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