Online religious comment; The year of Bob Crachit

This is the year of Bob Crachit.

Remember him, a character in Dickens’ A Christmas Carol ? He works for the miserable Ebenezer Scrooge. Even though it’s December Scrooge keeps Bob Crachit chilly as he writes out the ledger books. He’s keeping an account of who owes money to Scrooge.

Bob Crachit, on a low salary, struggles to provide for his wife and children -- children who include his disabled son, Tiny Tim.

This year Bob Crachit moves centre stage.

We all know what the mood is this year as Christmas approaches. It’s the truly depressing news of the economic downturn. This is real, just as, in other years, other harsh, bitter, discouraging things going on in the world, with real hurt and irretrievable loss provided the backdrop and the mood to the run up to Christmas.

As we all know many people, going into this season, this year, having already begun to try to do Christmas shopping on a diminished budget, are already in debt. Many people throughout the country have been losing their jobs since the dramatic events in the money markets in mid-September.

Financial debt is miserable. At this time of the year the very concept seems chilly and damp. In European literature and music in the story of Faust there is the figure of Mephistopheles, a version of the devil. In return for the promise of a person’s soul, he strikes a bargain that brings a man or woman temporary, earthly pleasure, sometimes even fabulous luxury and pleasure. A modern day Mephistopheles would not be after your soul; he would be after your home.

The novelist, Margaret Atwood, has brought out a book taking note of many references to debt in literature. At one point she suggests that a contemporary equivalent of Hell would be ‘a maxed-out credit card that multiplies the charges endlessly.’ But the concept of debt is much broader. It simply refers to something that is owed.

As William Skidelsky wrote in reviewing Margaret Atwood’s book, Payback, “We can be indebted to someone for their love and friendship or we can be indebted to them for the cup of sugar they brought round the other day.” And, as he writes later on in that same review: “The Christian narrative can likewise be viewed through the prism of debt, with God figuring as a kind of benign banker. He has given us something of incalculable value – life – and, if we play by His rules and make our (moral) repayments on time, we’ll be allowed to hold on to it forever.”

Christians believe that sending His Son, Jesus Christ, to be born amongst us, to live and to die for us, was the astounding, amazing way God chose continually to bring us back into credit, to bring us back into communion with Him, to bring us a new beginning to our life each and every time we ask for it in Jesus’ name.

As the Scots (and Americans) say, in their version of the Lord’s Prayer, “Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.”

Dickens brings A Christmas Carol to a close by quoting Bob Crachit’s son: “And so,as Tiny Tim observed, ‘God Bless Us, Everyone!’”.

by Community Correspondent,Revd Bruce Stuart