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The scriptures referred to are Isaiah 11:1-10, Psalm 72:1-7, 18-19, and Matthew 3:1-12.

If you want to establish a character as a villain, you have him pick on or take advantage of someone less powerful than him right off the bat. He can kick a dog or steal candy from a baby or fire an underling for no good reason. If you want to establish a character as a hero, you have them help someone powerless: a kid, a homeless person, or, again, an animal. Rarely do you see a character who acts in both ways. There is a major exception, however.

In Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol Scrooge begrudges his clerk Bob Cratchit extra coal on the fire or a full day off on Christmas. He further refuses to make a charitable contribution to the poor, saying that they should go to the workhouse. When told many can't go there and some would rather die than do so, Scrooge replies, “If they would rather die, they had better do it and decrease the surplus population.” Boo! Hiss!

But by the end of his story, wherein 3 ghosts show him scenes from his sad past, the present condition of those he knows and a chilling look at his bleak future, Scrooge changes. He becomes generous, sending an enormous goose to Bob Cratchit's family, giving him a raise, doing what he can to help Tiny Tim's frail health and contributing a great deal to charity to make up for many years of not doing so.

Most stories are about conflict: man vs. man, man vs. nature, man vs. society, etc. A Christmas Carol, the story of the conversion of a bad person into a good one, doesn't really fit that paradigm. It's not even man vs. himself because Scrooge does not set out to improve himself. Even in the Bill Murray movie Groundhog's Day, the main character, after a variety of responses to his situation, including trying to end his life, eventually decides to use the endlessly repeating day to better himself. But Scrooge is not an active antagonist. He observes and is changed by what he sees. And you can't exactly say this is an example of man vs. God because nowhere is it explicitly said that God sent the ghosts. (Though the Ghost of Christmas Present speaks of having 1800 brothers. In other words, there have been Christmases from Dickens' time back to the birth of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.)

That said, Dickens considered himself a Christian and wrote a book on Jesus' life. And much of his audience was Christian and saw this as a story of repentance and transformation. And it resonates so greatly with people that it has been adapted into literally hundreds of plays, musicals, films, TV shows, cartoons and even operas.

The principal practical result of Scrooge's change is his actions for the less fortunate. His transformation goes beyond his personality going from dour to jovial; he uses his money to make real changes in the lives of people. He becomes a fairer employer, a second father to a sick boy and a benefactor to the poor. Were he in the crowd to whom John the Baptist was preaching, he would be able to say he truly does “bear fruit worthy of repentance.”

The problem in John's time is the same as today's: people considered themselves religious though their lives did not show it. In the parallel passage in Luke when people ask what they should do “John answered them, 'The person who has two tunics must share with the person who has none, and the person who has food must do likewise.' Tax collectors also came to be baptized, and they said to him, 'Teacher, what should we do?' He told them, 'Collect no more than you are required to.' Then some soldiers also asked him, 'And as for us—what should we do?' He told them, 'Take money from no one by violence or by false accusation, and be content with your pay.'” (Luke 3:10-14) Share what you have with those who lack, don't cheat or extort people and be content.

And because of such things, Luke tells us that people wondered if John was the Messiah. Why? Because of passages such as we read in Isaiah today. “He shall not judge by what his eyes see, or decide by what his ears hear; but with righteousness he shall judge the poor, and decide with equity for the meek of the earth.” Or our psalm: “Give the King your justice, O God, and your righteousness to the King's Son; That he may rule your people righteously and the poor with justice....He shall defend the needy among the people; he shall rescue the poor and crush the oppressor.”

Why did God's people look forward to a Messiah, a future king who “shall live as long as the sun and moon endure, from one generation to another”? Not because Israel and Judah were ideal places with a succession of ideal kings. In fact the books of Kings tell us that the twin kingdoms had both good and bad monarchs. Things went well under the good kings and went terribly under the bad kings. 

Nor was this desire for royal justice unique. As the NIV Cultural Backgrounds Study Bible says in one of the notes on Psalm 72, “Care for the weak members of society is the practical test of a just and good government throughout the ancient Near East, as claimed by Hammurapi...in the Ugaritic Kirta epic, King Kirta is rebuked for failure to 'pursue the widow's case,' 'take up the wretched's claim,' 'expel the poor's oppressor' and 'feed the orphan.'” These are universal concerns. Indeed our own Declaration of Independence lists the “oppressions,” “injuries,” “abuses” and deafness to “the voice of justice” the colonies experienced under King George III.

