You know what I love about Narnia?
Okay if you spend enough time talking to me about it, I’ll tell you this: I don’t think half the biblical symbolism was even put there on purpose. You know how long it takes me to even notice half this stuff? I cannot imagine anyone, even C. S. Lewis purposefully planning every single detail. It seems far more likely that the truth was just so ingrained in his head and heart that he couldn’t write the story without it. (In fact, in one of the biographies I was reading, he said a similar thing himself. He didn’t set out to make the series this way. It just happened.)
But that being said, one of the most simple, subtle, and beautiful things that ended up in the series is this: In The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, the Pevensies didn’t do anything.
Like, okay, okay, it sounds really awful at first. It makes it sound like they’re useless protagonists. But it’s so much deeper than that.
It would’ve been exciting, wouldn’t it, if Peter killed the witch? If the children took to some brave quest to break her spell? Oh, but it would’ve been so much less important. Notice that the spell begins to break, not because the Pevensies did something, but rather just because they were there. What was the prophecy again? “When Adam’s flesh and Adam’s bone sits at Cair Paravel in throne, the evil time will be over and done.” And what’s more, “ Wrong will be right, when Aslan comes in sight, At the sound of his roar, sorrows will be no more, When he bares his teeth, winter meets its death, And when he shakes his mane, we shall have spring again.”
See, neither prophecy mentions the children doing anything. It doesn’t tell you to expect for one second that they will defeat the Witch by their own power. From the very beginning they tell you that it is by Aslan’s power that the Witch shall be defeated. So what do the children do? They listen. They obey. They follow.
They’re not Kings and Queens because they are great conquerors. They’re Kings and Queens because Aslan chose them. He placed them in this world and told them what they had to do, and so they fought and followed and searched, but ultimately it wasn’t in their power to do anything.
Isn’t that lovely? I worry that I can’t explain it quite the way I would like to. But how lovely is it that these children weren’t special because they were powerful? They weren’t great rulers by their own strength. Everything that made them great was through Aslan. We can do all things through Christ who gives us strength: if we follow him fully, we can accomplish anything. Not because we are strong. But because he is. All he asks is that we follow his word.
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