Back to: Dickens A Christmas Carol and the Bible
From “Hearing the Gospel through Charles Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol” – Reverend Cheryl Anne Kincaid
We should be more disciplined about allowing Christmas light to shine in the dark crevasses of our past so that God can use in the present and future.
The light of Christmas sharpens Ebenezer’s awareness of eternity. Before the Advent lessons visited him, he lived only his present, a present “a tight fisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge! A squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner!”48
A person so enchained to fear and hurt that he could not even open his hands to the ones he wanted to cherish, not to mention those who needed his generosity.
After the visits of the Advent Lessons, Scrooge can’t help but view his life as guided in providential eyes of grace. He understands his past has a role in present and his present must produce fruits for the future. He now sees the gift that was given to him through the goodness of his former employer and dear sister. These gifts must be passed on to others, his nephew and Clark.
He must also learn the pain that the pain of his lonely childhood can be comforted by his ability to comfort others, thus he must act on behalf of Tiny Tim and others like him.
This is the transformation that takes place from gazing at the Christ child in the shadow of the Cross. This picture causes us to open our hand, because Christ opened His hands.
“Your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus: Who, being in very nature, God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient to death- even death on a cross!” Philippians 2:5-8
A grasping old sinner must make a decision when faced with the opened nailed scared hands of God in the flesh. They must either defiantly, more deliberately, by an open confession of will, hang on to their sin in spite of God’s grace or they must surrender it completely and utterly to the compelling love of God.
Scrooges’ change of heart takes on a deeper meaning when we consider in light of the book of Prayers Epistle reading Philippians 4, we read Paul’s famous description of God’s peace.
“Rejoice in the Lord always. I will say it again: Rejoice! Let your gentleness be evident to all. The Lord is near. Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.” Philippians 4:6-7
When Paul says “do not be anxious about anything I think a better translation of the passage is “do not be anxious for just one thing but in all things let your request be known unto God.”
Scrooge lived his life grasping for “one thing”, which was wealth. Perhaps he obsessed over wealth to ease the pain of the child abandoned in the school house, but his wealth did ease that child’s pain. Later in his life he protests to his first love the “there is nothing the world so detests as poverty and nothing it condemns more than the accumulation of wealth.”
Scrooge has hit on one point of hypocrisy here, but the lessons of Christmas do not condemn him because he has accumulated wealth. He is condemned because he has led an empty life. Scrooge has forsaken all so he can accumulate wealth. He lived his life in anxiety coveting the “one thing” of wealth above all things. Yet his anxiety over his golden idol of material success did not consol the hurting abandoned child inside of him, in fact it kept him from the intimacy he might have experienced with his first love.
God’s peace is above those idols that we have exalted to be our false saviors. But these are false idols that grow pale and fragile in the light of child of Bethlehem who foreshadows the Cross of Sacrifice. We are more human when we gaze at this Cross; we are less human when we worship the “things “of our false idols. Because our false idols are often objects and non-living, our exaltations of the material works cause us to reflect deadness of materialism. In our relationships instead of treating others as created in God’s image, we objectify others because we worship objects. But God’s peace and love is higher than these material idols.
Conversion is lived out in changed perception of the grandiose sense of self as we realize that we need God.
It is in our change perception of others that we modern day Christians should have something in common with Scrooge. Here, Scrooge’s miracle is our miracle!! His life changed! Christ did not just redeem part of life, but all of it. Here we should allow the light of Christmas to shine on our parts of our abandoned and hurting past, as Scrooge did, so we can live a better present. Here we perceive our past differently in the light of God’s sacrifice in Christ. Here while reverently considering the trust of Mary and Joseph we open our hands to a more generous present and future. Here we commit to live our lives not to grasping God’s gifts for ourselves but in considering the great Christmas gift, we can see the great wealth there is in generosity. We see our lives as stewardship from God to be used for others.
Scrooge had been abandoned and not loved as a child; he grew up not loving or even really living. When Scrooge examined his past, present and future in the light of a loving Providence, which could give purpose to Scrooge’s life, Scrooge change!!! But let’s take this further, as Christians we do not just rejoice in faceless providence but in the face of Jesus Christ. Let us bring our past to Christ for nurture and healing and our present to Christ, for mission and purpose, and our future to Christ for hope and expectation to be His church on earth.
And that is the real miracle of Christmas.
Scrooge awakens from nightmare of rebuke to repentance. And the light of repentance fills his darkened room which had become a torture chamber of rebuke. In his nightmare he suffered the consequences for his selfish calloused sin toward others by others responding in kind in his death. His intimacies, even his own bed cloths, were stolen. So his dead was left immodestly vulnerable to the gazing public.
Now we he awakes in room that where his privacy remains untouched. He will not pay for consequences of sin instead he has the gift of repentance.
“Yes, and bedpost y/as his own. The bed was his own, the room was his own. Best and happiest of all time the time before him was his own!”
Repentance has given Scrooge the gift of perspective and recognition of the time he has to make amends.
That is the gift of “the Christ who being bom in our hearts”, this gift of Christmas. We, as Scrooge, no longer have to cringe at the past. Because of Christ forgiveness, we can embrace our pasts of wrong turns into the redemptive arms of Jesus Christ. Jesus buys our past back. It easier to live in the present when the past is put to peace by the payment that Christ made on the cross. We now understand how our sin and our distance from God, dimmed our perspective, so we now can embrace our past as tool and reminder, or as Ebenezer
“Then Samuel took a stone and set it up between Mizpah and Shen. He named it Ebenezer, saying, “Thus far has the LORD helped us.” 1 Samuel 7:12
Turning back from our failures and sins is the main lesson of Christianity. Christians are not a people who claim to be above sin or betrayal of our Lord, we are people who throw ourselves on the mercy of Christ, so we can “turn back” or repent from our sin.
