Dwarves, as a rule, are a rather recalcitrant lot. It was their stubborn refusal to follow directions that caused some of them to suffer the indignity of being turned into dufflepuds, in C.S. Lewis’ The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. No doubt some distant cousins of the duffers were found in the stable at the end of the chronicles, in The Last Battle. You remember what happens there. History has drawn to a close. Aslan, the great king, and son of the Emperor Beyond the Sea has consummated all things.
Through the fuzzy and disheartening ecumenism of Lewis, we find living in paradise not only a servant of the false god Tash, but some mule-headed dwarves who, to the end of the age, refused to be taken in by any religious hornswaggle, including faith in Aslan. The Tash-ite, once Aslan explains Lewis’ ecumenism, goes on his merry way up into the high lands. The dwarves, on the other hand, insist that time has not ended, that they are in fact still locked in an old stable. When the redeemed seek to awaken them by offering them food from Aslan’s table, they insist that they have been offered dung from the stable floor.
While I deny with great vigor that the lost in hell suffer only because they don’t know they are in heaven, there is a lesson to be learned here. Lewis makes the same point in The Weight of Glory when he says, “When infinite joy is offered us, [we are] like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in the slums because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.” Which is exactly how we like it.
Lewis, however, I think, missed something here. I don’t think he was quite nice enough to us. Isn’t it possible that the reason we have such a hard time believing that the King’s banquet is indeed a feast is because we are already feasting in the gutter with our mud pies? That is, the reason we are satisfied with so little is not because we are all pig-headed philistines, but because even a tidbit of the grace of God overpowers us. There is a beauty and a power in His grace, in whatever form it takes. Like Lucy’s bottle of healing cordial, it only takes a drop.
The grace and the beauty of God is omnipresent, and so we find it hard to take our eyes off the beauty of this thing which reflects His glory to look through a glass that is somewhat less dim.
But Lewis is right in this; there really is a banquet, and it really is far more grand than the mud pies. Let’s follow a few different versions of the invitation/encounter in the gutter, and see what we shall see. Here am I, a servant of the king. I have been sent out into the highways and byways to be sure that my Master’s feast is full. I find you in the gutter with your mud pie. Each of us has an opportunity to sin here, and each an opportunity to do the right thing.
Suppose, for instance, that I look at you, see your filthy little fingers, see the moronic delight you are taking in the mud and conclude, “Forget it. He’s happy where he is. Leave him be. Anyone that foolish just can’t be worth the trouble.” Have I been nice? I could walk away with a smile, and you could watch me walk away thinking, “What a nice, smiley man. I wonder why he was looking at me,” and then get back to your mud. That’s one option in which I sin, and you don’t.
Now let’s try another. I’ve come to fetch you. I see you in the mud, and I say, “Hey you blamed fool! What’s the matter with you? Haven’t you any more sense than a pig? The Master, I’ll never understand why, has sent me for you. Now get out of that muck, and get a move on. That stuff is nasty. Let’s go.”
On the one hand, in this scenario I was nicer to you in a sense. I didn’t leave you where I found you. I told you about the good news of the great feast. On the other hand, I wasn’t as nice as I should have been. I didn’t exhibit much of the Master’s grace. In fact I showed a degree of pride, forgetting that I only became the servant of the Master because He used His grace and power to get me to see that I was in the gutter.
Stick with the second scenario for a moment. Now let’s look at how you could respond. You could conclude that if the servant is anything like the master, you just can’t believe that His feast would be better than your mud pie. While such a response would be understandable, it would also cause you to miss the feast. The hard truth is that the Master doesn’t perfect us before He calls us to send out the word about the feast. Knowing full well that we will probably stink up the joint serving as His ambassadors. The Master, after all, isn’t a tame lion.
Consider though this third scenario. You are still there in the gutter. I approach you and say, “The King has invited you to come to His feast. You will find there delights and joys far surpassing what you have here in your gutter-“ “See here,” you say, “who invited you to come here and begin knocking what I have going on? You certainly are an arrogant cuss, aren’t you? It’s not terribly nice of you to come along bragging about how your feast is better than mine.”
“I’m sorry,” I suggest, “did I say the feast was mine? How clumsy of me. No, it is the King’s feast. He is the source of all its delights. (And, by the way, He is even the source of that pie you have there.) I add nothing to the feast. But it is indeed far greater than what you have here. I know because I once also played with mud pies in the gutter.”
“Go away you mean-spirited, arrogant old coot. God gave me these mud pies, and you should be ashamed of yourself for knocking them.”
Now who is in sin?
We do have some not so nice faces that are, in some circumstances, appropriate to wear. For in our meeting-in-the-gutter scenarios, we often find a third group there, the sons of Sanballat. You remember this sweet fellow. He shows up at Nehemiah’s building project and asks, “What are these feeble Jews doing? Will they fortify themselves? Will they offer sacrifices? Will they complete it in a day? Will they revive the stones from the heaps of rubbish—stones that are burned?” (Nehemiah 4:2).
The true enemy is not the one in the gutter, but the one who insists that there is no feast, the one who calls any invitation to the feast an act of unkindness. These are they who not only deny the feast, but argue that we’re trying to coax you into a prison, that we’re trying to make the gutter dwellers give up their mud pies, and give them only drudgery in return. This group gets from us not the smiley face, but the prophetic voice.
We ought to appreciate the mud pies, to see in them the grace of God, reflections of His glory. But we mustn’t be too easily satisfied. We seek to distinguish, and never to confuse the gift and the Giver, the creation and the Creator. We should remember the wisdom of John Piper who tells us that “God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in Him.”
We ought also to remember the wisdom of Tony Campolo, who rightly reminds us that the kingdom of God is a party. We are both building and reveling in that kingdom when we come to that feast because we are making manifest, and drinking in the glory of God. This is blessing and not burden.