Near the beginning of A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens,
the miserly, cold-hearted, and damnable if not yet lost Ebenezer Scrooge is
surpised, unpleasantly for him, by a visit from his nephew, Fred. While Scrooge
provides his litany of complaint against the holiday, Fred persists in
unassailable joy and goodwill. Finding himself confronted by Scrooge’s claim
that Christmas has never done him, or any other man, any real good, Fred
presents the following retort:
“There are many things from which I might have derived good, by which I have not profited, I dare say,” returned the nephew, “Christmas among the rest. But I am sure I have always thought of Christmas time, when it has come round — apart from the veneration due to its sacred name and origin, if anything belonging to is can be apart from that — as a good time: a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time: the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys.”
In his own way, Fred seems to have taken to heart in this
defense of keeping Christmas something of the wisdom imparted by Paul to Titus.
The appearance of the grace of God our Savior among men, which is to say, the
appearance among men of God himself as man, Paul tells Titus, was precisely to
teach us to reject impiety and worldly desires, and to live soberly, justly,
and piously in this world, this time, this age.
It is here, though, that the Christmas message today seems
to stumble. Good-intentioned men and women who reject the Gospel have come to
insist that the heart of Christmas are precisely those things which Fred
insists can be valued “apart from the veneration due to its sacred name and
origin,” namely the kindness, forgivness, charity, and pleasantness, the
solidarity with one’s fellow man, and especially with those in need. To these
who live in unbelief, rejecting impiety and worldly desires, living soberly,
justly, and piously can be held as having value even without being taught by
the coming of the Savior. If they are correct, if we can keep what is best
about Christmas without the Word made Flesh, then do we, the faithful, not
confuse matters by insisting, again and again, that Jesus Christ not be
neglected in this holy feast? Do we not insert a principle of division and
discord precisely in proclaiming not merely peace on earth and good will toward
men, but glory to God in the highest as well?
St Paul, in his letter to Titus, does not, however, merely
give some laudable moral advice. He notes that the appearance of the grace of
the Savior which teaches us how to live also directs our attention to the
blessed hope, the coming of the glory of our great God and Savior, Jesus
Christ. Even as Fred opines that abstracting the good cheer of Christmas might
be a mental exercise only — “if anything can be apart from that” — Paul directs
Titus from moralizing and ethics, however important they be, to the real hope
and joy of Christmas. That is, Paul wants Titus, and wants us, to see that how
we relate to our fellow men here and now, how we abound here and now with
kindness, justice, and solidarity, especially for those most crushed by the
hardships inflicted upon them by our own unchecked worldly desires, is
precisely what will make us receive with boundless and unconquerable delight or
with inconsolable and unremitting despair, the final culmination of all that
is. Said differently, while there can be no final joy for any who remain
unmoved by the plight of the poor in their midst, who prefer their own comfort
in warm beds to the warmth of human kindness towards those least plausible to
receive our love, neither can there be lasting happiness for those whose love
extends only as far as the grave, which considers earthly loss final, and so
accepts a limit to charity. It is the hope of unbounded and inexhaustible
festival, evident already in the choirs of angels attending the birth of the
Lord in a place fit for beasts and not men, that transforms our earthly
kindness and solidarity into what it was meant to be in the first place.
This is why, without the Cross of Christ, and with that
Cross the final and glorious coming of the Lamb slain from the foundation of
the world, Christmas will seduce us again into impiety and worldly desires,
either mere sentiment or cold moralizing. Faced by the seemingly insurmountable
longings of the world, the only true and hopeful answer is to raise up, along
with the tinsel, the holly, and the cheerful songs, the broken body of the
Savior. This was the wisdom of Tiny Tim, who even in his broken body, or
perhaps precisely because of it, saw that Christ alone can make good the
promises and hopes we exchange so freely on this day. Tim hoped, his father
relates, that “the people saw him in the church, because he was a cripple, and
it might be pleasant to them to remember upon Christmas Day, who made lame
beggars walk and blind men see.”
So, without any desire to take away in the least the true
and laudable good that our brothers and sisters outside the faith have done and
will do on this holy day, we insist like Fred to return every year and proclaim
not merely good cheer and human solidarity, but the true Light that made bright
that most holy night in Bethlehem. We do so that we, with them, might know
better on earth the mysteries of that Light here on earth, in the hope that we,
with them, might together take part in the joys that last forever.
God bless us every one!
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