The Boy Who Couldn't Shed His Own Skin

In C.S. Lewis's The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, a disagreeable boy named Eustace Scrubb wanders into a dragon's cave and falls asleep on a pile of treasure. When he wakes, he has become a dragon himself — scales, claws, and all. The transformation mirrors exactly what he had been on the inside: selfish, hoarding, hard-hearted.

Desperate to become human again, Eustace tries what seems obvious: he scratches off his scaly skin himself. Layer after layer peels away, but each time he looks down, there is still more dragon beneath. He cannot reach deep enough. He cannot get to what is actually wrong with him.

Then Aslan comes. The great lion tells Eustace he must undress him — and the claws go deeper than Eustace ever could himself. It hurts terribly. But when the last scale falls away, Aslan throws Eustace into a clear pool of water, and he emerges himself again — more himself, Lewis writes, than he had been in years.

Lewis understood what the gospel teaches so clearly: self-reformation never gets to the root. We can manage behavior, adjust habits, polish the exterior — but the deep work of transformation belongs to Someone else. Redemption is not something we achieve; it is something we receive, from hands willing to go where ours cannot reach.

Christ does not merely improve us. He re-makes us.