Reflections on the Resurrection, Part 1
By Melissa Cain Travis and Paul M. Gould | Bulletin Roundtable
In honor of the Easter season, we are devoting this month’s Roundtable to Jesus’s work of redemption. In Part 1, Melissa Cain Travis and Paul Gould provide different but complementary lenses through which to view the Good News and its implications for our lives.
He Is Risen!
Christopher Reese
Editor-in-Chief
The Ultimate Eucatastrophe
How Fairy Tales Illuminate the Resurrection of Christ
By Melissa Cain Travis
“…and they lived happily ever after. The end.”
At the end of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit, the reader is treated to a wonderfully satisfying conclusion—one that paints a picture of Bilbo Baggins’ delightful post-adventure life:
He took to writing poetry and visiting the elves; and though many shook their heads and touched their foreheads and said, “Poor old Baggins!” and though few believed any of his tales, he remained very happy to the end of his days, and those were extraordinarily long.[1]
Tolkien believed that fairy tales are a high genre of literature because they provide powerful imaginative satisfaction of humanity’s “ancient desires,” such as a world in which goodness is fully restored. Think of how deficient a tale would be if the dragon—be it literal or metaphorical—was slain by the hero’s arrow and fell to the ground, the end. We’d judge that to be a poor ending indeed—but why? Because deep down in our souls, we long to have full resolution of the story. How is the damage wrought by the villain undone, and how does our hero fare in life thereafter? Does he climb the tower to retrieve the princess, marry her, and have countless prosperous days as a lord, husband, and father? We want this kind of closure in an imaginative story because we have a built-in yearning for full redemption—a world made right forevermore, not merely one in which one particular force of evil has been destroyed.
In a proper fairy tale, argues Tolkien, there is a central turn of events, an abrupt pivot from seemingly certain doom to a thrilling escape that occurs prior to all the happy aftermath. This climactic plot point is what Tolkien regarded as the most important element of the story. He called it the eucatastrophe—a “good catastrophe”—and described it this way:
In its fairy-tale—or otherworld—setting, it is a sudden and miraculous grace: never to be counted on to recur. It does not deny the existence of dyscatastrophe, of sorrow and failure: the possibility of these is necessary to the joy of deliverance; it denies (in the face of much evidence, if you will) universal final defeat and in so far is evangelium [Good News], giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.[2]
The Tolkienian eucatastrophe is the supreme literary vehicle for triggering a peculiar kind of joy, “a far-off gleam or echo of evangelium in the real world.”[3] In other words, a sudden and powerful intimation of the Gospel, which is the eucatastrophe at the very foundation of the world. The paradigmatic example from Tolkien’s own work is the scene in the fiery crack of Mount Doom, when Frodo succumbs to the power of the One Ring, and then a sudden, merciful grace occurs that not only saves Frodo from himself, but also saves all of Middle-earth from being swallowed up by the seething, ravenous evil of Sauron. It seemed that all was hopelessly lost, but in a dramatic, unexpected intervention, the tide completely turned.
In my home hangs a large framed print of Eugene Burnand’s masterpiece, The Disciples Peter and John Running to the Sepulchre (shown above). Even after ten years of walking past it numerous times a day, I cannot consciously contemplate the image for very long without a tightening of the chest and tearing of the eyes. The expressions on the faces of Peter and John are a heart-wrenching mixture of agony and desperate hope-against-hope. I try to imagine the torturous anguish they endured in the hours between their beloved and divine Rabbi’s crucifixion and Sunday morning. What would it have been like to be in the deepest pit of despair and then abruptly shocked out of it by a pile of empty grave clothes? Did they know that Christ’s ascent from the grave was also the cosmic-scale defeat of the Enemy and of the spiritual—and eventually physical—death of God’s image-bearers? Did they know that now, a glorious day will come when everything sad will become untrue?
When we read great fantasy stories, many of their qualities point us to higher truth. I think of literary art as a conduit through which our Creator pours natural revelation. When we are absorbed in a beautifully written, exciting tale that takes the protagonist to a perilous brink, and our hearts pound and our palms sweat in expectation of his or her certain demise, there is a piercing kind of joy, a brief moment of transcendence when the eucatastrophe occurs. He is risen! He is risen indeed!
Notes
[1] J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1997), 254.
[2] J.R.R. Tolkien, “Tree and Leaf,” in A Tolkien Miscellany (New Yort: Houghton Mifflin, 2002), 135-136.
