Just Like Magic

The new Harry Potter movie is coming out in just a few days, so, yes, I’m going to do it.  I’m going to talk about Harry Potter.  (Sherann, you knew it was only a matter of time.)

PLEASE NOTE: If you aren’t a Harry Potter fan, I’m not going to get deep into details.  So, please stick around and give this a read.  With that said, to you who are fans, there will be no spoilers here, unless it would spoil things for you to know that the bad guy loses at the end of the story.  Oops.  Sorry.  I guess I spoiled it then.

I am a huge Harry Potter fan.  I’m a big fan of the fantasy genre to begin with, so when my cousin suggested the books to me years ago, I decided to give them a try, and of course, like millions of other people throughout the world, I was instantly hooked on the story of the Boy Who Lived.  But these stories are more than just entertaining.  A lot of truth is revealed, as is the case in many fiction stories and even in fantastical fiction such as this.

Let me tell you what hooked me.  The Harry Potter story is ultimately a story of good versus evil, in which good wins out in the end.  Too simplistic?  I don’t think so.  It’s similar to another book that we’re all big fans of: the Bible.  Before you start lighting the fires to burn me as a heretic, let me explain.  The Harry Potter series are not Christian novels, but there is nothing inherently un-Christian, or anti-Christian in them.  They advocate peace, love, acceptance, justice… yes, there’s magic, but it’s a fantasy story, not a manual.  There’s magic in the Lord of the Rings series, too!  Maybe I’ll talk about those books sometime … but not right now.  I don’t think that Harry is meant to be a messiah figure, not really.  But there are many parallels in his story to the human condition in general and to the realities of evil in the world, as well as the acknowledgment of the fact that there are worse things than death and the true power of love.

Call me weird, but I’m a big fan of books and movies that paint evil for what it truly is.  Evil is real, whether we want to believe it is or not.  Evil exists solely to steal, kill, and destroy.  Within evil there is no compassion, no mercy, and no love, of any kind.  In fact, as Rowling points out over and over again in Harry’s story, evil doesn’t understand love, and that is evil’s greatest downfall.  Voldemort is thwarted over and over again by love.  He doesn’t understand it.  He doesn’t believe in its power.  He doesn’t count on it.  Therefore, it always defeats him and ultimately defeats him.

Jesus Christ took the humble form of a human being and walked willingly to death on a cross in order to redeem us.  Satan thought that he had won.  Everything had worked out just like he had wanted, just like he had influenced them… or so he thought.  But then, three days later, God raised Jesus from the dead, and any perceived power that Satan thought that he had was shattered and the entire world would never be the same again.  Praise God!

Also, we can’t ignore the connection of the Ministry of Magic’s (Rowling’s magical government) intense effort to ignore the truth of Voldemort’s existence and our own efforts to ignore evil in our world.  For Harry, frustration runs rampant as he deals with people at school and in the government who are trying their very best to shut him up as he is trying to make people aware of the fact that Voldemort is alive and well.  Watching the movies recently with a friend who had never seen them before he turned to me and asked why the government would refuse to believe Harry.  And I said to him, “Because they don’t want to believe him.  Would you?” 

We would love to ignore evil and just pretend that it doesn’t exist.  No murder.  No theft.  No bullying.  No starvation.  No cancer.  No AIDS.  No orphans.  I could go on and on and on.  But the point is that evil exists.  We have to acknowledge it.  But we do so in the knowledge that Jesus has already overcome the world.  Love has already won.  Evil has no power here except what we give up, and we give it up most readily when we chose to ignore it.