Better, Not Back

“It’s like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo – the ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger, they were, and sometimes you didn’t want to know the end, because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was, when so much bad had happened? … But in the end, it’s only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come, and when the sun shines, it will shine out the clearer.”

The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002)

The sun shining ... trees will also prove somewhat relevant in a moment.

Samwise Gamge knows a thing or two about how stories work.¹ You’ve got the setup, which tells you The Way The World Is. Then there’s some kind of complication; some threat rises that needs to be dealt with; great demands are made on our heroes that they rise to meet the challenge; a heck lot of bad goes down. And after all that, how can the world go back to the way it was? Well, it can’t. It doesn’t. It isn’t supposed to. All that suffering wins something better than a return to the way things were; it wins victory over the threat. Whereas before evil was just dormant, now it’s defeated. When the shadow has passed, the sun shines out the clearer.

The world didn’t go back to the way it was after the Ring was thrown into Mount Doom and destroyed; it was better, because there was no possibility of anyone ever using the Ring for evil again. The world didn’t go back to the way it was after Voldemort was killed at the Battle of Hogwarts; it was better, because there were no Horcruxes left and no chance that he might return from semi-death as he’d done once before.² The world didn’t even go back to the way it was after the Avengers used actual time travel to snap the half of the universe’s population that had turned to dust back into existence; it was better, because this time around they successfully defeated Thanos. Heavy prices were paid, in all cases, certainly, but the peace they bought in the end was worth more than the peace there was at the beginning, because, as consistently demonstrated, that first peace was susceptible to disruption by evil, whereas the second peace, evil having been permanently dealt with, was not.

Well, not to the same evil, anyway; when we’re talking about fictional realms, there’s almost always room for a sequel where something else goes wrong. But nevertheless, you catch my drift. A happy ending is worth more than a happy beginning, because it involves evil being defeated rather than merely dormant. All the suffering in the middle, grievous as it may have been, turns out to be worth it for the sake of securing that happy ending. Plus, it’s the key vehicle of character development, whereby our heroes actually become heroes rather than merely main characters. In the best stories – or the ones with the most satisfactory endings, anyway – the world doesn’t go back to the way it was. The world going back to the way it was is something that belongs to cartoons and the ilk: things might get pretty crazy within the ten- or twenty-minute runtime of an episode, but they invariably all go back to normal at the end of it, and hence we always know that none of the struggles and successes and sufferings of our poor two-dimensional heroes are ultimately going to have any significance or worth. In the great stories, by contrast, the ones that really matter, the ones that stay with you and mean something, the world doesn’t go back to the way it was; all those struggles and successes and sufferings get to count for something; the cause is won, and the world ends up better.

And so it is too in the greatest story of all.

Has it ever occurred to you that the Garden of Eden wasn’t actually perfect? I mean, I’m sure it was really nice and everything, but let’s be real here, there were some pretty major issues. The fact that the tree of the knowledge of good and evil was there at all is an obvious one. Then there was that talking snake going around advocating disobedience of God’s command. And most vitally of all, the human and his wife were of such a disposition as to start thinking that, now you mention it, Mr. Serpent, disobedience sounds like a really great idea.³ When the prospect of immortality is on the table, if you can’t be relied upon to do your job successfully every single time ad infinitum, then sooner or later you’re bound to get it wrong. The fact that the fall happened at all, in other words, proves that it was inevitable. And if the fall was inevitable, then we can hardly say that the original setup was perfect. It wasn’t. Creation wasn’t perfect. Humans weren’t perfect. Eden was the beginning-of-the-story peace, where evil was dormant; it was the equivalent of Bilbo keeping the Ring in an envelope on his mantelpiece, of Voldemort going about currently deprived of physical form and so powerless, of Thanos not having got hold of the infinity stones yet. There might have been peace for the moment, but it was never going to last, not while the potential for evil existed.

 

Of course, the fact that the serpent was cursed to crawl on its belly as a consequence of its deceit makes you wonder what it used to do before that. My personal favourite theory is that it flew. But that’s by the by.

