Mirror, Mirror, on the Wall

I wonder if this story is relevant for the younger members of our congregation, the tale of Snow White? Maybe it helps us to recognise the amount of time that’s passed between our childhood and those of our young ones today. Maybe we have a few more lines on our faces, flecks of grey in our hair, maybe we’re afraid to ask the question that the Queen asks of the enchanted mirror in this story of Snow White.

Well in the unlikely event that you haven’t heard of Snow White, in this story, the evil queen stands before her enchanted mirror and asks a question she thinks she already knows the answer to: "Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the fairest of them all?" For most of her life, the answer given is that she was the fairest, until Snow White came of age. And for a time, this question from the queen wasn’t a genuine inquiry; it was a request for validation. She really didn’t want the truth; she wanted affirmation that stroked her ego and confirmed her superiority. She wanted the answer to be something that tickles her ears and affirmed her own proclivities.

In many ways, we have created our own mirrors or self-affirmation, our own silos that reinforce and stroke our egos. We stand before the mirrors of social media, we replay only the wins in our lives over and over again, we look at our achievement certificates, the positive references and positive reviews, so we might relive and revel in them. And we do this so we can soften the deep internal questions that we’re scared to ask, "Am I doing enough? Am I good enough? Am I really loved?" We suck in our breath, we justify our failures and mistakes, and then we hope that the world and God will confirm, yes you are indeed the ‘fairest’ in the land.

But what happens when the mirror says something we don’t want to hear? In the Snow White story the Queen hears that Snow White has surpassed her in beauty and she is incensed, wracked with jealousy, anger and envy. I wonder what our response is to the truth that we are not the fairest in the land, that we’re not the ‘good guy,’ in fact that we’re not even the ‘hero’ of our own story?

In our journey through this Lenten season, we’re actually confronted with a different kind of mirror, a mirror that is a gift of God, this mirror is the Law of God, and it’s found in our passage this week of Romans 3:9–20. This mirror is not concerned with how beautiful we are, our achievements, or even our good deeds. Rather it places us right next to everyone else in humanity, everyone is on one side of this mirror and there is only one person who stands alone in the reflection, the one person who will tell you the truth with love and compassion, the one person who is the truth, Jesus Christ.

If you have spent your life trying to be better, trying to be good, trying to be acknowledged as enough, this passage in Romans can actually be a path to freedom for you, freedom from the slog of doing more, of trying to be more. The most hopeful thing we might do as we journey through Lent to the Cross is to move from being self-centred, to being Christ-centred. Let us commit to acknowledging the real hero of our story, the One who is truly worthy of our worship. May God bless you.

Josh