[3] Ibid., 137.
—Melissa Cain Travis, PhD, is the author of Science and the Mind of the Maker: What the Conversation Between Faith and Science Reveals About God (Harvest House, 2018) and Thinking God's Thoughts: Johannes Kepler and the Miracle of Cosmic Comprehensibility (forthcoming, Roman Roads Press, 2022). She serves as an Affiliate Faculty at Colorado Christian University.
Seeing the Good News from “the Outside”
By Paul M. Gould
I’ve come to think of the gospel, following Frederick Buechner, in terms of a three-act play: tragedy—comedy—fairy story.[1] We begin with man’s tragedy: the fall from innocence, the sin of humanity’s first pair. But then there is divine comedy: who would have foreseen God’s answer to man’s tragedy in the form of the incarnation? And who would have foreseen God’s answer to the tragedy of the cross with the resurrection of Jesus? And then there is the fairy story ending: one day, because of Jesus, all things will be made right—forever. All will be known by their true name and the redeemed will worship forever (for the gospel story never truly ends) in joy and peace and delight of God.
The gospel story is beautiful. It is a good and true story. But we don’t always appreciate its goodness and beauty. We become too familiar with the story. I struggle with this every year as Easter approaches. My preoccupation with Easter egg cookies, the church service, Easter brunch, and the Easter egg hunt occupy my time and heart. As a result, I often miss the opportunity to reflect on the deep love of God and the great good of the redemption I have in Christ.
How might we better reflect on the great loss of humanity’s first couple and the great good of redemption in Christ this Easter? One answer—and it’s not the only answer—is by looking at the gospel “from the outside” (let’s say), through the imaginative story of C. S. Lewis’s Perelandra.
I’ll set the stage and take you to the passage I have in mind. In this second book of C. S. Lewis’s Ransom trilogy, Ransom has been sent by God to Perelandra (Venus) to keep the first couple of that world from falling into sin and disobedience (as the first couple in our world did).
Ransom battles—first with words, eventually with fisticuffs—the Un-man, the devil who hitched a ride to the planet with the evil scientist Weston. As the Un-man begins to sow seeds of doubt and confusion with the Green Lady, Ransom realizes he is supposed to oppose the Un-man. In chapter 9, the Un-man begins a new line of argument: the fall on earth was a great good because without it there would have been no incarnation—and no need for redemption. Ransom steps in with this reply:
“Of course good came of it [i.e., the fall]. Is Maleldil [i.e., God] a beast that we can stop His path, or a leaf that we can twist his shape? Whatever you do, He will make good of it. But not the good He had prepared for you if you had obeyed Him. That is lost for ever. The first King and first Mother of our world did the forbidden thing; and He brought good of it in the end. But what they did was not good; and what they lost we have not seen. And there was some to whom no good came nor ever will come.” He turned to the body of Weston. “You,” he said, “tell her all. What good came to you? Do you rejoice that Maleldil became a man? Tell her of your joys, and of what profit you had when you made Maleldil and death acquainted.”[2]
In this passage, Lewis helps us see “from the outside” the great loss of the fall and the great good of redemption in Christ. The loss of innocence is a real loss: we’ll never know just what was lost because of humanity’s first failure. But God turns our failures into good, just as he has done with the fall. True comedy is the unexpected, the unforeseen. And who could have foreseen what God did? The twin goods of incarnation and resurrection are mixed: there is loss and sorrow there too. That is why the gospel is a good and true story: we find real loss, real redemption, and rich divine mercy triumphing over all. May you experience the depth of man’s tragedy and the great good of God’s passionate pursuit of you this Easter.
Notes
[1] Frederick Buechner, Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale (New York: HarperCollins, 1977).
[2] C. S. Lewis, Perelandra (New York: Scribner, 2003), 104.
— Paul M. Gould is an Associate Professor of Philosophy of Religion and Director of the M.A. Philosophy of Religion program at Palm Beach Atlantic University. He is the author or editor of ten scholarly and popular-level books including Cultural Apologetics, Philosophy: A Christian Introduction and The Story of the Cosmos. He has been a visiting scholar at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School’s Henry Center, working on the intersection of science and faith, and is the founder and president of the Two Tasks Institute. You can find out more about Dr. Gould and his work at Paul Gould.com and the Two Tasks Institute. He is married to Ethel and has four children.
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