It’s not as if God weren’t aware of that, either – as if he hadn’t ordained it. We know that the cross was always the plan. It was before the foundation of the world that we were chosen to be holy and blameless through the blood of the Lamb who was slain.⁴ That’s the happy ending God’s always had on the agenda. And so it wasn’t some kind of oversight that Eden was corruptible; indeed, it was necessary. The illusory peace at the beginning of the story, followed by the complication and the threat and our heroes’ striving and suffering, is necessary in order to land on the better peace of the happy ending.

And a better peace it is. Eden had two significant trees, the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, whereas the new creation will only have one, the tree of life. In Eden, the snake went about telling untruths, whereas nobody who does what is false or detestable shall have a place in the new creation.⁵ The first humans were susceptible to corruption and hence to death, whereas we are to inherit eternal life having been made perfect in Christ – who is God and so incorruptible, and moreover who was made perfect through his human suffering.⁶ As in every story, our hero becomes truly heroic through his persistence in service of good in the face of adversity; Jesus did so perfectly, and we are gifted his virtue as if it were our own, and in order that we might grow into that identity, we share in his sufferings.⁷ Think of it as character development. You don’t emerge from suffering and go back to the way you were; in God’s hands, you emerge from it better – refined like precious metal.

The first humans in Eden could have sung the throne-room song of Revelation 4 – worthy are you, our Lord and God, to receive glory and honour and power, for you created all things, and by your will they existed and were created – but they couldn’t have sung the new song that replaces it in the following chapter: worthy are you to take the scroll and to open its seals, for you were slain, and by your blood you ransomed people for God from every tribe and language and people and nation, and you have made them a kingdom and priests to our God, and they shall reign on the earth. And then a moment later, worthy is the Lamb who was slain, to receive power and wealth and wisdom and might and honour and glory and blessing.⁸ That’s seven things, as opposed to the earlier three. The Son is worthier, more glorious, more excellent and more deserving of devotion, because of what he did for us on the cross. When he died for our sins, he didn’t merely put things back the way they’d been before our first ancestors ate the fruit; he created something better than that. Our first ancestors didn’t even know the difference between good and evil; we are granted to know and love the greatest example of good that there could ever possibly be.

We are not trying to get back to Eden, any more than Frodo and Sam were trying to put the Ring back on Bilbo’s mantelpiece. That was an illusory peace. Where we are heading is so much better. Evil shall be defeated, not merely dormant; there’ll be no possibility that we’ll ever be subject to it again. And the one who defeated it, and through his endurance of suffering in that endeavour was perfected as the best hero of any story ever, will live with us forever and ever. When the shadow of this life and this age is over and God himself shines as our sun, surely, indeed, our sun will shine out so, so much the clearer.

Footnotes

¹ As so often, thanks to Springfield! Springfield! for their extremely useful archive of film scripts: https://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/movie_script.php?movie=lord-of-the-rings-the-two-towers-the.

² Barring – Cursed Child spoilers ahead – mucking about with Time-Turners. Does anyone else feel as if … the Cursed Child reads like fanfiction, or a kind of weird midrash thing trying to account for points of contention and apparent flaws in the original series? Ah well, it’s still a properly stunning bit of theatre: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KzD3qlnhVZA.

³ I hardly need to tell you that you’re looking at Genesis 2 and 3 for this jazz, but heigh-ho, here’s a link: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=gen+2-3&version=ESVUK.

⁴ Ephesians 1:4 and Revelation 13:8, which I’m pretty sure I reference a lot on this blog.

⁵ Check out Revelation 21-22, https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=rev+21-22&version=ESVUK, one of very few passages in the Bible which actually tells us anything at all about the nature of the new creation.

⁶ Yep, Jesus was perfected; Hebrews 2 and 5 are pretty explicit about that: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Hebrews+5&version=ESVUK. Doesn’t mean there was any flaw in him to start with, but what he went through for us made him yet more excellent than he was.

⁷ There are quite a few places I could have taken you for that, but I’ll give you Philippians 3, because it’s great: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Philippians+3&version=ESVUK.

⁸ Last Bible link for today: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=rev+4-5&version=ESVUK.