But the idea of a future king who would be perfectly just was rare. In both Mesopotamia and Egypt the people's hopes were confined to the present king. But the Hebrews looked forward to a Davidic king who would someday rule a worldwide kingdom forever. And those hopes intensified when, after briefly becoming independent after the Maccabean revolt, Judea was subjugated by the Romans. Though they installed a puppet king, Herod the Great, he was not fully Jewish and he was known to kill his wives and his sons out of paranoia. He even planned to have thousands of Jewish leaders killed when he died to ensure people would mourn his passing. Fortunately, his remaining sons vetoed carrying out their father's final edict. Herod was a powerful king but not just.

By the time Jesus begins his ministry, there is no king in Judea. A Roman governor named Pontius Pilate was in charge. He had no clue when it came to ruling the Jews, constantly offending them and quick to use force. To the north in Galilee, where Jesus grew up, one of Herod's sons, Herod Antipas, ruled. Like most sons of powerful men, he was a shadow of his father, retaining only Herod the Great's penchant for summarily silencing those who opposed or criticized him. As for Tiberius, while he was a great general, as an emperor, the best thing that can be said is that he wasn't as bad as his successors, Caligula and Nero. All these rulers had the power of life and death over those under them. None of them cared about justice for the average person. They just wanted their people to keep quiet and keep paying for their upkeep.

So the people longed for justice. And when Jesus came along, healing and speaking about God's kingdom being near, they perceived him to be at least a prophet and possibly the Messiah. What puzzled them was that Jesus never raised a sword, unlike the Maccabees, or even King David. The reason was he knew that the real enemy was not an external one.

In the minds of most folks the source of evil is “those people.” They can be the rich, the poor, people of color, people of faith, foreigners, the overeducated, the undereducated, the government, a shadowy conspiracy trying to control everything, etc. The fact is we are our own worst enemies. We sabotage our own lives.

I just finished Jeff Guinn's The Last Gunfight: The Real Story of the Shootout at the OK Corral—And How It Changed the American West. His research shows how that iconic event we have seen depicted over and over in movies was not in fact a showdown between Good and Evil but was the result of long-standing tensions between cowboys and the law, local politics, local economics, the fallout of the Civil War, a number of crucial misunderstandings and the failure of Virgil Earp to lock up an obnoxious drunk. The Earps were on the side of the law, though they had not always been. They made most of their money gambling and rarely married the prostitutes who were their common law wives. After the gunfight, when 2 of the Earp brothers were later shot in revenge, one of whom died, Wyatt finally crossed the line from lawman to outlaw, hunting down and killing 3 men who, yeah, probably were involved in the ambushes on his brothers. The Wyatt Earp we know, the pillar of righteousness, is the creation of writers and movie makers and TV producers more interested in moral drama than in truth. If you know the facts, it is impossible to say that in either the gunfight or in the aftermath that justice was truly served. No one won; no one got what they wanted. It was messed-up men shooting messed-up men.

Like those on both sides of the gunfight at the OK Corral, we are usually our own worst enemies, if not so dramatically. Like Paul says in Romans, “I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do.” (Romans 7:15) We all have times when we say to ourselves, “Why did I do that?” Or “Why do I keep doing that?” And Jesus realized that the problem was not located in some thing or some people outside us. The problem is inside us. As he said, “For from inside, from the human heart, come evil ideas, sexual immoralities, thefts, murders, adulteries, greed, evils, deceit, debauchery, envy, slander, arrogance and foolishness.” (Mark 7:21-22, my translation) Since the cause is internal, external things, like simple justice, cannot fix it.

The people of Jesus' day, and, for that matter, the disciples, expected Jesus to create an external kingdom of God, a political one that would solve all their problems. Jesus knew that God must reign in our hearts first. That's why he says, “The coming of the kingdom of God is not something that can be observed, nor will people say, 'Look here!' or “Look there!' for the kingdom of God is inside you.” (Luke 17:20-21, my translation) Often that gets translated, “in your midst” but the “you” in Greek is singular. The kingdom is not around you but within. If evil starts within our hearts, that is where the cure, the royal reign of God, must begin.

