Always Winter But Never Christmas

Always Winter But Never Christmas.  In the imaginative world of Narnia from the mind of author, C.S. Lewis, came one of the best lines about Christmas that has nothing to do with Christmas technically. It rather has to do with the long shadow cast if Christmas were absent.

In Lewis’ masterwork of fiction, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (1950), the eight-year-old heroine, Lucy Pevensie, knew nothing of Narnia when she punched through the back of the commonest wardrobe in England to the uncommonest, magical land called Narnia. But the Narnia that Lucy found lay under a two-fold curse: (1) the White Witch ruled as usurper, and (2) Aslan the Lion, the rightful ruler of Narnia, had not been seen in Narnia for many years. Doubly cursed, Narnia was plunged into an unnaturally prolonged winter, which was succinctly summarized by a citizen of Narnia, Mr. Tumnus, to his eight-year-old visitor, Lucy: “It is winter in Narnia . . . always winter, but never Christmas.”

To children (and many adults!), Christmas is what makes winter wonderful. Without it, the cold is interminable, the dark days are intolerable, and one’s socks never really dry out from sloshing through the partially melted snow made gritty and dirty by traffic. Without Christmas, winter is punishment.

To humans, a Christmas-less reality is far worse than a Christmas-less winter. Worse still, if Christ’s birth does not link directly to his resurrection, or if his resurrection does not guarantee our resurrection through faith in him, then, as the Apostle Paul wrote, “we are of all people most to be pitied” (1 Cor. 15:19). In Narnia and on Earth, winter is the intruder. But the eternal day has dawned. “The people dwelling in darkness have seen a great light, and for those dwelling in the region and shadow of death, on them a light has dawned” (Matt. 4:16).

In Narnia, when Christmas broke through winter, the surprising appearance of Father Christmas in Narnia marked the beginning of the end of the curse of the White Witch (chapter 10). "I've come at last. She has kept me out for a long time, but I have got in at last. Aslan is on the move. The Witch's magic is weakening." Alas, Father Christmas delivered serious gifts to Lucy and her siblings, for there was an unavoidable battle ahead. Lewis’ allegory leaps easily across the thin divide between fiction and non-fiction, between a story with a moral and a moral with a story. Like in Narnia, our world’s Christmas is the beginning of the end of the curse; the rightful King Jesus has arrived.

The fact of the biblical Christmas allows for and fits together in a cohesive unit all the other facets of Christ. Of course, Christ lived a sinless life, died an innocent death, rose bodily in the resurrection, ascended to heaven to sit at the right hand of Majesty on high, and saves everyone who calls upon the name of the Lord in faith. All those later works and words of Christ follow his Incarnation, and not merely chronologically, but essentially! Theologian, J.I. Packer, said that the Incarnation is the “supreme mystery.”

 

It is here, in the thing that happened at the first Christmas, that the profoundest and most unfathomable depths of the Christian revelation lie. “The Word became flesh” (Jn 1:14); God became man; the divine Son became a Jew; the Almighty appeared on earth as a helpless human baby, unable to do more than lie and stare and wriggle and make noises, needing to be fed and changed and taught to talk like any other child. And there was no illusion or deception in this: the babyhood of the Son of God was a reality. The more you think about it, the more staggering it gets. Nothing in fiction is so fantastic as is this truth of the Incarnation (J.I. Packer, Knowing God [1973], 53).

 

Later, at the conclusion of Narnia lore, Christmas took a curtain call, of sorts. A portal opened from Narnia to Aslan’s Country through an ordinary-looking stable, hidden in plain sight. “Its inside is bigger than its outside.” “Yes,” said Queen Lucy. “In our world too, a stable once had something inside it that was bigger than our whole world” (The Last Battle, p. 103).