Monday in the Fifth Week of Easter
When Christ died he gave his soul to the Father, his body to Joseph of Arimathea, his clothes to the soldiers, his mother to St. John, and to all of us, his disciples, he gave his Spirit to dwell within us.
If we were entirely good, like the saints in heaven, the presence of the Spirit would be pure happiness. But as sinners, the Holy Spirit seeks to make us Christlike. He doesn’t want to hurt us, but it is a painful process to give up sin.1
In the Chronicles of Narnia, C.S. Lewis narrates the adventures of a child named Eustace. His peers describe him as a real stinker. After sleeping in a dragon’s cave, Eustace wakes up to find that he himself has turned into a dragon and he realizes it’s because he’s not been a very nice person. In order to become a lovable young boy his adventures involve tearing and peeling away layer after layer of dragon skin.1 He only succeeds with the help of the lion, Aslan, who is a Christ figure.
Our journey through life is like that. We need Christ’s gift of the Holy Spirit to peel away our dragon skin. Then at last others might say of us what they said of Eustace, “You’d never know him for the same boy.”2
- Francis Chan. Forgotten God: Reversing Our Tragic Neglect of the Holy Spirit (pp. 50-51). Kindle Edition.
- C.S. Lewis, Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Penguin Books, 1965, 210.