We keep putting our faith in externals: systems of law, economic systems, science, government, etc. These are all vital but they are not sufficient to make internal change. People can always find ways to violate the spirit of the law while observing its letter. People exploit economic systems to enrich themselves at the expense of others or even at the expense of the stability of the system as a whole. Science can be used to make the world better or to make it worse. Nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons are the results of scientific effort. Systems of government are only as beneficial to their citizens as the people in government are committed to the common good. For that matter, we have seen institutional religion used to harm and exploit, rather than help and empower. In every case, the problem is not so much the imperfections of the system as the hearts of those who know how to manipulate the system.

The kingdom of this world will never become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ if the Spirit of God does not first reign in the hearts of every citizen. The change must begin within us. Then it will affect how we think and how we speak and how we act. And if enough people start really letting Jesus reign in their lives, others will notice and more people will investigate it and, finding that it works, will start doing it themselves.

Robert Sapolsky, a professor of neurology at Stanford, has spent years studying a troop of baboons in the wild in Africa. At one point, a resort opened up in the area and the baboons discovered the garbage the resort threw out. They loved this new source of food. But baboon society is rigidly hierarchical and it is maintained by the dominant males being very aggressive towards those who rank below them. So only the upper echelon of baboons were allowed to indulge in eating this delicious garbage. Then the baboons contracted a human disease from the garbage and it wiped out all the dominant males. The result was that the females and non-dominant males were left. And the culture of that baboon troop changed. Grooming, as always, was encouraged but aggression was not. Even when rogue males joined they soon learned that violence was not acceptable in this troop. Sapolsky was amazed to see this monumental change in a group of animals whose behavior was supposedly inborn.

The same thing took place in the Roman empire in the early days of the church. A small group of people spread through the empire saying that a Jewish handyman was in fact God's anointed king. He had been executed but rose to life again. A few Jews who followed him went everywhere sharing this news. Gentiles started to accept the message. Communities were organized. They helped one another. They took care of the sick and suffering. They fed the hungry. And even when they were told they must honor the emperor as a god or die, they refused. On and off for 3 centuries various emperors tried to kill this message and eradicate this movement but they couldn't. Finally the rulers capitulated.

At this late date the Good News is old news and unfortunately the top baboons are back to their old tricks and society is taking its cues from them. But it can change. It has before and it can again. We need to open our hearts and minds to the Spirit of God we see in Jesus. We need to become so steeped in his Word we know what he would have us think and say and do when we see those in need, when we encounter falsehoods, when we confront evil.

Scrooge changes when he sees his grave. In the old days the church preached the dangers of going to hell after death. People are no longer worried about that and ironically, our present existence has become more hellish. So-called deaths of despair are increasing. Reacting in fear and anger are making the situations which cause us fear and anger worse. Warnings about the consequences, now or hereafter, don't seem to work any more. But hope can. I think the world is starving for hope: hope that the world can change, hope that people can change, hope that we as individuals can change.

In the second to last part of A Christmas Carol the silent Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come points Scrooge to his gravestone. “'Spirit!' he cried, tight clutching at its robe, 'hear me! I am not the man I was. I will not be the man I must have been but for this intercourse. Why show me this, if I am past all hope!' For the first time the hand appeared to shake. 'Good Spirit!' he pursued, as down upon the ground he fell before it: 'Your nature intercedes for me, and pities me. Assure me that I may yet change these shadows you have shown me, by an altered life!' The kind hand trembled. '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.'” In the end we are told “Scrooge was better than his word.” And his future changes, as do the futures of the lives he touches.

That is why A Christmas Carol resonates with us. It is a story of transformation, of ending internal conflict not by external conquest but by surrender to joy and generosity and to what could be and what ought to be rather than resignation to the dismal state of the way things are. Scrooge asks for and receives mercy and then bears fruit worthy of repentance. The good news isn't that nothing is wrong; it's that there is something wrong, but that something can be done about it. We can find peace for the war within our souls. We just have to let Jesus come in and take over our lives. He says, “Listen! I am standing at the door, knocking; if you hear my voice and open the door, I will come in to you and eat with you, and you with me.” (Revelation 3:20) Let him in. Let him reign. Spread the word.