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The Doing of That in a Day, Which May Ordinarily Take a Thousand Years

I’m trying to compile some of my favorite George MacDonald quotes from C.S. Lewis’ anthology. That’s all I intended this to be, but then I began to think of quotes I read elsewhere that were related. Why not write them down in one place?

On Miracles:

Think of Jesus’ words, “Truly, truly, I say to you, the Son can do nothing of his own accord, but only what he sees the Father doing. For whatever the Father does, that the Son does likewise’ (John 5:19).

The Father said, That is a stone. The Son would not say, That is a loaf. No one creative fiat shall contradict another. The Father and the Son are of one mind. The Lord could hunger, could starve, but would not change into another thing what His Father had made one thing. There was no such change in the feeding of the multitudes. The fish and the bread were fish and bread before…There was in these miracles, I think in all, only a hastening of appearances: the doing of that in a day, which may ordinarily take a thousand years, for with God time is not what it is with us…Indeed, the wonder of the growing corn is to me greater than the wonder of feeding the thousands. It is easier to understand the creative power going forth at once – immediately – than through the countless, the lovely, the seemingly forsaken wonders of the cornfield (George MacDonald Anthology, pp. 12-13).

To this add C.S. Lewis’ thoughts, building off of MacDonald:

God creates the vine and teaches it to draw up water by its roots and, with the aid of the sun, to turn the water into a juice which will ferment and take on certain qualities. Thus every year, from Noah’s time till ours, God turns water into wine. That, men fail to see…But when Christ at Cana makes water into wine, the mask is off. The miracle has only half its effect if it only convinces us that Christ is God: it will have its full effect if whenever we see a vineyard or drink a glass of wine we remember that here works He who sat at the wedding party in Cana.

He continues,

God makes a little corn into much corn: the seed is sown and there is an increase, and men, according to the fashion of their age, say… ‘It is the laws of Nature.’ The close-up, the translation, of this annual wonder working is the feeding of the five thousand. Bread is not made there of nothing. Bread is not made of stones, as the Devil once suggested to Our Lord in vain. A little bread is made into much bread. The Son will do what He sees the Father do…When He fed the thousands he multiplied the fish as well as the bread. Look in every bay and almost every river. This swarming, pulsating fecundity shows He is still at work.

Finally, he applies this principle to the Virgin Birth:

This time He was creating not simply a man, but the man who was to be Himself: the only true man. The process which leads to the spermatozoon has carried down with it through the centuries much undesirable silt; the life which reaches us by that normal route is tainted. To avoid that taint, to give humanity a fresh start, He once short-circuited the process…For what He did once without a human father, He does always even when He uses a human father as His instrument. For the human father in ordinary generation is only a carrier, sometimes an unwilling carrier, always the last in a long line of carriers, of life that comes from the supreme life (Essay on Miracles, from God in the Dock).

So then, for Lewis and MacDonald, miracles are God speeding up, or (to use Lewis’ words) ‘short-circuiting’ the process. In Jesus’ miracles he was effectively hitting ‘fast forward.’ He was breaking the speed limit of the so-called ‘laws of nature.’

As to the purpose of such miracles, Lewis cites a quote by Athanasius from On the Incarnation:

Our Lord took a body like to ours and lived as a man in order that those who had refused to recognize Him in His superintendence and captaincy of the whole universe might come to recognize from the works He did here below in the body that what dwelled in this body was the Word of God.

Pure gold from MacDonald and Lewis.

But add to this Martin Luther’s take on Psalm 147:12-14 (which says):

  • Praise the LORD, O Jerusalem! Praise your God, O Zion! 13 For he strengthens the bars of your gates; he blesses your children within you. 14 He makes peace in your borders; he fills you with the finest of the wheat.

In his vocation man does works which effect the well-being of others; for so God has made all offices. Through this work in man’s offices, God’s creative work goes forward, and that creative work is love, a profusion of good gifts. With persons as his “hands” or “coworkers,” God gives his gifts through the earthly vocations, toward man’s life on earth (food through farmers, fishermen and hunters; external peace through princes, judges, and orderly powers; knowledge and education through teachers and parents, etc., etc.). Through the preacher’s vocation, God gives the forgiveness of sins. Thus love comes from God, flowing down to human beings on earth through all vocations, through both spiritual and earthly governments.

