Unless you have been residing under a rock for the last couple of months, you are surely aware that we are deep into the Yuletide season. The mercantile world hardly took a breath from dismantling the Halloween advertising decor before erecting the sales attractions to entice an early present-purchasing frenzy. In our era that is obsessed with evidences of prosperity, it challenges all of us to avoid Scrooge’s humbug disdain for Christmastide. I want to screech with the old codger, “Merry Christmas! What right have you to be merry?”
But I had a couple of insights when I happened to discover not only was today, Dec. 19, an anniversary of the 1843 publishing of “A Christmas Carol” by Charles Dickens, but the play contains some insights I had never noticed before, and these perceptions are easily identified as truly shared by Christ Himself.
First of all, we need to lay some groundwork or foundation for what follows. That being, “A Christmas Carol” is not about Christmas. Not in the sense of Mary and Joseph along with Baby Jesus visited by shepherds and magi in a stable. But, in the sense of it bearing the good news of God’s loving gift to the world and His purpose being born, it probably is one of the most sincere stories about Christmas.
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The real theme of “A Christmas Carol” is about changing the hearts of mankind!
You know the story. Ebeneezer Scrooge is a wealthy old miser whose life has been spent eking wealth out of people less fortunate than himself. Employed by Scrooge is an overworked and underpaid bookkeeper, Bob Cratchit. Scrooge lives all alone in a mansion while Bob, though kept poor by his uncle’s paltry wages, enjoys the hearth with a loving family.
The first lesson I learned, and there is no excuse for my oversight, comes from Scrooge’s first name, Ebeneezer. Where have you heard that word? You most likely have actually sung it in congregational worship in the second verse of the hymn, “Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing.” In the Old Testament book of 1st Samuel, when the Philistines had captured the Ark of the Covenant and the Israelites found themselves to be in a great chaos, they made sacrifices to God and attacked the Philistines. In that battle, the Lord led them to a wonderful victory. To commemorate the event as well as remind the people not to stray from the Lord, Samuel established a stone monument he called an Ebeneezer.
Forget the presents and accumulation of conspicuous consumption. Everything that truly celebrates the spirit of Christmas properly should be an Ebeneezer, reminding us of the change the Lord has brought in our lives.
With the three ghosts of Christmases Past, Present and Future, there are dozens of other symbols that Dickens wove into his story, all of which magnify the essence of Christ’s teachings of love for neighbor and God, but there is space for only one more, very quickly.
When Scrooge’s old partner, Marley, visits him from the other side of the grave, he comes fettered and weighted down with heavy chains. Marley explains, “I wear the chain I forged in life. I made it link by link and yard by yard; I girded it on of my own free will, and of my own free will I wore it.” You see, Scrooge had not started out as a hateful, selfish miser. Little by little, the idolatry of money replaced any sense of compassion and hospitality for others. But, just like Scrooge, when we displace God in our lives with self-centered interests of any hue, we slowly enslave ourselves with confinement that only can become more burdensome and restrictive.
“A Christmas Carol’s” ending is a very different Ebeneezer Scrooge, a man freed from the bonds of selfishness, lust for gold and distaste of his neighbor.
Is that not the true Christmas story? “God so loved the world that He gave his only begotten Son …” to save us — sometimes from our own selves!
The Rev. Johnny A. Phillips
The Rev. Johnny A. Phillips is a retired minister who lives in Burke County. Email him at phillips_sue@bellsouth.net.
