Job and Death, George Bailey and Life
The Christmas season and It's a Wonderful Life
Last Friday, along with a group of mourners, I sat in our garlanded sanctuary for a funeral. The Christmas tree stood tall and stately, red bows linking swags of greenery along the altar rail and bordering the windows and woodwork. Poinsettias clustered in the chancel and down around the big Advent wreath, with three purple candles and one rose candle, with the white and waiting Christ candle standing sentry by the baptism font. It is a colorful, festive space during this season. The dark clad and subdued people in the pews belied the cheerful surroundings. They also illuminated the contradictions implicit during Christmas.
We glory in the holiness and precious new life of Christmas Eve and Day, but the first week after Christmas, still in the midst of Christmastide, is full of commemorations of bloodshed. On December 26, we remember Stephen, the first martyr, stoned to death. On December 27, we remember John, the beloved apostle, eyewitness to the agony of Christ’s crucifixion and death. On December 28, we remember the Holy Innocents, the slaughter of young boys in Bethlehem. On December 29, we remember David, guilty of manipulating the murder of Bathsheba’s husband so he could hide his adultery, not to mention the violence propagated by his sons toward him and others. On December 31, the eve of commemorating the ritual bloodshed of Jesus’s circumcision and naming, we watch our year die.
It sounds deliberately pessimistic, even possibly sadistic, to dwell on death in the midst of celebrating our Savior’s birth. Of course, it’s also honest. This is why He came, precisely why the Christ Child was born. Dave, whose funeral we were at, understood this. He was a man who’d lived a hard life, and he was a Christian. He had seen death for himself, and he knew what was coming for him. Not because he deserved mercy, but precisely because he didn’t, he looked to Jesus. He’d told my husband a week or so before he died, after he received Holy Communion, “The Lord has been good to me.”
The first reading at the funeral contained ringing words of Job that Dave had confessed as true.
Oh that my words were written! Oh that they were inscribed in a book! Oh that with an iron pen and lead they were engraved in the rock forever! For I know that my Redeemer lives, and at the last he will stand upon the earth. And after my skin has been thus destroyed, yet in my flesh I shall see God, whom I shall see for myself, and my eyes shall behold, and not another. My heart faints within me!
I couldn’t help it. Hearing those words as I sat in the pew, wearing black and thinking of death, I thought of Dave, and I thought of George Bailey.
“It’s a Wonderful Life” has been around for over seventy-five years, longer than most of us have lived. Yet the story, and George himself, have lasted. George lives a life story that most of us can recognize. He comes from small beginnings and remains in a small orbit, in humble Bedford Falls. He has his shining moments, certainly. He saves his brother Harry from drowning. He saves his boss, Mr. Gower, from drunkenly poisoning a child. He saves his father’s Building and Loan from the dark plans and mercenary manipulations of the evil Mr. Potter. But mostly, George lives a mundane life. While his friends go to college and leave town, George stays. He quashes his grand architectural ambitions to build big, impressive things out in the world to instead build small, modest homes for his neighbors.
As Samuel James points out, George is a quintessential man, one who seeks meaning in his actions and work. At his moment of crisis, when money goes missing and his business and reputation are on the cusp of disaster, George questions whether he himself matters.
We can relate to this. As Megan Garber writes, the film “channels George’s awareness of his own powerlessness” and is suffused with “ambient despair.” It unflinchingly shows vicissitudes of George’s life, and so many, many things he can’t control. Garber muses that “George reconciles himself. He gives up one dream for the one he had never thought to want: a wife who reliably sees the bright side of their misfortunes, children who are devoted to him, a community full of people whose lives have been made better because of him. Does that amount to a happy ending?” Her answer sounds flippant: “Maybe.”
Those of us who know and love It’s a Wonderful Life, and more importantly, recognize ourselves in George’s anguish and hopelessness, know this is precisely the wrong question. Our culture has long been navel-gazingly obsessed with an individualized view of happiness, to the extent that it—and we—constantly, like the willfully blind, avoids the obvious dilemma of people wrestling with real-life, flawed people, including ourselves. Aside from a few true isolated types, the vast majority of us all live around others, and our lives are inextricably intertwined. And in fact, this is the point of George’s story.
When George ultimately decides to pursue his own way to the exclusion of considering others, and he’s not checked by heroism or duty or earnest community involvement or family ties or the parameters of Christian morals, he becomes utterly hopeless, thinking the world “would’ve been better if I’d never been born.” In the film, God sends the cluelessly innocent second-class angel Clarence to teach George how that world—the one without him—would’ve turned out. And they, his friends and family, would’ve turned out badly. From a drunk and disorderly Violet, to a divorced cabdriver Ernie, to an alcoholic ex-prisoner Mr. Gower, to a shallow, cynical bartender Nick, to an institutionalized, insane Uncle Billy, to a cold and suspicious Ma Bailey and woefully shy and isolated Mary. And then there are the others, those who wouldn’t have turned out at all. Harry, George’s beloved brother, the Navy flier and Congressional Medal of Honor winner, instead dead as a child due to drowning because of George’s absence. All the men that Harry saved in shooting down enemies; as Clarence explains to a disbelieving George who insists Harry was a hero, “all the men on that transport died because you weren’t there to save Harry.” And heart-wrenchingly, all of George’s children, who would have never been born.
