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Enter into the mysterious world of Ebenezer Scrooge, Bob Cratchit, Jacob Marley, the Ghosts of Christmas, and Tiny Tim in our newest online course, “Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol.”

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"He took a child, and set him in the midst of them: and when He had taken him in His arms, He said unto them, "Whosoever shall receive one of such children in My name, receiveth Me." - Mark 9:36-37

0:00 The quiet Cratchit house
0:30 Reference to the Gospels
1:09 Scrooge's desire to hear more
2:19 Why are Christ's words about children so important?
3:14 Divine encounter

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"We move to the Cratchit house, and it's quiet, very quiet. The noisy little Cratchits were as still as statues in one corner and sat looking up at Peter. This is the brother, the older brother who had a book before him. The mother and her daughters were engaged in sowing, but surely they were very quiet and he took a child and set him in the midst of them. That's all we get. It's one line from, well, it could be actually any of the synoptic gospels, for example. It could be Mark 9:36, A little fragment of a biblical verse where it's Christ who takes a child and puts him in the middle of them, of his apostles. Well, on the one hand that makes an intuitive sense in this novel, this is the house where tiny Tim lived, and he, as we will shortly find, is dead.

There's something, there's a kind of melodramatic pathos about referencing Christ, putting him there amidst them. That all makes sense. But listen to the way that it continues. Where had Scrooge heard those words we're hearing his very thoughts. All of a sudden he had not dreamed them. The boy must to have read them out as he and the spirit crossed the threshold. Why did he not go on? So Scrooge actually has this desire to hear the rest of the passage, and that cues us readers also to think about the rest of the passage. Now, it may be that you hear this and don't actually know what the rest of the passage is, but in the Victorian period, there's a lot greater biblical literacy than what we have today. Most of them, I would guess, would be able to fill in something for the next part of this verse.

I'll do that for you in case you can't. So the line that Peter read was he took a child and set him in the midst of them. Stop Scrooge wondering what is the next thing? The next thing is this, whosoever shall receive one of such children in my name, receiveth me. That's the next thing that Christ says. And why is that important? I would suggest, first, we are meant to supply this ourselves just as I just did in the silence of our own hearts or minds, and with it to see that when a child is placed into the midst, it's actually God himself coming in amongst you. In the middle of this book, this verse means so much because this whole novel has been a succession of children, of poor ones, of little ones, of little things even that are smaller than people like calves or dead bodies. It's apples and onions and all these things, but it's a succession of little ones coming to Scrooge, also coming to us, by the way. And each of those, as we see in this pivotal moment, is actually a sight of divine encounter. That's the secret and the secret energy, the secret, mysterious power and presence at the heart of this whole little novella, the divine entering time. This is after all the mystery of Christmas. This is what the incarnation is."

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