Living the Cross Centered Life Quotes - Day 23

From Living the Cross Centered Life, by C.J. Mahaney:

What Does it All Mean?

Near the end of C.S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the children Lucy and Susan are on the Hill of the Stone Table on a moonlit night. From a distance they watch tearfully as Aslan the lion submits to the torment from the White Witch and her rabble of monsters—who are there because of the treachery of the girls’ brother Edmund. He is bound, shorn of his golden mane, muzzled… then tied to the table and killed.

After these vile creatures have gone, the two sisters creep out of their hiding place to approach the table. They spend the rest of that night weeping over Aslan’s body.

When dawn comes and the girls are shivering in the early morning coolness, they turn from the table to try and warm themselves by walking. As they watch the sky turn red and gold from the sunrise, they hear behind them “a great crackling, deafening noise.”
They hurry back, and are overcome with yet more grief at what they see:

The Stone Table was broken into two pieces by a great crack that ran down it from end to end; and there was no Aslan.

Suddenly their cries and questions are interrupted by “a great voice behind their backs.”

They looked round There, shining in the sunrise, larger than they had seen him before, shaking his mane (for it had apparently grown again) stood Aslan himself.
Susan tries to ask him if he’s a ghost.
Aslan stooped his golden head and licked her forehead. The warmth of his breath and a rich sort of smell that seemed to hang about his har came all over her.
“Do I look it?” he said.

Finally, after both girls have “flung themselves upon him and covered him with kisses,” Susan asks a pressing question: “But what does it all mean?”

A better question simply could not have been asked of Aslan—or, more importantly, of the Savior he so closely represents.

What is the meaning of the crucifixion of Jesus Christ? When The Passion of the Christ was released, a Time magazine cover asked, “Why did Jesus have to die?”—in other words, what does it all mean? No magazine cover ever asked a more significant or relevant question.