A Christmas Carol is about Scrooge’s “turning back” from a lifestyle of greedy fear so he could strengthen others. Hear Scrooges prayer of repentance as he cries out to the spirit of Judgment:
“Men’s courses will foreshadow certain ends, to which, if preserved in, they must lead,” said Scrooge. “But if the courses be departed from, the ends will change. Say it is thus with what you show me.”
“Spirit!” cried he, “tightly clutching at its” robe, “Hear me! I am not the man I was. I will not be the man I might have been but for this intercourse. Why show me this if I am past all hope!”53
In the grace of Jesus Christ no one is beyond the hope of repentance. Oh that Judas would have held on through the night to find repentance. Praise God that Peter did!”
A Christmas Carol has a happy ending not just because of Scrooge’s conversion but also because his conversion was not lived out privately but publicly by his actions and attitudes toward those around him.
“Scrooge was better than his word. He did it all and infinitely more; and to Tiny Tim, who did not die, he was a second father. He became as good a friend, as good a master, and as good a man as the good old town ever knew. Some people laughed to see the alteration in him, but he let them laugh, and little heeded them; for he was wise enough to know that nothing ever happened on this globe, for good, at which some people did not have their fill of laughter in the outset; and knowing that such as these would be blind anyway, he thought it quite as well that they should wrinkle up their eyes in grins, as have the malady in less attractive forms.
Yes, Scrooge is reaping the gift of repentance, but it is important to remember that Scrooge did not find his way on his own. Remember his prayer of thanksgiving that morning.
“I will live in the Past, the Present, and the future!” Scrooge repeated, as he scrambled out of bed. “The Sprits of all three shall strive within me. O Jacob Marley and heaven and the Christmas time be praised for this! !”58
Scrooge was led to repentance by the prodding of the spirits, the example of his clerk and perhaps the prayers of his nephew. Conversion and faith is never a private matter. Our lives are so intermingled and connected with others, that God’s plan does not allow us the luxury of privacy. Because God uses other people, His community to bring us to faith, so we ought to live our faith in community. His actions of repentance had ramifications that lasted for generations. And out of Scrooge’s repentance, by his good deeds that he extended to Tiny Tim, his actions had ramifications that out live him.
The redeemed life of Tiny Tim was made possible by the grateful hand of Scrooge in response to his repentance. No faith is ever a private matter.
Scrooge has learned that his life is not just about himself. His past, present and future have been lived in a community of people. Scrooge had some tough times, but he also had the love of a sister, the encouragement of Mr. Fizzywig and grace of a fiance, and the loyalty of his clerk and nephew.
I love that Scrooge recognizes the timeless of his conversion. It is true that Scrooge has a conversion at point in time, but influence that led him there had been working in his past, in his present and his future. He had been prepared for his repentance in his past, as he as accepted it and professed it in the present and his fruitful acts of repentance with ramifications in the future. Listen to Scrooges commitment to repentance again.
“I will live in the Past, the Present and the Future,” Scrooge repeated, as he scrambled out of bed. “The Spirits of all Three shall strive within me.
Lights have a special place in the Christmas celebration and they should. The string of lights that sparkle on our trees should remind us of a more permanent light that Christ illuminates, the light that pierces through the darkness of all of mankind. Sin loves darkness; there it can hide in a gloom of the despicable agony and isolation that immoral deeds produce. Remember Scrooges’ house at the beginning of the story, it was hidden in darkness.
“He lived in chambers which had once belonged to his deceased partner. They were a gloomy suite of rooms, in a lowering pile of a building up a yard, where it had so little business to be, that one could scarcely help but fancying it must have run there when it was a young house, playing at hide-and-seek with other houses, and forgotten the way out again62.”
Doesn’t this passage remind you of what happens when we allow sin or addiction to become our playmate? Sin introduces us to pleasurable game that fills our gloomy hours of boredom. But before we know it the game engulfs us, losing us its’ gloom and sadly we realize that we are not playing anymore, we are being played with and we are lost!!! But Christ’s light finds us in that gloom. It is the light that sustains and empowers all the good things in life.
“The Son is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being, sustaining all things by his powerful word.” Hebrews 1:2
Jesus’ light pierces our gloomy worlds and deals with our sins hiding in the shadowy place of our lives and sets us free by exposing those sins. It is through this act of freedom that we really can experience the Majesty of Christ Jesus.
Now compare Scrooge’s perspective of the world after the piercing light of repentance has touched him with his pass glooming world where he was hiding in his small apartment.
“He went to church and walked about the streets, and watched the people hurrying to and fro, and patted children on the head, and questioned beggars and looked down into kitchens of houses and up to the windows, and found everything that could yield his pleasure. He never dreamed of that in any walk—that anything could give him so much happiness. In the afternoon he turned his steps toward his nephew’s house.”63
What changed in Scrooge’s world? The things that he witnessed on that walk were there before his repentance, what he had never seen them before in the dark world where he was hiding in his office and his apartments
What changed? Scrooge changed! His perspective changed because he is now free from his sin, he can look up into the pleasurable warmth of society instead of frantically hiding behind his work in his office or at his home away from society.
The Book of Hebrews tells us that Christ lifts our head by forgiveness and our position.
“After he had provided purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty in heaven”. Hebrews 1:3b
Scrooges’ repentance is lived out in action, his repentance benefits his world by people he touched with compassion and treated with justice.
“Scrooge was better than his word. He did it all, and infinitely more; and to Tiny Tim, who did not die, he was a second father. He became as good a friend, as good a master and as good a man as the good old city knew, or any other good old city, town or borough in the good old world.”