her. A rocky path along the edge of the crevasse, littered with boulders and uncertainty. As Anna’s eyes turned to follow his they both knew what they had to do. This path was harder work than any they had travelled so far, and they lived in constant fear of losing their footing and tumbling into the abyss that never strayed from the left-hand edge of their vision. But they balled up their courage and they kept their eyes on the obstacles ahead. They clambered and they crawled and they kept, anxiously, moving. And as they did, it seemed to them that the crevasse beside them was growing thinner. The far edge was creeping closer and closer until, after many days, many nights, many bumps, many scrapes, many scares and many dares, they looked to their left and saw a gap that looked – though their hearts hammered harder and harder – small enough to jump.

They knew that this gulf – once so utterly impassable – was now small enough for even their little legs. Their eyes and their brains knew this. Their legs and their hearts were less certain. Their knees shook and their hearts raced like the knees and the hearts of the heroes in their mothers old legends. Anna felt dizzy. Cescu felt sick. The abyss of uncertainty that had been threatening to swallow them up for days now stood before them – smaller now, weaker, but still utterly terrifying. They looked across to the other side. They saw the new path – still steep, still narrow – leading up and up to the city. To the city of gold. To the rumour of the city of gold. The strange man was nowhere to be seen. The fruits, the shelters, they seemed somehow foolish. They might have been made by animals. They might have been anything. They looked at the note on the sticks in their hands. It might have been a joke. It might have been a trick.

YOU MUST NOT LEAP TOO SOON.
BUT YOU MUST SURELY LEAP.

Anna felt dizzy. Cescu felt sick. They held hands. Tightly. They fixed their eyes on the solid ground beyond the darkness.



***