I am not a Narnia expert either - I never liked the books enough to read them closely (and in fact to this day I've only read half the series, and most of them only once,) but I recall having many, many problems with them, and reading later discussions has not changed my mind.
But as it's relevant to the Easter lesson: the first time I threw the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe against the wall was after Aslan died on the Stone Table, and then came back again, same as ever, everything fixed, no harm done. The whole *point* of Christ's sacrifice was that it *mattered*, that it was a *true* sacrifice, that he really did die and could never again have his human life, couldn't sit down again with his loved ones as equals, and he died in pain and misery and his wounds were not erased - he lived as a human and *died* as a human, and part of being a human is that it ends.
The miracle of the Resurrection is that dying as a human no longer means Death is victorious, that Christ, by choosing to die as a human but in his glory as God, blazed the way for all of us, exactly as human as he is, to follow him to the Kingdom of Heaven.
The miracle of the Resurrection isn't that there was a tricky bit of magic which made it like the sacrifice never happened. When Aslan declared that his death had been unmade and appeared completely unaltered, his death stopped being about the power of love and sacrifice and started being about the Pevensies' manpain.
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I am not a Narnia expert either - I never liked the books enough to read them closely (and in fact to this day I've only read half the series, and most of them only once,) but I recall having many, many problems with them, and reading later discussions has not changed my mind.
But as it's relevant to the Easter lesson: the first time I threw the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe against the wall was after Aslan died on the Stone Table, and then came back again, same as ever, everything fixed, no harm done. The whole *point* of Christ's sacrifice was that it *mattered*, that it was a *true* sacrifice, that he really did die and could never again have his human life, couldn't sit down again with his loved ones as equals, and he died in pain and misery and his wounds were not erased - he lived as a human and *died* as a human, and part of being a human is that it ends.
The miracle of the Resurrection is that dying as a human no longer means Death is victorious, that Christ, by choosing to die as a human but in his glory as God, blazed the way for all of us, exactly as human as he is, to follow him to the Kingdom of Heaven.
The miracle of the Resurrection isn't that there was a tricky bit of magic which made it like the sacrifice never happened. When Aslan declared that his death had been unmade and appeared completely unaltered, his death stopped being about the power of love and sacrifice and started being about the Pevensies' manpain.
And then I threw the book at the wall.