Today brought the third quarter of the school year to a close.  The quarter both started and ended with a chapel (which I think is pretty rare).  After spending most of the quarter with different speakers walk through the fruit of the Spirit, we wrapped the quarter up with a look at the resurrection of Jesus and encouragement to go to church over spring break.

Part of the time involved setting up, showing, and debriefing this clip from Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part Two, where Harry finally opens the golden snitch and uses the Resurrection Stone.

The clip was then contrasted with this snippet from C. S. Lewis’s “What Are We to Make of Jesus” essay:

Then we come to the strangest story of all, the story of the Resurrection. It is very necessary to get the story clear. I heard a man say, ‘The importance of the Resurrection is that is gives evidence of survival, evidence that the human personality survives death.’ On that view what happened to Christ would be what had always happened to all men, the difference being that in Christ’s case we were privileged to see it happening. This is certainly not what the earliest Christian writers thought. Something perfectly new in the history of the universe had happened. Christ had defeated death. The door, which had always been locked, had for the very first time been forced open. This is something quite distinct from mere ghost-survival. I don’t mean that they disbelieved in ghost-survival. I don’t mean that they disbelieved in ghost-survival. On the contrary, they believed in it so firmly that, on more than one occasion, Christ had had to assure them that He was not a ghost. The point is that while believing in survival they yet regarded the Resurrection as something totally different and new. The Resurrection narratives are not a picture of survival after death; they record how a totally new mode of being has arisen in the universe. Something new had appeared in the universe: as new as the first coming of organic life. This Man, after death, does not get divided into ‘ghost’ and ‘corpse’. A new mode of being has arisen. That is the story. What are we going to make of it?

Definitely an interesting take from Lewis, if only because it reminds us that the “surviving self” has been around for a long time . . . and that the resurrected Jesus stands in stark contrast to it.

All in all, I’m very glad that the quarter is over.  The grades are done.  I have one more speaking responsibility tomorrow.  Then I can get on with planning how to spend spring break.