From Caterpillar to King: Eustace's Undragoning

In C.S. Lewis's The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, there is a scene that every pastor should know. The boy Eustace Scrubb — selfish, greedy, and thoroughly unpleasant — falls asleep on a dragon's hoard and wakes to discover he has become a dragon himself. His outer form has finally matched what was already inside.

But the transformation that matters comes next. Eustace tries to peel off his dragon skin himself. He scratches and claws, and layer after layer comes away, but there is always another dragon skin underneath. He cannot go deep enough. He cannot fix himself.

Then Aslan appears. "You will have to let me undress you," the great Lion says. And with the first tear of those claws, Eustace feels a pain deeper than anything he has managed on his own — a pain that cuts all the way down to the real boy buried beneath the scales. It hurts terribly. But when it is done, Eustace is thrown into clear water and comes out new.

Lewis understood what the Apostle Paul meant when he wrote, "If anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come" (2 Corinthians 5:17). Real transformation is not self-improvement. We cannot peel away our own sin deeply enough. It takes the hands of the Living God — hands that wound us in mercy so they can make us whole. The work hurts. But oh, what we become on the other side.