The Redemption of Scrooge: Keeping Christmas Well

I love A Christmas Carol. Ebenezer Scrooge starts out closed off to everyone. Accumulation of wealth is all he cares about. He lives in resentment, fear and the ice-cold frozen state of watching out only for himself. 

As he accompanies the Ghost of Christmas Past, Scrooge starts to thaw. When he sees himself as a child, alone at Christmas, he thinks of the young caroler he turned away. He sees the Fezziwig Christmas party and remembers how it wasn’t about the cost, but about how he made the lives of his employees better. And Scrooge thinks of Bob Cratchit. And then Scrooge relives the heartbreak of his fiance, Belle, leaving him. Reliving this painful memory “eventually moved him to compassion toward those who know the pain of brokenness.” 

The Ghost of Christmas Present invites Scrooge “Look upon me.” Scrooge looks, and as the chapter unfolds, he continues to look and to notice a world he never saw before. Where he previously saw the poor as creators of their own misfortune, he now sees their actual circumstances, as well as how he has contributed to the misfortune of the Cratchit family.

With the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, Scrooge fully faces what could happen if he doesn’t change. He would die unmourned- the only emotion connected to his death would be relief and excitement over the opportunity to profit. And if he didn’t start paying Bob Cratchit adequately, Tiny Tim would die.

By the end, as he looks at the gravestone with his name on it, Scrooge asks “‘Are these the shadows of the things that Will be, or are they shadows of the things that May be, only?’

And then, Ebenezer Scrooge wakes up. In his own bed, and with the rest of his life before him to live out what the spirits had taught him. Ebenezer Scrooge had received a gift that he never knew he needed.

This season, I’ve been reading through Matt Rawle’s book The Redemption of Scrooge. It’s opened my eyes to new ways of seeing Scrooge’s story, and how scripture can relate to it. In the book, Rawle discusses the Christmas story we just heard. Luke chapter 2 begins with “a magnificent palace, the seat of human power and authority. …The scene begins at the palace and ends with no place. It begins with Caesar, who was named emperor of the world, and ends with a baby placed in a feeding trough. It begins with the seat of human power and ends with those who live in powerless poverty. It begins with everyone being counted and ends with a baby revealing that everyone counts. God is beginning to turn the world upside down for all of the right reasons.” 

And then we get to scene two, where the shepherds receive an unanticipated gift, just like Scrooge did. They get the sign they need; not some intangible star, but a baby wrapped in cloths and lying in a manger. This wasn’t some rich prince that had been born in some grand house. This was a house like theirs: with the manger in the floor of the family room, which was on a raised terrace about four feet above the lower area where the animals were brought in on cold nights. The baby would be there if his parents had come in to be counted for the census. Every house was packed, so the guestrooms at the back of the house would have been full as well. The family and the baby were in the center of everything, in a house just like the shepherds’ homes.

As Rawle notes, “[And then t]he curtain opens on the shepherds having found the child lying in a manger, and they tell the Holy Family all that has happened. They can’t offer treasures of gold, frankincense, or myrrh, and yet Mary treasures the gift they did offer—their words—in her heart. The shepherds do not linger. They return to the fields, but they returned forever changed.”

Part of the final stave of Dickens’s novella is showing how Scrooge changes in his interactions with others. He helps Cratchit and his family and becomes like a second father to Tiny Tim, but he also reconciles with his nephew.

In the beginning, Scrooge tells his nephew “[K]eep Christmas in your own way, and let me keep it in mine.” We see just how much Scrooge has changed when he goes to his nephew Fred’s house at the end: he passes the house five times before gathering courage to rush to the door and knock. And then, we see the reconciliation he has been needing- he spends time with Fred, he gets to know his niece-in-law, he enjoys himself at their party just as much as he enjoyed himself with the Ghost of Christmas Present, except now he gets to interact and truly be part of everything.

Dickens closes by telling us “[Scrooge] 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. …[I]t was always said of him, that he knew how to keep Christmas well, if any man alive possessed the knowledge.” 

“Keeping Christmas well” is about getting our true selves back so that we might give of ourselves with joy. Keeping Christmas well is about those relationships. As Rawle notes toward the end of his book, “Christmas is an invitation into relationship with God, through Christ, in the power of the Holy Spirit. Christ is born so that God might have ears to hear our wants, eyes to see our need, hands to outstretch on the cross in order to clothe us in his resurrection, and lips to speak the story of good news, that we might share with the world. When Christ’s invitation is accepted, we discover that we have been redeemed. We have neither earned it nor do we deserve it. It is a gift from God, calling us to respond in the world with love.” It doesn’t matter how far off course we might have gone. If Scrooge can be redeemed, then so can we!

“The miracle has just begun in YOU for the sake of the world… God Bless us Every One!”