My five
year old daughter is very taken with the Disney double Academy award-wining film,
Frozen. Maybe the children or
grandchildren in your life are too? In many ways it’s no doubt an excellent
film. And it’s been very successful: accumulating nearly $1.3 billion in
worldwide box office revenue, it is the highest grossing animated movie of all
time. You may well know it’s anthemic song, “Let it go!” and even this August
we may find ourselves asking, “Do you want to build a snowman?” In fact, my
eldest son has taken to pleading with me, “Please will you stop singing that
annoying song, Daddy!”
I have
argued before that the good news of the Christian faith is what we might call
the true or ultimate fairy story. All the stories which we tell are really variations
on the theme of the Bible’s story, God’s story of the world – or sometimes
protests against it. All the best stories involve some kind of problem or
crisis, a Fall, and a resolution, rescue, redemption or deliverance. Death and
resurrection is the shape of all life. We all long for a happy ending, but can
it be true? Christianity’s great story is that God loves this wonderful yet
broken world. Jesus is the mysterious stranger, the Prince from another world
who kills the dragon and gets the girl. At the cost of his own life he triumphs
over evil and he and his bride, the church, live happily ever after.
Yet the
writers of Frozen are on record as
saying that they are deliberately trying to tell a different kind of fairy
story. In the film, the crisis is that Anna is gradually freezing. As in
Narnia, an endless winter without any Christmases threatens. Anna is told that
she can be saved only by true love. She imagines that might come from the
charming and dashing Hans, who turns out to be a rotter of the worst sort. In
the end, Anna finds that she has to look within for true love. She can’t depend
on some handsome fella to swoop in and rescue her. She has to dig deep and
stand on her own two feet. It’s Anna’s own love for her sister that saves the
day.
Although
there’s something to be said for this, the Bible would tell us, I think, that
it’s basically wrong! One of the most important things to grasp about the
Christian worldview is that it sees us as sinners in need of rescue. Yes, we
are astonishing, mysterious, deep creatures, made in the image of God himself.
But if we look within our hearts we won’t find perfect, true love. There are
all sorts of confused and contradictory loves in our hearts. And the fatal
flaws of selfishness, sin and pride touch everything. In the end, we are part
of the problem not the solution. We cannot fix ourselves or our world. We need
the perfect love of God from outside to come down and save the day. The Bible’s
story is of God in Christ to the rescue, a story that interrupted and
transformed history in a stable in Bethlehem more than two millennia ago, and
is still changing lives today.
But for
all their rejection of the classic fairy story, the writers of Frozen can’t totally escape God’s story.
We are characters in the drama God is performing whether we like it, or realise
it, or not. Anna’s act of true love is self-less and self-sacrificial: she
jumps in front of her sister, Elsa, to save her from Hans’ sword-thrust – and
thus the curse is broken. Which of course is an echo of Jesus’ laying down of
his life for us on the cross. God’s reality breaks in to all our stories and
begins to make sense of them. A happy ending depends on realising what the
story is and embracing it as our story.
The Revd Marc Lloyd
I owe many of the ideas for this article to a talk given by The Revd Dr Tim Keller at the
Evangelical Ministry Assembly this year. See: www.timothykeller.com
/ www.proctrust.org.uk/
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