When Jesus washes you with baptismal water, you can rest assured that the Lion of Judah is on the move.
This is an excerpt from Luther and the Lion: A Narnian Catechism by Sam Schuldheisz (1517 Publishing, 2026), p. 123-125, now available here.
When the story of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader begins, Lucy and Edmund as well as their insufferable cousin Eustace are sitting in their room. Lucy and Edmund are busy talking about and longing for Narnia, admiring a portrait of a ship on the wall, when Eustace, as he delights in doing, interrupts them. With a mischievous grin, he doubles down on his other favorite activity – teasing his cousins for all their nonsense about Narnia.
Thankfully, for Lucy and Edmund’s sake, something interrupts Eustace for once. It’s the painting on the wall. The ship, which appears to the children to be a very Narnian ship, slices through the water. Not painted water, but real, dripping wet water. The kind that splishes and splashes in your face. As the children look closer, the waves crest and trough. And Eustace’s face begins to match the color of the sea rolling through the portrait and into their room.
And then something even more magical happens. Lucy and Edmund aren’t seeing things at all. They aren’t making up tall tales. Narnia is real, and so are the waves, the ship, and her crew. The waves spray. The wind rushes to greet Lucy’s face and tosses her about. The sounds and smells of the sea fill their ears and greet their noses, and the taste of saltwater touches their lips. Sea foam froths and flies through the air.
What is happening? What does it all mean? No, it isn’t a dream. The portrait on the wall swallows Lucy, Edmund, and Eustace right into Narnia. The painting is alive and draws them through its watery doorway into the magical world that Lucy and Edmund have been longing to return to. The water of that portrait is not just plain water. It’s a portal that brings Lucy, Edmund, and Eustace into a new life in a new (at least new for Eustace) world and a new adventure.
This is what God does for you in Baptism. Like Jonah, you are tossed in the sea where all your sins are dead and drowned, and you are hurled back out again, dripping with new life in Jesus. The Lion of Judah makes a doorway out of water and word. And where does this doorway lead? To a new life and a new world in him. How can this be? Like that portrait in Dawn Treader, but only better, baptism is not just plain water. It’s the water joined with God’s word, command, and promise. When Jesus washes you with baptismal water, you can rest assured that the Lion of Judah is on the move.
As with the adventures of Lucy, Edmund, and Eustace in Narnia, your story begins with a journey in and through water. Baptism is your watery portal into God’s kingdom. Through the liquid grace of water and his word and the Holy Spirit, he brings you back upstream to his kingdom. Your baptism is a journey that takes you down into the grave and out alive again, soaking you with salvation.
“Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were buried, therefore, with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life” (Romans 6:3-4).
