Scrooge and Thomas

The wearing of white vestments concludes this Sunday, marking the end of another Christmas season and the resumption of another year of bad rap for my friend Ebenezer Scrooge.

The fictional Ebenezer and my very real patron saint, Thomas the Apostle, both have fallen heir to an outrageous and unkind legacy, their reputations sullied beyond any consistency with the facts.

Call someone a Scrooge and you should be calling him a kind fellow, generous, “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.” Trouble is, we still hold Scrooge to be miserly and sour, insensitive to the great chain of suffering to be found amongst his neighbors.

It’s also popular to think immediately of Thomas when encountering someone struggling with belief. “Doubting Thomases” they are called; but, of course, St. Thomas was a man of great faith. How many of us find ourselves repeating his words when we behold the host at the elevation: “My Lord and my God!”

It is true that Scrooge was a miser and Thomas refused to believe until he had seen the Lord himself. But the fact is and the point is that these men changed. Had Scrooge refused to turn around or Thomas perdured in his unbelief, what edification would we have had, what Gospel truth attained?

O, I’m a staunch defender of Scrooge and Thomas, all right; but I’m afraid I have trouble letting people off the hook, too. Would that I did not find it so easy to judge people, put them in a category, form an opinion. I can build a whole personality around a tiny bit of gossip. Obviously, the solution to it all is to allow people to have their faults, to observe the sturdy pile of timber in my eye, and to remember that God doesn’t have favorites.

The rub comes most keenly, I have observed, when the rub comes home. That is, I resist change because that means I will have to be different. I suspect the fictional neighbors of the fictional Ebenezer Scrooge were not a little suspicious of this now gregarious, now benevolent fellow. Doubtless he had to change a lot and for a long time before the townsfolk would hazard a fresh look at the old pinchpenny. Thomas has been dead these nineteen hundred-odd years, been canonized, but we still haven’t given him the benefit of the doubt.

So there is then this social aspect which militates against conversion, I think. I resolve to stop swearing, but in the company of the old crowd, will I find acceptance? I lay off the booze. What will my comrades say? Dare I show displeasure at some racial epithet? Do I laugh at the dirty joke?

I can’t believe it wasn’t humanly hard for Jesus when they sneered and scoffed. “We know you,” they said. “You can’t possibly be anything special. You’re the carpenter’s son. Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” You can almost hear the round of laughter.

In a way, Scrooge had an easy conversion. He had a bunch of money to be generous with, which doubtless brought a degree of instant acceptance of his newfound state. The most Christ-like figure in the whole tale had to be Scrooge’s nephew Fred, who accepted and loved his uncle in his former state as well as his latter.

Thomas, to be sure, found himself without a leg to stand on, faced with the irrefutable contradiction of his lack of faith, and so fell to his knees. Perhaps he was embarrassed. Without doubt, he was forever changed – despite himself.

Sometimes I have seen the clear path to follow and have shied away. Given gobs of grave and unmistakable direction, I have stood firm in the old way. Fear of being no longer the hail good fellow, the wag, the center of attention, I have remained the un-Christ-like version of the Christian. Rather than stand by the Carpenter’s Son, the Nazarene, I have chosen the path of weakness and habit and pride. Jesus gave us a stand-in for us all to put his finger in the nail prints, his hand in the side. He gave us Thomas. He knew us. He wanted us to have not the slightest reason to doubt that He was alive.

I cannot understand my diffidence, my refusal to surrender. Faced with the same disarming clarity Thomas faced, I know what to do, but do not. Still, hope reigns in ordinary time, too.

Scrooge became a good man. Thomas came to believe.

written by Thomas A. Russell
first published in the Lafayette Sunday Visitor on January 11th, 1987