Mere Muggles

“Well, my gran brought me up and she’s a witch … but the family thought I was all-Muggle for ages. My Great Uncle Algie kept trying to catch me off my guard and force some magic out of me – he pushed me off the end of Blackpool pier once, I nearly drowned – but nothing happened until I was eight. Great Uncle Algie came round for dinner, and he was hanging me out of an upstairs window by the ankles when my Great Auntie Enid offered him a meringue and he accidentally let go. But I bounced – all the way down the garden and into the road. They were all really pleased, Gran was crying, she was so happy. And you should have seen their faces when I got in here – they thought I might not be magic enough to come, you see. Great Uncle Algie was so pleased he bought me my toad.”

J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (1997)

 

Harry is finally visually represented with the correct eye colour, courtesy of the talented Mouri at newgrounds.com.

Well, maybe it was another stroke of J. K. Rowling’s genius; maybe it was pure coincidence. Either way, articulation of the fact finds its way onto my Facebook newsfeed at reasonably regular intervals, and usually raises a smile. Here’s the deal: canonically, Voldemort exercised control of the Ministry of Magic during the academic year 1997-98;¹ under his regime, Muggle-born witches and wizards were not recognised as genuine members of the wizarding world, so that records of their being so were altered or purged; Muggle-born witches and wizards resident in the United Kingdom typically don’t discover their true magical identity until they receive a letter inviting them to attend Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry at the age of eleven; and therefore, for those of us who were less than eleven years old at the time in question – for the very same generation, in other words, that grew up reading Harry Potter and longing to be part of the wizarding world – there remains a chance that any one of us could be a Muggle-born witch or wizard whose existence was erased from Ministry of Magic records during Voldemort’s reign of terror. There remains a chance, for every one of us, that we really should have received that Hogwarts letter and set off from Platform Nine-and-Three-Quarters on the first of September to receive our magical education. Take heart, millennial Potterheads; there’s hope for us yet: we may yet turn out to be more than mere Muggles.

Because nobody wants to be a Muggle, does she? Of course, Rowling’s fictional universe is far from the only one in which there exists a hidden community of special people endowed with extraordinary powers – the same is true, for instance, in the Percy Jackson series, the Mortal Instruments, the Children of the Red King,² and countless others – but it’s probably the best example merely by virtue of how well known it is. Some people are magical; others are mundane. Some people have the supernatural abilities; others just don’t. They’re just the ordinary, run-of-the-mill rank and file; they don’t get to cast the spells and fight the battles and do the cool things that make it into the stories; they’re just the unremarkable randomers there to bulk out the background while the special heroes get on with the stuff that really matters. They’re mere Muggles. And nobody, having had a glimpse of the wizarding world – having come to understand that the world we see hides an incredible supernatural reality – wants to be a Muggle. Being a Muggle means one cannot truly participate in the wizarding world; instead, one can only observe. And as fun as it might be to ooh and aah at the astonishing, it’s surely got to be more fun to actually be part of the astonishing oneself.

Happily for us, there are – if you’ll permit the analogy – no Muggles in the Church.

But grace was given to each one of us according to the measure of Christ’s gift. Therefore it says, When he ascended on high he led a host of captives, and he gave gifts to men … And he gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the shepherds and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ…

That’s from Paul’s letter to the Christian community at Ephesus.³ I owe credit for the concept of this post both to my supervisor, who recently took a few of us through the chapter in question, and to one of the aforementioned ‘few of us’, who subsequently described a tendency, upon looking at lists of gifts for ministry in the New Testament, to assume that some Christians had those, and the rest of us were – well, Muggles.

It’s a tendency I recognise. One scans through a list like that and thinks, oh crikey, I’m not sure I’m up to doing any of those jobs. I’m not denying that God bestows each of these supernatural abilities on some of the individuals he has chosen to be holy and blameless before him, but I can’t see that I really fit the bill for any of the roles in question. And you know what, I think if you were to ask most of my Christian friends, they’d say the same thing about themselves. I know about these great heroes of the faith who do the cool stuff and have their stories told, but that doesn’t sound much like most of the Christians I know, least of all myself. Aren’t there some of us who are just the ordinary, run-of-the-mill rank and file? Aren’t there some of us who just pootle along quietly in the background – turning up, and maybe helping out here and there, but nothing too dramatic – while the movers and shakers get on with the super-important ministry stuff? Isn’t there any room in the Church for Muggles?

Well, from the aforementioned Ephesians passage, no, there isn’t. Grace was given to each one of us according to the measure of Christ’s gift – and from what follows, it’s clear that we’re talking about gifts for ministry here, not the gift of salvation (which has in any case already been dealt with in the previous chapters, and had a line drawn under it in the form of a brief doxology, forever and ever, amen). To each one of us. There is no wriggling out of that. If you belong to the body, grace has been given you to carry out ministry of some description.

None of us in the Church is a mere Muggle. None of us is lacking supernatural abilities. None of us is relegated to only observing the astonishing things God does instead of fully participating in them. In fact, let me rephrase that: none of us is permitted to only observe instead of to fully participate. If the reason our gifts for ministry were given – and they have, if the Bible is true, been given – is in order to equip our fellow-believers to exercise theirs; and to build one another up; and to bring about unity among us; and to increase our knowledge of the one we worship; and to grow one another into maturity of faith; and to cause each other to reflect more fully in our own person the perfection of our Lord … if the reason God gave us these gifts was in order that we might use them for these purposes, then not to do so frankly constitutes disobedience and neglect of duty, not to mention a disservice to our brothers and sisters.

Christian, you are not a mere Muggle – not because you’re one of the special heroes instead, but because God didn’t design his Church to be divided into two categories of people, the remarkable and the mundane. You are not a mere Muggle, and neither is any of your fellow-believers. You are not a mere Muggle, and you are not permitted to only observe the proceedings of ministry, only to benefit from them, rather than fully participating yourself. But more to the point, you are not a mere Muggle, because Christ gives grace to each one of us: he who calls us to exercise our gifts for ministry in service of his body, his people, is the same one who apportioned those gifts in the first place, precisely so that they might be used for such a purpose. These are gifts of grace; they don’t require any worthiness or innate capability on our part, any more than the gift of our salvation does. We are no more responsible for our own spiritual giftings than the witches and wizards of the Potterverse are for their own magical abilities.

Nobody wants to be a Muggle. And in the Church, nobody is. Now that raises a truer smile than any daft headcanon about a misplaced Hogwarts letter, right guys?

Footnotes

¹ Here’s a handy timeline of key events of the Potterverse for your consultation: https://www.hp-lexicon.org/timeline/character-timelines/harry-potter-timeline/. I’ll warn you now that it contains Cursed Child spoilers.

² Also known as the Charlie Bone series: http://www.jennynimmo.me.uk/CharlieBone.html. I’m surprised that no cinema studio appears to snapped up the rights to this one yet.

³ Do check out the whole chapter: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Ephesians+4&version=ESVUK.