Eucatastrophe. n. a sudden and favorable resolution of events in a story; a happy ending. From the Greek ευ- "good" and καταστροφή "destruction."
March 25.
On this day in history: the One Ring was destroyed. At the moment of direst defeat came sudden and unexpected victory. Eucatastrophe.
Also on this day in history: at the “yes” of a young Jewish woman, God Himself became a man.
Also on this day in history (so tradition goes): the God-man died. In a horrifying defeat, the very men He had come to save nailed him to a cross and killed him.
Think about this from the Dark Lord’s point of view for a moment. Satan had already messed up God’s plan for humanity by causing Adam to fall. That fall was not intended. God had a different plan for humans, but Satan worked on Adam’s free will, and Adam made his free choice and screwed the whole plan up.
Now, thousands of years later, there’s this man walking around that Satan can’t touch, who resists all temptation, who doesn’t commit even one little sin. Satan knows God has another plan, one involving a Messiah, to restore humanity’s connection to God. A totally sinless man is pretty suspicious. Satan’s not dumb. He figures this guy must be the Messiah, the instrument of God’s new plan.
But this isn’t Adam, willfully choosing himself over God. This man resists all temptation. And he’s preaching, converting, gaining followers. Which is God’s plan, obviously. And Satan can’t touch him.
But that doesn’t mean Satan can’t mess up the plan. God might be omnipotent, but as long as He allows humans to have free will, God’s plans can, and will, be foiled. Satan has done it once already. No reason to think he can’t do it again. This man might be untouchable, but the people around him aren’t. He can’t touch the sinless man? Fine. He’ll just use the people round him to remove him from the picture.
And he does. He incites the people to jealousy and suspicion. He works on their pride and greed. And three days after the sinless man entered Jerusalem to acclaim and triumph, He is hanging on a cross, abandoned by almost everyone, gasping as he slowly suffocates and bleeds out.
Satan is on the cusp of his greatest victory. God’s plan appears to have been foiled, again.
And then the man dies.
And suddenly, the whole universe is different. There is a bridge, a path, between humanity and God. Because a man who is also God willingly offered himself as a sacrifice to atone for man’s rebellion. His humanity allowed Him to represent humankind, and His divinity made his offering infinite — an infinite recompense for humanity's rebellion against the infinite God. And by willingly entering into suffering and dying for humanity, He made even suffering, that natural result of man’s separation from his Creator, contain redemptive value when accepted in imitation of Him. And by offering His life for every human as though there were no other, He made every human infinitely precious.
And Satan realizes: this was God's plan. He himself — Satan himself, the angelic power whose actions had brought about the downfall of the human species, whose pride was that he could spit in the face of his Creator and destroy, destroy, what the Creator had created — Satan himself brought about God’s victory, a victory snatched at the last second from what seemed certain and dire defeat.
And three days later, the murdered God-man walked out of his tomb.
Eucatastrophe.
The consolation of fairy-stories, the joy of the happy ending: or more correctly of the good catastrophe, the sudden joyous “turn” (for there is no true end to any fairy-tale): this joy, which is one of the things which fairy-stories can produce supremely well, is not essentially “escapist,” nor “fugitive.” . . . It does not deny the existence of dyscatastrophe, of sorrow and failure: the possibility of these is necessary to the joy of deliverance; it denies (in the face of much evidence, if you will) universal final defeat and in so far is evangelium, giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief. . . .
I would venture to say that approaching the Christian Story from this direction, it has long been my feeling (a joyous feeling) that God redeemed the corrupt making-creatures, men, in a way fitting to this aspect, as to others, of their strange nature. The Gospels contain a fairy-story, or a story of a larger kind which embraces all the essence of fairy-stories. They contain many marvels—peculiarly artistic, beautiful, and moving: “mythical” in their perfect, self-contained significance; and among the marvels is the greatest and most complete conceivable eucatastrophe. But this story has entered History and the primary world; the desire and aspiration of sub-creation has been raised to the fulfillment of Creation. The Birth of Christ is the eucatastrophe of Man's history. The Resurrection is the eucatastrophe of the story of the Incarnation. This story begins and ends in joy.
- J.R.R. Tolkien, On Fairy Stories
