Only Aslan

I recently have begun reading The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis to my younger children. We are in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, and I was struck by the passage where Peter, Susan, and Lucy discuss with Mr. and Mrs. Beaver what to do when their brother Edmund went missing. They realized that he must have gone to the witch, and Peter was determined to go find him. He said, “All the same, we’ll still have to go and look for him. He is our brother after all, even if he is rather a little beast. And he’s only a kid.” But Mr. Beaver responded, “Go to the Witch’s House? Don’t you see that the only chance of saving either him or yourselves is to keep away from her?” Lucy said in despair, “Oh, can no one help us?” To this Mr. Beaver answered, “Only Aslan. We must go on and meet him. That’s our only chance now.” When they wanted to chase after the prodigal Edmund, Mr. Beaver wisely told them instead to seek out Aslan themselves for help. Aslan is of course a symbol of Christ in these novels, and the message for us perhaps is that the best way to help someone who seems unreachable may be to seek out the Savior for ourselves. In the New Testament, Jairus understood this. When his daughter was sick, he went and sought out Jesus: “And, behold, there cometh one of the rulers of the synagogue, Jairus by name; and when he saw him, he fell at his feet, And besought him greatly, saying, My little daughter lieth at the point of death: I pray thee, come and lay thy hands on her, that she may be healed; and she shall live” (Mark 5:22-23). This trip of his to go find Jesus meant that he had to leave his daughter for a time, even though she could die in his absence. But he understood that he did not have power to heal the girl, and he had faith that by going to Jesus, she could be helped. If he had stayed with her, she would have died and remained dead; but because he found Jesus and brought the Savior to her, she was healed. When others that we love are struggling, the most important thing we can do is to go to the Savior ourselves so that he can help both us and them.

This reminds me of what Elder Renlund taught about helping those who are struggling: “The Savior’s job is to heal. Our job is to love—to love and minister in such a way that others are drawn to Jesus Christ. This is one of the fruits of powerful, virtuous cycle of the doctrine of Christ.” Another well-known New Testament story illustrates this powerfully: “And again he entered into Capernaum after some days; and it was noised that he was in the house…. And they come unto him, bringing one sick of the palsy, which was borne of four. And when they could not come nigh unto him for the press, they uncovered the roof where he was: and when they had broken it up, they let down the bed wherein the sick of the palsy lay” (Mark 2:1-4). These four friends knew they could not heal this man sick with the palsy themselves, and so they brought him to Jesus who did heal him. Jairus couldn’t even bring his daughter to Jesus because she was so sick, but the result was the same when these faithful loved ones went to the Savior themselves in search for help. And so, it is powerful to me that in this fictional story it was to Aslan that these siblings had to go in order to save their brother. And ultimately Edmund was saved by Aslan in the most dramatic way, for Aslan had to die at the hand of the witch on the Stone Table for Edmund to be released. In the same way, the Savior had to die for each of us on the cross to free us from sin and death.