And why does Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol (1843) resound so deeply within us all? Because it is a story of profound repentance and reclamation, a story that offers to our history of moral cowardice, failure, and guilty conscience the welcome hope that change for the better can occur.And talk about a villain who so desperately needed change…
“Oh! But he was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge — a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner! Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire; secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster. The cold within him froze his old features, nipped his pointed nose, shriveled his cheek, stiffened his gait; made his eyes red, his thin lips blue; and spoke out shrewdly in his grating voice. A frosty rime was on his head, and on his eyebrows, and his wiry chin. He carried his own low temperature always about with him; he iced his office in the dog-days; and didn’t thaw it one degree at Christmas.”
And then talk about reclamation…
“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. 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. His own heart laughed: and that was quite enough for him. He had no further intercourse with Spirits, but lived upon the Total Abstinence Principle, ever afterwards; and it was always said of him, that he knew how to keep Christmas well, if any man alive possessed the knowledge.”
Of course, in fiction dramatic changes of this sort are as possible as they are desirable. In real life, however, the Scripture makes clear that genuine spiritual change comes only through the new birth, that act of God’s grace when a sinner surrenders his self-will, despair, and load of guilt and instead trusts in the finished work of atonement that Jesus won for mankind through His death and resurrection.