The movie is not “George’s Big Day” or some other shallow ode to one man’s self-actualization. It’s a generic phrase—“it’s a wonderful life”—that refers to George and so many others around him, from Violet to Uncle Billy, to Mary and Harry. Because real life is about others. Life is about lives, plural. A life, meaning one among many.
The film certainly doesn’t promise the kind of Disneyfied happiness our culture valorizes as the best. The nickel-and-diming, the visceral material hardships, the immediate, petty, and flawed relationships George must handle and live with—they are everything most of us instinctively flinch from, the unmistakable forms of humility that other, more selfish and worldly ambitious pursuits, allow us to pretend don’t exist. The bumbling and grossly inadequate business efforts of Uncle Billys, the tragic addictions of Mr. Gowers, the invariably acquisitive machinations of Potters, the fearful and modest strivings and clutchings of Violets and Ernies and Toms and countless neighbors—they are types that show us us, in all our small brokenness.
Even the successful ones like Harry, who seemingly achieves the American dream of a publicly laudable and excellent life, recognize the priceless merit and dignity of George’s small life lived in humility and service. For who would we rather have as a neighbor, a friend, a son, a brother, or a husband than George?
George’s wife, Mary—deserving of her own praise as a loving, self-serving woman—knows the answer. On the verge of their honeymoon, during a bank run, it is Mary who brandishes their $2,000 savings as George desperately tries to calm their panicked neighbors. “How much do you need?” she says, in a moment of unbelievable generosity. It is a moment that is a foretaste of their life together. She knows that George has sidelined his dreams of becoming an architect to instead finance and build modest homes for hard-working people to escape slum life. She also knows that what he does, and what he often hates doing, has made her quiet dream possible—living in an old house in her hometown with him and their children. So it is she who marshals the gratitude that has long existed in their neighbors for George, who heads the parade of people who love him and who give back to him in his hour of need.
But it is George we notice—the hopeless, prideful George. He first despairs because, as James writes, “Men build something when they are something, and they are something when they receive something. The ghost of insignificance haunts us because we are not created for it. Irrelevance is an enemy. We dread it because it is death and we are made for life.” In his panic, George has forgotten what he has received. In forgetting, he sees his insignificance, and so he seeks death.
And something miraculous happens. After his time with Clarence, after seeing the vacuous, terrible Bedford Falls world without him, George returns to the bridge where he originally contemplated suicide. First he calls for Clarence. “Get me back,” he says. “I don’t care what happens to me.” George is saying what he has seen again, what he had already lived and momentarily forgot. And we know, as do all his family and friends, what George means. He does not pray for a divine blessing to change his life to be suddenly, magically transformed into a realization of his individual dreams and aspirations. Potter still lives. George will never be a famous architect or traveler. He will never be independently wealthy or known outside of his community. His life will remain largely ordinary and slogging and not what he wanted or expected. It will not even and always, or usually, be happy. But it will be, and is, good and truly meaningful. Indeed, it is wonderful.
For what George prays for is not, ultimately, for himself. He prays to live so that others may live. “I want to live again,” he says, and at the moment he finally invokes the name of his Creator, he receives that which God had already deigned to give him: "Dear God, I want to live again." He's praying, "Dear God, I want Mr. Gower, and Violet and Ernie and Bert, and Uncle Billy and Mary, and all of my family and friends to have a chance. I want Harry and my children to be alive.”
I saw someone describe as "ugly cry" her reaction to Life. And it was not a criticism; it was a truthful analysis of how George and the film moved her. I react the same way. For most of us want what George realizes: that life is about more than individual success or circumstance. In fact, it is always about love—serving and acting for others when the actions are hard and the feelings don't fit. George is not a perfect man. Far from it. He can be depressing and pessimistic, aloof, sullen and scarily angry. He is also, at his worst, very proud. Indeed, we are all George. But it is in his humility, bent over the rail of a bridge, begging for his life solely for the benefit of the lives of others, that he shows us a dim reflection of Gethsemane. As white flakes softly fall upon his head, he is asking to take up the cross God has already given him to bear.
Many people bear grief this season. Loneliness and isolation are common, as newly made widows, or anyone who has lost a loved one, know. We hardly need reminders of this, and yet reminders can be helpful. Sitting in sanctuaries during funerals, surrounded by Christmas decorations and reminders of our baptisms. Watching old films that highlight one man’s quotidian and heavy burdens so we can see the indescribable gifts he actually possesses. Our equivalent of George’s crisis, here at the end of 2023, isn’t being dragged through flashbacks of our lives against our will or standing on a bridge looking at turbid water. It’s slowly, incrementally losing our souls as we gaze at our phones, immerse ourselves in meaningless materialism and entertainment and self-absorption, and forget who we are, why we were made and why we are here.
Instead, God reminds us this season that He gave and gives us Himself so that we are not forgotten. Job in his terrible losses still knew this Truth, as did Stephen, and John, and David and Dave. They spoke of the Word of Life that has brought life to us all. At the end of It’s a Wonderful Life, Harry proposes a toast. "To my big brother, George," he says, "the richest man in town." So we in our funereal rags too lift up our small, mortal heads, crowned with riches for which we still wait. Through Christ’s helpless, infant hands that grew to bear the nails for us, we also confess the ironclad Truth.
For I know that my Redeemer lives, and at the last he will stand upon the earth. And after my skin has been thus destroyed, yet in my flesh I shall see God, whom I shall see for myself, and my eyes shall behold, and not another.
Merry Christmas.