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| Harry Potter: The Boy Who Lived Come to Die by Jason Pooley |
"I Open at the Close."
+ Secret of the Resurrection Stone
This brief post is in honor of some of my kids who enjoyed the summer of 2024 in many ways with vacations, adventures, movies, friends, family ... and with the Harry Potter books and films. A couple of them even read all the books and watched all the films.
I participated in some of this fun with them, watching this world come alive again through the wonder in their eyes, and experiencing some of the wonder myself especially when John Williams' score began to play or when watching Alfonso Curaón's magical and masterful direction of The Prisoner of Azkaban.
Today's post references how Harry's story often points to the true story of the world revealed through Jesus as the Storyteller, with excerpts from Rebecca McLaughlin's 10 Questions ..., Tim Keller's King's Cross, and Dan White Jr.'s Love Over Fear. Enjoy.
It's a Bit Like Quidditch
In Quidditch, all the players except the Seeker try to score goals against the other team. Each goal scores ten points. But the Seeker's job is to catch the golden snitch, and that's worth 150 points. The team can be losing really badly. But if the Seeker gets the golden snitch the team still wins.
Often, it feels like (we're) losing ... But Jesus is our Seeker and the salvation He's won for us is worth all the points in the world. Like the golden snitch from Harry's first Quidditch game, it contains the resurrection stone, and it will open at the close.
"I Am the Resurrection and the Life,"
says Jesus.
"Whoever believes in Me, though he die,
yet shall he live,
and everyone who lives and
believes in Me shall never die.
Do you believe this?"
(John 11:25-26)
When Harry finally goes to his death, he carries with him the "resurrection stone." It's hidden in the golden snitch from his first Quidditch match — a seemingly small gift from Dumbledore. Dumbledore planned for Harry to suffer and to die. But he also planned for him to come back to life.
"I Open at the Close"
The words, "I open at the close," were engraved on the snitch. Harry didn't know how his life would be saved, but Dumbledore did. And when the time came, it was.
If we're trusting in Jesus, we're holding a resurrection stone in our hands. Nothing can snatch it away from us, because nothing can snatch us away from Jesus, who is the resurrection and the life (John 10:28-29; 11:25-26). The only man who has ever beaten death beat death for us. And he has promised to give us life ...
Dumbledore sent Harry to his death, clutching the resurrection stone, not because he wanted Harry dead, but because he wanted him finally to live free of Voldemort.
If Dumbledore Died to Save Tom
In Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Harry realizes that part of Voldemort's soul is stored in him. The only way for Voldemort to die is if Harry dies too. Voldemort's evil can't be extracted from Harry any other way. The Bible tells us that we each have sin lodged in us like that piece of Voldemort's soul in Harry. The punishment for sin is death ... But the amazing message of the Bible is that if we put our trust in Jesus, His death on the cross becomes our death. Paul puts it like this: "our old self was crucified with Him in order that the body of sin might be brought to nothing, so that we would no longer be enslaved to sin" (Romans 6:6). But if we trust in Jesus, we also get to share His life.
I wish I could tell you a story to explain this. But people don't write stories in which good characters die for bad ones. I could say it was a bit like when Lily Potter threw herself in front of Harry to protect him from Lord Voldemort. And it is a bit like that, because her sacrifice saved Harry's life. But God isn't like Lord Voldemort, and we're not like an innocent baby.
It would be more like if Dumbledore
had died to save Tom Riddle.
Harry's Mind Changed About Sirius
In Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Harry has just run away from his awful aunt and uncle's house when he sees an ominous black dog. He's rescued by the Knight Bus, which picks up stranded magical folk. But throughout the book, this dog keeps cropping up. Harry sees it in the tea leaves in Professor Trelawney's divination class. He sees it in the grounds of Hogwarts School. He even sees it in the bleachers of the Quidditch field. He's not sure if he's going mad, imagining this creature everywhere. But then one night it grabs his best friend Ron by the leg and drags him down a tunnel. Harry dashes after, terrified. At the end of the tunnel, he finds Ron in a haunted house. But the dog has gone. It's turned into the evil murderer Sirius Black, who betrayed Harry's parents to their deaths. Now he's going to murder Harry too. Or so Harry thinks.
If you've read the Harry Potter books, you'll know that that's not right at all. Rather than trying to murder Harry, Sirius wants to protect him. Rather than betraying Harry's parents, Sirius was himself betrayed. Rather than being Harry's enemy, Sirius turns out to be his faithful friend. In fact, he's the closest to family Harry's got. When Harry first saw Sirius, all the evidence was against him. But when he found out the truth of who Sirius was, Harry's mind was changed. So was his heart.
When people look at Christ and His claims, sometimes they make the same mistake that Harry made with Sirius. Many of my friends think Christianity is against the things they care about the most. My friends care about racial justice. They see the ways in which Christians have engaged in slavery and racism and they assume that Christianity is against racial justice. My friends hear Christians saying that Jesus is the only way to God (or the One God who made His Way to us), and they think this is arrogant and offensive to those who were raised with other religious beliefs. My friends think people should be able to date and marry whomever they want, but Christianity says that it's not okay to marry someone of the same sex. My friends are excited by the discoveries of science, and they think that believing in a Creator God is the opposite of believing in science. My friends believe that women are equal to men, and they think Christianity puts women down. My friends see all the pain and suffering in the world, and they think there couldn't possibly be a loving God in charge.
