30th March 2025. Listen Up!

The Magician’s Nephew is the prequel to the more famous, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. It tells the story of the creation of the world of Narnia, a world where Jesus is represented by a great lion Aslan. A couple of human children, Eustace and Polly, stumble upon Narnia as it is being formed. They find the song
of creation that Aslan sings wonderful! But the children had inadvertently brought two others along with them: the wicked witch, and Eustace’s uncle. The witch hates the song, and runs away. Listen to how Lewis describes Eustace’s uncle:

When the Lion had first begun singing, long ago when it was still quite dark, he
had realized that the noise was a song. And he had disliked the song very much. It made him think and feel things he did not want to think and feel.

Then, when the sun rose and he saw that the singer was a Lion (“only a lion,” as he said to himself) he tried his hardest to make himself believe that it wasn’t singing and never had been singing, only roaring as any lion might in a zoo in our own world. Of course it can’t really have been singing, he thought, I must have imagined it. I’ve been letting my nerves get out of order. Who ever heard of a lion singing?

And the longer and more beautifully the Lion sang, the harder Uncle Andrew tried to make himself believe that he could hear nothing but roaring. Now the trouble about trying to make yourself stupider than you really are is that you very often succeed. Uncle Andrew did. He soon did hear nothing but roaring in Aslan’s song. Soon he couldn’t have heard anything else even if he had wanted to.

This weekend, we’re looking at one of the most famous of Jesus’ stories: the story of the Sower. It’s all about hearing and listening. Who can discover and understand the good news about God’s Kingdom? Why did Jesus speak in stories, with hidden meanings, when He spoke in public? Who can hear and understand Jesus? And what might this have to say about the way that we share the good news today?

Today’s text: Mark 4:1-25