“I will honour Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year. I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future."
Micah 5:2-5a
5:2
But you, O Bethlehem of Ephrathah, who are one of the little clans of Judah, from you shall come forth for me one who is to rule in Israel, whose origin is from of old, from ancient days.
5:3
Therefore he shall give them up until the time when she who is in labor has brought forth; then the rest of his kindred shall return to the people of Israel.
5:4
And he shall stand and feed his flock in the strength of the LORD, in the majesty of the name of the LORD his God. And they shall live secure, for now he shall be great to the ends of the earth,
5:5
and he shall be the one of peace.
Psalm 80:1-7
80:1
Give ear, O Shepherd of Israel, you who lead Joseph like a flock! You who are enthroned upon the cherubim, shine forth
80:2
before Ephraim and Benjamin and Manasseh. Stir up your might, and come to save us!
80:3
Restore us, O God; let your face shine, that we may be saved.
80:4
O LORD God of hosts, how long will you be angry with your people's prayers?
80:5
You have fed them with the bread of tears and given them tears to drink in full measure.
80:6
You make us the scorn of our neighbors; our enemies laugh among themselves.
80:7
Restore us, O God of hosts; let your face shine, that we may be saved.
Hebrews 10:5-10
10:5
Consequently, when Christ came into the world, he said, "Sacrifices and offerings you have not desired, but a body you have prepared for me;
10:6
in burnt offerings and sin offerings you have taken no pleasure.
10:7
Then I said, 'See, I have come to do your will, O God' (in the scroll of the book it is written of me)."
10:8
When he said above, "You have neither desired nor taken pleasure in sacrifices and offerings and burnt offerings and sin offerings" (these are offered according to the law),
10:9
then he added, "See, I have come to do your will." He abolishes the first in order to establish the second.
10:10
And it is by God's will that we have been sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all.
Luke 1:39-45, (46-55)
1:39
In those days Mary set out and went with haste to a Judean town in the hill country,
1:40
where she entered the house of Zechariah and greeted Elizabeth.
1:41
When Elizabeth heard Mary's greeting, the child leaped in her womb. And Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit
1:42
and exclaimed with a loud cry, "Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb.
1:43
And why has this happened to me, that the mother of my Lord comes to me?
1:44
For as soon as I heard the sound of your greeting, the child in my womb leaped for joy.
1:45
And blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her by the Lord."
1:46
And Mary said, "My soul magnifies the Lord,
1:47
and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,
1:48
for he has looked with favor on the lowly state of his servant. Surely from now on all generations will call me blessed,
1:49
for the Mighty One has done great things for me, and holy is his name;
1:50
indeed, his mercy is for those who fear him from generation to generation.
1:51
He has shown strength with his arm; he has scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts.
1:52
Of He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly;
1:53
he has filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away empty.
1:54
He has come to the aid his child Israel, in remembrance of his mercy,
1:55
according to the promise he made to our ancestors, to Abraham and to his descendants forever."
One note about the Ghosts: they have no power.
Christmas Present can passively bestow the blessings of the season on individuals; the other two ghosts can only show, they cannot otherwise intervene. All three ghosts can show Scrooge things, but they cannot force him to change, bend him to their will, even accept the lessons. They can’t even force Scrooge to travel with them; he does so if his own volition. In this, Marley has prepared the way. Scrooge knows that the Ghosts mean to help him, so he goes with them.
The ghosts present the power of powerlessness. They are some of the most powerful creatures in literature, able to change the heart of the grasping, clutching, covetous old sinner Ebenezer Scrooge. And yet they exert no power to do this. Scrooge changes entirely of his own volition. His character is remade because Scrooge remakes it.
In the third and final visitation, Scrooge pleads with the Spirit that he may be saved. He does more than plead, though. He abases himself. Haughty, cold, arrogant Scrooge is gone. Faced finally with the hard evidence of his mortality, he falls to his knees. There, like a washerwoman scrubbing the floor, he pleads with the Spirit:
“I will honour Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year. I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future. The Spirits of all Three shall strive within me. I will not shut out the lessons that they teach. Oh, tell me I may sponge away the writing on this stone!”
