Advent – What does The Muppet’s Christmas Carol teach us about Christmas?

Powerpoint Pictures: Various scenes from The Muppet’s Christmas Carol including the scene at the end with Scrooge smiling.

You can’t beat a good Christmas movie!

Every year there are plenty of good and plenty of not so good Christmas films to watch.

And some of these movies remind us about what Christmas is all about.  Why it is that Christmas is about good news of great joy that is for all people to hear.

Over this period of advent, we are going to think about 4 Christmas movies and what they teach us about Christmas.

We saw that the Christmas story unlike The Snowman is a story with a happy ending.  It ends not with Jesus’ death, but with His resurrection.

The next film is The Muppet’s Christmas Carol.

Do you remember the story?

At the start of this film, it looks like we have another Christmas movie in need of a happy ending.  Scrooge is miserable and causes misery to those who work for him.  He doesn’t have the Christmas spirit!  Bah humbug!

But on the night before Christmas, he is visited by his old business partners who are being tormented in death because of their past actions, and warned that if he didn’t change his way, that is what will happen to him.  Then follows visits from three ghosts: Christmas Past, Christmas Present, and Christmas Future which explain why Scrooge is the way he is, show the suffering his behaviour is causing to others, and his future if he does not change.

Scrooge wakes up a changed man and we have a happy ending, with him having Christmas dinner with Kermit the Frog!

There is an important difference between The Muppet’s Christmas Carol and the Christmas Story.

In The Muppet’s Christmas Carol, Scrooge is his own saviour who gets his happy ending by trying harder to be a better person.

Whereas the happy ending of the Christmas Story for us – sins forgiven and eternal life in heaven – comes not by saving ourselves by trying harder to be better people, but instead by trusting in the Saviour God gave to the world in the Christmas Story – the Lord Jesus.

“For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.” (John 3:16)

So yes, Christmas is a story with a happy ending, but only for those who trust in Jesus to be the Saviour.