The Missing Piece - Harry Potter
By Rev. Michael Stonhouse
It may be sad to say, but I have to say it: ‘He Who Cannot Be Named’, Lord Voldemort, is more than just a little bit clueless. Like someone who neglects installing the capstone of an arch or the foundation stone of a building, Voldemort is missing the most essential piece to life. Voldemort values those things that Slytherin is known for, particularly power, and ‘happens’ to believe it is the most important thing in life. However, as it turns out, Voldemort is wrong, deluded, because it is not the most important thing, and the one thing that he is missing, that he has neglected and written off as inconsequential, turns out to be his undoing.
In the Bible, in what is called the Prologue of John, there is something most telling, most informative. Depending on the translation used, it says, ‘the darkness has never extinguished or overcome or overpowered the light’ or ‘the darkness has never comprehended or understood the light.’ In a sense, both of these renditions are true, and both of them apply to Voldemort.
If one thinks of Voldemort as the epitome of darkness, the absence of light, or as active personal darkness or a concrete tangible manifestation of it, hostility personified, then this makes abundant sense. He has never, to quote the first translation mentioned above, overcome or put out the light that dwells in Harry Potter and epitomizes his life and all that he stands for.
This only stands to reason when one looks at the other way that the passage is translated. What is the ‘light’ that Voldemort doesn’t understand or appreciate? It is love, disinterested, unselfish, sacrificial love. We see this love manifested all over the accounts of Harry Potter’s love.
Most notably we see this in Harry’s mother, Lily Potter, but not only there. But before going on to the others, let’s just look at what it says about Lily’s love:
Here Dumbledore is speaking to Harry: “Your mother died to save you. If there is one thing Voldemort cannot understand, it is love. He didn’t realize that love as powerful as your mother’s for you leaves its own mark. Not a scar, no visible sign…to have been loved so deeply, even though the person who loved us is gone, will give us some protection forever.”
Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (p. 216)
And again, in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (pp. 736-737), Dumbledore says, “But I knew, too, where Voldemort was weak. And so, I made my decision. You would be protected by an ancient magic of which he knows, which he despises, and which he has always, therefore, underestimated—to his cost. I am speaking, of course, of the fact that your mother died to save you. She gave you a lingering protection he never expected, a protection that flows in your veins to this day. I put my trust, therefore, in your mother’s blood...Your mother’s sacrifice made the bond of blood the strongest shield I could give you.”
The light that was found in Harry was thusly underestimated, despised, misunderstood, undervalued, by Voldemort—and in fact, sneered at, and yet it proved to be his undoing. It is like the ‘deeper magic’, a sacrificial love, that Aslan refers to in C.S. Lewis’ classic, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, a magic that the evil White Witch knew nothing about. Indeed, as Screwtape alleges in The Screwtape Letters, the whole idea of a pure, disinterested, unselfish love is something that the enemy of our souls could never quite figure out. Indeed, all through these letters, there is a thread of suspicion on his part that surely there is another side to this love, for surely, he figures, that this love seeks some sort of benefit to its giver.
Moreover, this idea of a sacrificial love, this idea that the shedding of blood on behalf another person provides some sort of blessing and protection, is at the heart of the Christian message, the Gospel, namely that Christ, like Lily Potter with Harry, ‘died to save us.’
But, in this ‘gospel according to Harry Potter’, it doesn’t end there. Harry has thereby gained a power that Voldemort had never had, namely the ability to love. Earlier on, in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (p. 311), Harry saves the life of Pettigrew, the very man who had betrayed James and Lily Potter thereby leading directly to their deaths, an act on Harry’s part that would later rebound to his favour. And, in the end, Harry too lays down his life, yes, for his friends, in order to defeat Voldemort. And once again, it rebounds to his favour, to the defeat of the darkness and all that was evil and to the triumph of good and what was surely the ‘light that shines in the darkness’. So, Harry, by the sacrifice of his mother, and his own sacrifice as well, is endowed with a ‘missing piece’, a weapon that Voldemort could scarcely imagine. And so, it is too with God, in Christ, has done for us through His death.