When we pray that God would give us our daily bread, he does so through the means of human agency, the same goes for many other areas. All of life is, therefore, a miracle in some sense. But the workings of natural and human agency are so common that God must short-circuit the process to shake us out of our unbelief and monotony – and this is what we deem as a true miracle.

Seeing the Heart as God Sees It

If God sees that heart corroded with the rust of cares, riddled into caverns and films by the worms of ambition and greed, then your heart is as God sees it, for God sees things as they are. And one day you will be compelled to see, nay to feel your heart as God sees it (George MacDonald: An Anthology, p.11).

My takeaway from this quote (which probably has little if anything to do with what MacDonald, in his quasi-universalism, intended) is – The Christian is one who comes to see, and feel, his heart in the way that God sees it.

  • Jeremiah 17:9 “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it? 10 “I the LORD search the heart and test the mind, to give every man according to his ways, according to the fruit of his deeds.”
  • Matthew 5:3 “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”

 

Anthropomorphism, Unlikeness, and Reality in Fiction: Opening the Eyes of the Blind

This is a follow up to my post on the Wind in the Willows.

I didn’t want to include this line of thought in my initial thoughts on the Wind in the Willows. I think it deserves its own post, so here goes.

I often reference C.S. Lewis’ statement to the effect that fantasy literature does not make children (and I would say adults as well, so long as they’re not prone to pure escapism) forget, or despise, the real world. He said basically that a child who reads of an enchanted forest does not thereby begin to hate real forests. Instead all forests take on some of this enchantment. For instance, I’ve never thought of forests in the same way since reading the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings. I’ve never looked at peaceful walks the same since I read the Princess and the Goblin (I’m always ready to sing a goblin song should the proper situation arise). I’ve never looked at lions the same since reading the Chronicles of Narnia. I could go on, but I won’t.

I bring this up here because one might think of a story about a bunch of animals with human characteristics as mere silliness and entertainment (the Narnia books should show the falsity of such a notion). The Wind in the Willows is a perfect example of how a work of fiction (and impossible fiction at that) can actually tune us in to reality in a way, perhaps, more significant than if the book were ‘realistic.’

In Orthodoxy, Chesterton wrote (I’m paraphrasing) that we sometimes need to read of golden apples to remind us that apples are really green (or red, or yellow), and of rivers of wine to remind us that rivers are, in fact, filled with water. In our position, taking these things for granted, we tend to forget such wonderful facts.

In the case of the Wind in the Willows we get anthropomorphism as well as sheer unlikeness, for the animals are made human-like, and yet are utterly different because they remain animals. Yet, taking Chesteron’s point, it is precisely in this fact – the animals are different from us, and yet the same as us (because of the anthropomorphism) – that we are led to see actual reality more clearly. In other words, to paraphrase Chesterton again, sometimes we need prideful, idolatrous toads to remind us that humans are prideful and idolatrous.

It’s absurd to think of a toad obsessed with cars. It’s laugh out loud funny. But we wouldn’t laugh so hard if he were a human. Perhaps then we should be laughing at more humans.

It’s absurd to think of a toad who is arrogant and self-absorbed, always wanting the attention focused on him. It’s hilarious. But it’s not as funny when we see a prideful man. Perhaps it should be.

Idolatry and pride are, you guessed it, idolatry and pride – no matter the situation. They are scandalous regardless of the person or circumstances. Sometimes it takes fantasy (say, talking animals) to point this out to us. When I laugh at toad, when I think of his pomposity and absurdity, I’m laughing at myself – and so are you. The question is, do you realize it? You are that guy.

David had a ‘Wind in the Willows’ moment before the prophet Nathan. We all need moments like that. Sometimes it takes a story that takes us completely out of our comfortable context for it to happen.

2 Samuel 12:7 ¶ Nathan said to David, “You are the man!