But just as Harry's view of Sirius totally changed when he discovered more, when we look more closely at each of these concerns, our view of Christianity might just change as well.
Harvard Professor Tyler VanderWeele says that
— in light of all the evidence for Christianity —
any educated person should look carefully
at the claims of Jesus
and be able to explain why
he or she does or doesn't believe them.
To find out who Sirius really was, Harry had to dive down a tunnel ... to understand Christianity, you need to dive in with an open mind. If you do that, you might find — like Harry — that your world turns upside down.
+ Rebecca McLaughlin,
10 Questions ...
+ pgs. 181, 164, 176-177, 19-24
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| Lily's Sacrifice by Drew Graham |
Lily's Sacrifice and King's Cross
You may know King's Cross as a railway station in London, England, one that has been immortalized in the Harry Potter books. But it's such a perfect encapsulation of Jesus' life ... Mark's account of Jesus's life is presented to us in two symmetrical acts: His identity as King over all things (in Mark chapters 1-8), and His purpose in dying on the cross (in Mark chapters 9-16).
All real, life-changing love
is substitutionary sacrifice.
Remember Lily Potter, the mother of Harry Potter? In the first book of the series, the evil Lord Voldemort tries to kill Harry, but he can't touch him. When the Voldemort-possessed villain tries to lay hands on Harry, he experiences agonizing pain, and so he is thwarted. Harry later goes to Dumbledore, his mentor, and asks, "Why couldn't he touch me?" Dumbledore replies that "Your mother died to save you. ... love as powerful as your mother's for you leaves its own mark. Not a scar, no visible sign. ... (but) to have been loved so deeply ... will give us some protection forever." Why is Dumbledore's statement so moving?
We know from experience,
from the mundane to the dramatic,
that sacrifice is at the heart of real love.
And we know that anybody
who has ever done anything
that made a difference for us
— a parent, a teacher, a mentor,
a friend, a spouse —
sacrificed in some way,
stepped in and accepted
some hardship so that
we would not get hit with it
ourselves.
Therefore it makes sense
that a God who is more loving
than you and I,
a God who comes into the world
to deal with the ultimate evil,
the ultimate sin,
would have to make a
substitutionary sacrifice.
Even we flawed human beings know that you can't just overlook evil. It can't be dealt with, removed, or healed just by saying, "Forget it." It must be paid for, and dealing with it is costly. How much more should we expect that God could not just shrug off evil? The debt had to be paid. But He was so incredibly loving that He was willing to die in order to do it Himself.
That is where the God of the Bible is most different from the primitive gods of old. The ancients understood the idea of the wrath of God, they understood the idea of justice, the idea of a debt and a necessary punishment, but they had no idea that God would come and pay it Himself. The cross is the self-substitution of God. That possibility would not have entered into the Greek Homer's imagination in The Iliad a million years, let alone the imagination of the Jewish Jesus' disciples.
The only way that Jesus could redeem us was to give His life as a ransom. ... That's how it works. Love that really changes things and redeems things is always a substitutionary sacrifice. C.S. Lewis in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe puts it like this:
"When a willing victim
who had committed no treachery
was killed in a traitor's stead,
the Table would crack and
Death itself
would start working backward."
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| Harry Potter and Dumbledore at King's Cross |
+ Timothy Keller,
King's Cross
+ pgs. xiv, 143-144
Bonus Conclusion:
In the Harry Potter books, Harry, Ron, and Hermione are three friends on a journey to overcome evil and restore good to its proper place in the world. Their pilgrimage, like most spiritual journeys, includes one trial after another.
In the Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone movie, they seek the stone that is the key to the triumph of love and the casting out of fear. To reach the stone, they must overcome a variety of obstacles. The fierce three-headed dog guarding the stone is after them, and they save themselves by jumping through a trap door. They land on something soft, a giant plant, thinking they are out of harm's way.
Suddenly with horror, they feel the plant coiling around them and strangling them. Hermione remembers this plant is called "the devil's snare." The more they fight it, the more the plant closes around them. With every aggressive move, they get bound even more tightly, and their range of motion gets even tighter. The more fear they feel, the more trapped they become. Hermione remembers what to do. The solution is to be still. Relax, stop fighting, stop struggling, trust that stillness is the way to loosen this plant's stronghold. With Hermione's guidance, Harry is able to do this. Ron, however, cannot find his way out of fear.
"There is no fear in love,
but perfect love casts out fear"
(1 John 4:18 ESV).
This truth is a proclamation
not to get caught in the devil's snare ...
(We) need a revolution of love,
a love so scandalous it relaxes
in the face of fear.
+ Dan White Jr.,
+ pgs. 215-216
More 2024 Reading Recs:
With presence and peace in Christ,
Rev. Mike “Sully” Sullivan
Email Pastor Mike | Website | Visit Us | Support Us | Facebook Us
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