This Christmas season, I've been reading a book of devotionals about Christmas. Here's one that struck me. It begins with a quote:
"Without poverty of spirit, there can be no abundance of God."
We love Christmas because, as we say, Christmas brings out the best in us. Everyone gives on Christmas, even the stingiest among us, even the Ebenezer Scrooges. Charles Dickens' story of Scrooge's transformation has probably done more to form our notions of Christmas than St. Luke's story of the manger. Whereas Luke tells us of God's gift to us, Dickens tells us how we can give to others. A Christmas Carol is more congenial to our favorite images of ourselves. Dickens suggests that deep down, even the worst of us can become generous, giving people.
Yet I suggest we are better givers than getters, not because we are generous people because we are proud, arrogant people. The Christmas story - the one according to Luke not Dickens - is not about how blessed it is to be givers but how essential it is to see ourselves as receivers.
We prefer to think of ourselves as givers - powerful, competent, self-sufficient, capable people whose goodness motivates us to employ some of our power, competence and gifts to benefit the less fortunate. Which is a direct contradiction of the biblical account of the first Christmas. There we are portrayed not as the givers we wish we were but as the receivers we are. Luke and Matthew go to great lenghs to demonstrate that we - with our power, generosity, competence and capabilities - had little to do with God's work in Jesus. God wanted to do something for us so strange, so utterly beyond the bounds of human imagination, so foreign to human projection, that God had to resort to angels, pregnant virgins, and stars in the sky to get it done. We didn't think of it, understand it or approve it. All we could do, at Bethlehem, was to receive it. A gift from a God we hardly even knew.
The strange story of a virgin birth to a peasant couple in Judea demonstrates that the solution for what ails us has very little to do with us. One rabbi writes that, as a Jew, he is impressed reading Matthew's account of the Nativity by how utterly passive the actors are. The first word of the church is that we are receivers before we are givers. Discipleship teaches us of the art of seeing our lives as gifts. That's tough, because I would rather see myself as a giver. I want power - to stand on my own, take charge, set things to rights, perhaps to help those who have nothing. I don't like picturing myself as dependent, needy, empty-handed.
It's tough to be on the receiving end of love, God's or anybody else's. It requires that we see our lives not as our possessions, but as gifts. "Nothing is more repugnant to capable, reasonable people than grace," wrote John Wesley a long time ago.
So God comes to us, blesses us with a gift, and calls us to see ourselves as we are - empty-handed recipients of the gracious God who, rather than leave us to our own devices, gave us a baby.
-- William Willimon --
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"Forgive me if I am not justified in what I ask," said Scrooge, looking intently at the Spirit's robe, "but I see something strange, and not belonging to yourself, protruding from your skirts. Is it a foot or a claw!"
"It might be a claw, for the flesh there is upon it," was the Spirit's sorrowful reply. "Look here."
From the foldings of its robe, it brought two children; wretched, abject, frightful, hideous, miserable. They knelt down at its feet, and clung upon the outside of its garment.
"Oh, Man! look here. Look, look, down here!" exclaimed the Ghost.
They were a boy and a girl. Yellow, meagre, ragged, scowling, wolfish; but prostrate, too, in their humility. Where graceful youth should have filled their features out, and touched them with its freshest tints, a stale and shriveled hand, like that of age, had pinched, and twisted them, and pulled them into shreds. Where angels might have sat enthroned, devils lurked, and glared out menacing. No change, no degradation, no perversion of humanity, in any grade, through all the mysteries of wonderful creation, has monsters half so horrible and dread.
Scrooge started back, appalled. Having them shown to him in this way, he tried to say they were fine children, but the words choked themselves, rather than be parties to a lie of such enormous magnitude.
"Spirit! are they yours?" Scrooge could say no more.
"They are Man's," said the Spirit, looking down upon them. "and they cling to me, appealing from their fathers. This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the writing be erased. Deny it!" cried the Spirit, stretching out its hand towards the city. "Slander those who tell it ye! Admit it for your factious purposes, and make it worse! And bide the end!"
"Have they no refuge or resource?" cried Scrooge.
"Are there no prisons?" said the Spirit, turning on him for the last time with his own words. "Are there no workhouses?"
--Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol
While Dickens preaches a social gospel, his message is still one of transformation. He may call for us to move into a spirit of giving, but it is ultimately a spirit of inadequacy. Dickens asks for us to fight ignorance and want, truly heeding Saint Paul's admonition that "the greatest of these is charity." I agree that perhaps the characters in the original Christmas were passive, but the Holy Spirit has asked us to enter into a communion with the Trinity, and to respond to the good news of Jesus Christ. His birth is upon us -- He is incarnate, so let us not live out that incarnation and spread His love to His creation.
I do no see Dickens as inconsistent with the gospel accounts of Saint Luke and Matthew, but rather responding to their tellings of the birth of Christ with the message of His death and resurrection. We do need to recognize the grace of Christ coming to earth, but we also must recognize His purpose here and His commission to us.
Well, well. The son corrects his father! Perhaps it would have been more accurate for the author of the article to say that the current interpretation of Dickens is at odds with Matthew. It's hard to deny that any elements pointing us to God's grace in the original have been removed wholesale by modern portrayals.
Anywho, thanks for the insight!
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