The People v. Ebenezer Scrooge

I ran into my college roommate when walking out of church a few weeks ago.  Mark and I spent a few minutes catching up on each other’s life; but then randomly and without any obvious lead-in from the previous conversation, he recalled a time when he walked into our dorm room to find me at my desk writing figures in a notebook.  It didn’t look like homework, so he asked me what I was doing.  I told him I was recording an expenditure—seventy-nine cents spent at the campus snack shop.  Decades later he still marveled that I kept a record of seemingly inconsequential financial transactions.

 

I glanced over at my wife who rolled her knowing eyes.  She has lived with that quirk of mine much, much longer than anyone else has.  She is a good record-keeper in her own right, but to list every single expenditure and every cent of income—even to the level of this one actual entry:“Income: $0.05  Source: Found on street”—well, NOBODY in his right mind does that.

 

As Mark and I parted, I walked away pondering just what kind of man I am.  The image that came to mind was…Ebenezer Scrooge, the miserable and miserly old man of A Christmas Carol, bent over his business ledgers and thinking of little other than money.  Scrooge—the epitome of greed and selfishness; the antithesis of the Christmas spirit.  In fact, as we approach Christmas, let’s put him—and vicariously all like him—on trial for his greed.

 

The prosecution presents its case:

 

His “biographer”, Charles Dickens, weighs in first: Scrooge is “tight-fisted…a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner.”  He often, after work, “beguiled the rest of the evening with his banker’s book.”

 

Mrs. Scrooge reluctantly charges: Scrooge has “one master-passion” that “engrosses” him: “GAIN”.  He “weighs everything by Gain.”  (She capitalizes the word as if to distinguish it as a god to her husband, and certainly occupying a more important place in his heart than she does.)

 

Mrs. Bob Cratchit: He’s “an odious, stingy, hard, unfeeling man.”

 

A little less harsh and with an implicit plea for mercy, Scrooge’s nephew, Fred tells the court: “[H]is offences carry their own punishment….His wealth is of no use to him.  He don’t do any good with it.  He don’t make himself comfortable with it.”

 

Marley, Scrooge’s now-deceased business partner, cannot, for obvious reasons, be in the courtroom, but the judge has indicated he may admit hearsay evidence that Marley was equally consumed by his work, bound by a chain of “cashboxes, keys, padlocks, ledgers, deeds, and heavy purses wrought in steel” and that he and Scrooge were complicit in their greed and money-grubbing ways.

 

It doesn’t look good for Mr. Scrooge.  But next week the defense presents its case.

 

Until next time,

Roger

“The greedy bring ruin to their households.” Proverbs 15:27 NIV®*

*Scripture quotations taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version® NIV®

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