“Sponge”? I can think of many more effective ways to remove words carved in stone. But Scrooge has become last of all, and servant of all. And he is praying that writing is not carved in stone.
In Mary's Magnificat we see Scrooge, finally, on Xmas Day, rejoicing in what the Spirits have done for him. The actual Christmas Day, not the one he spent with the Spirit. This one includes Scrooge. But to get there he has to suffer the fate of the powerful, cast down from their thrones. The first shall be last, after all; and the first of all will be last and servant of all. For Scrooge that means learning to live in the past, present, and future: integrating all the time of his life into the now, aware of his relationship to others, and to himself. He had cut himself off from his life and his family, and he has to recover those connections in order to redeem himself.
The future Scrooge sees is not the one that has to be, but the one that will flow naturally from his choices in his life. There’s a Hebrew prophets quality here. The stereotyped mistake about the prophets is that they pour out the bowls of God’s wrath in punishment for Israel’s apostasy. But the prophets tell Israel it is suffering the consequences of their actions and that God is allowing them to reap what they have sown, while God remains faithful to the covenant and to Israel. So Scrooge, too, is not condemned, but shown his choice: accept the fate he has forged for himself (as Marley said), or escape Marley’s fate (as Marley hoped). Marley suffers the consequences of his indifference in life, but gets one chance to save Scrooge, in death. The universe is not cruel; but we suffer the consequences of our actions; or the rewards of our compassion.
Advent is a church season. It is celebrated in liturgy. An important part of the liturgy is always the confession of sins. Confession is the result of self-examination. Scrooge is brought to confess his sins, not by the demands of the silent and frightening Spirit of Christmas Future, but by that self-examination. Scrooge finally faces himself and confesses his wrongs and asks for no more than a chance to change. If his fate is written in stone then this entire journey has been useless. But if he cannot confess his sins and try himself to change, no power on earth can help him.
It turns out the preparation of Advent is, finally, in confession. Scrooge doesn’t confess his sins, so much as he confesses he wants to be a better man. It’s a sincere admission; otherwise it’s a bootless one. It is the experience that makes him confess. It is the confession that makes him change. There’s a very liturgical quality to that.
But the visit of the third Spirit raises the question of time in Scrooge’s story of redemption. It’s not one that can be raised in the real world, so it has no counterpart in the Advent liturgy.
We know Marley arrives on Christmas Eve. Thereafter we only know the clock strikes to tell the time, and the hour is one a.m. Christmas Day when the first Spirit arrives. But yesterday is all the past with that Spirit, and we assume all the visions are from the 12 days of Christmas. Christmas Present is, of course, the contemporary Christmas Day for Scrooge, but it passes into night and Scrooge has one more Christmas Spirit to go: that of Christmas Future. That Spirit shows Scrooge visions of Christmas Days in the future: the absence of Tiny Tim, and the absence of Scrooge. These are visions of what will be; but not of what must be. Now, we know the past is set in stone, the future is unwritten. But how closely do we observe that in Scrooge’s story?
Marley says the Spirits will come one night apiece. Instead they come one after the other, always at the same hour. And the Spirit of Christmas Present shows Scrooge the Cratchit family celebration, and the party at his nephew’s house. Which, it turns out, are also shades of what might be; because Scrooge alters them. He sends the prize turkey to the Cratchits, and goes to Christmas dinner at his nephew’s house. And to prove to us, the reader, that the visits really happened:
He turned it gently, and sidled his face in, round the door. They were looking at the table (which was spread out in great array); for these young housekeepers are always nervous on such points, and like to see that everything is right. “Fred!” said Scrooge. Dear heart alive, how his niece by marriage started! Scrooge had forgotten, for the moment, about her sitting in the corner with the footstool, or he wouldn’t have done it, on any account.Only the past is set in stone: the present and future are unwritten. The confessional lesson of Scrooge’s tale is that redemption never comes too late. The liturgical lesson is that all time is redeemable, even if every year we have to redeem it again. If there is a liturgical counterpart, it is that all time is redeemable, and that through self-examination our encounter with others that shows us who we are (“this is the truth sent from above”), we are moved to confession and repentance (“the truth of God’s unchanging love”), and finally redemption. All through our own acts.
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