IF you have NOT already taken time to watch the Hosea Movie of a previous post, it is related to this series and I recommend it. Watch it as a family, if possible (80 min.); especially your teens.
Roger Harned
HANSEL & GRETEL – Chapter 4
The story of Hosea is a story of reconciliation between a husband and a wife. It is a story of reconciliation between a people who have done evil in the sight of the Lord and our God of unfailing, unconditional love.
As a wife commits adultery against her husband; so does a people who sin commit adultery against God.
Why is it that after his adultery with Bathsheba David had prayed, “Against You and You only have I sinned?”
God will judge and punish; yet God may have mercy on the one who repents.
Christ died for sinners, adulterers against God. Christ died for you and for me. We have His blood as our redeeming Light of hope, an escape from this woods of darkness away from our Father.
If we are like Hosea, a faithful husband with unconditional love, we know that the evil of the step-mother of this story is not committed against Hansel and Gretel or against her husband. The evil of their actions affects ALL, but God will judge.
Dear Christian husband, beloved Christian wife: do not believe you have sinned against each other, when Christ has sacrificed His undying love for your forgiveness and redemption. Do not continue to sin against our Lord.
You believe your sin is against me; but your sin is the adultery of Judas.
Rev. 2:21
(Enough for now of the importance of marriage.) Returning to the story of our children:
Hansel and Gretel are children of a step-family. Their father has given in to an evil step-mother and sent the children off into the woods… twice. The father and step-mother want to be alone. The children want to be with their parent. CONFLICT.
(Parents, once you have a child you do NOT get to be alone. That is God’s intention. Children need the loving affection of both parents… often.)
Go to your room!
As the story goes, after being sent away once the children find their way back. Hansel has marked the way with stones.
Yet after their return to what they hoped and had known as the love of home, the second time the wicked step-mother locks them in their room and they cannot gather stones to mark the way home.
Separation. Return home. Locked up alone by hatred. Sent away once more… never to see the love of home again. A sad and all-too-familiar contemporary non-fiction.
Then, as we observed in a previous chapter, a wicked witch (not unlike the step-mother, according to literary analysts) holds the children to serve her and even to become the food for the table of her famine. All seems hopeless; but once again (as we discovered in the previous chapter) their cleverness wins out and they escape the witch, who comes to her death as a result of her own evil intended for Hansel and Gretel.
2 Chronicles 29:6 For our fathers have been unfaithful and have done what was evil in the sight of the LORD our God. They have forsaken him and have turned away their faces from the habitation of the LORD and turned their backs.
A man has turned his back on his own children in favor of a new wife.
Is a father not lord over his children? Is a husband not lord over his wife? Is the man who led his own children into the hands of hopelessness and the fates of the darkness of the woods not unfaithful to the Lord?
The father and the step-mother have BOTH done what is evil in the sight of the Lord.
Yet somehow, without the help of their earthly father, Hansel and Gretel escape.
But what next? How better off will the children be in returning a third time to the home of an evil step-mother?
Then they stayed for several days to eat some more of the house, till they discovered amongst the witch’s belongings, a huge chocolate egg. Inside lay a casket of gold coins.
(The Grimm answer of fable: the money will make it all right.)
I hadn’t really remembered this part of the story after all these years, until looking up Hansel and Gretel and rereading the ending.
I had only remembered that they returned home.
God has planted this deepest desire into the heart of every child (even a man, who has no home).
So I ask us: where is home?
How must a father welcome a lost child?
They filled a large basket with food and set off into the forest to search for the way home.
After two days they find their own way home (not knowing what to expect). Yet the picture of the father is of joy, as in the story of the prodigal son. (My mom needed not tell us that the prodigal of Hansel and Gretel is the father.)
Once upon a time, children were innocent. Fables and bed-time stories spoke to hope – hope of living “happily ever after.” Hansel and Gretel (in a sense) does not disappoint in this.
“Promise you’ll never ever desert us again,” said Gretel, throwing her arms round her father’s neck.
Is this not the heart of every child who loves her father? The heart of every little boy who loves his father?
Promise.
(I did not remember the next scene of the ending, either.)
Hansel opened the casket.
What did Hansel see?
Competition? For had the step-mother not also seen competition for love in the children of the woodcutter? Of course.
It was evil for her to not love these as her own children. And now, providence has placed her with the same fate as the witch: death. Hansel looks inside the casket at the face of evil – dead and harmful no more.
His conclusion is perhaps childish. (Even his father, the woodcutter, may have learned an untold lesson in this fable.)
“Look, Father! We’re rich now . . . You’ll never have to chop wood again.”
And they all lived happily together ever after. The little ones who were still awake would say in unison.
As parents we know that this is but a fable. As Christians we know that indeed we are the prodigals of the story. As those whose home is in heaven, hopefully we tell our children of the real treasure.
Jesus said: The good person out of his good treasure brings forth good, and the evil person out of his evil treasure brings forth evil. – Matthew 12:35
Proverbs teaches children what Hansel and Gretel observed in the house of the witch. She was hungry in a house made of food. The witch had not purchased the food of righteousness with the treasure she had hidden away.
6 In the house of the righteous there is much treasure,
but trouble befalls the income of the wicked.16 Better is a little with the fear of the LORD
than great treasure and trouble with it.
Therefore, look into the casket, dear children. See the death of the wicked and the bones of our future.
And look to your Father in Heaven to the hope of our salvation.
2 Corinthians 4:16 So we do not lose heart. Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day.
The Ministry of Reconciliation
11 Therefore, knowing the fear of the Lord, we persuade others. But what we are is known to God, and I hope it is known also to your conscience.
18 All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation; 19 that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation. 20 Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, God making his appeal through us. We implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. 21 For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.
As I see it, Hansel and Gretel is a story of reconciliation. The father, who loves his children, is finally reconciled to them. And the children, who love the father, are finally reconciled to him.
It is not really a story of a step-mother or of a witch, as much as a story of the death of evil and the triumph of God – that is, the triumph of God: Who IS and was and will judge every evil and reward every good.
Therefore, IF you want to live happily every after (and eternity is a long time…):
Our Heavenly Father has rescued us from the woods of deep darkness and evil through the Light of the Sacrifice of His only Son and the redemption by His Blood on the Cross.
Walk in Love
Ephesians 5 Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children. 2 And walk in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.
8 for at one time you were darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. Walk as children of light 9 (for the fruit of light is found in all that is good and right and true), 10 and try to discern what is pleasing to the Lord.
Wives and Husbands
22 Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord. 23 For the husband is the head of the wife even as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himself its Savior. 24 Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit in everything to their husbands.
25 Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her
Dear Christian brother, beloved Christian sister of these last days,
Do you look to the light of the promises of Scripture and obey?
Teach these to the children of your bowels and remain faithful to the Head of the body, Christ Jesus our Lord.
31 “Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.” 32 This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church. 33 However, let each one of you love his wife as himself, and let the wife see that she respects her husband.
Children and Parents
6 Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right. 2 “Honor your father and mother” (this is the first commandment with a promise), 3 “that it may go well with you and that you may live long in the land.” 4 Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord.
And they lived happily ever after… Eternally!