It really is a wonderful life

Three reasons why everyone should watch It’s a Wonderful Life this Christmas.

Jon Kuhrt

Jon Kuhrt is CEO of Hope into Action, a homelessness charity. He is a former government adviser on how faith groups address rough sleeping.

A man stands one side of a bank counter while others, on the other side, look hopefully at him.

In my view, It’s a Wonderful Life is not the best Christmas film ever. It is simply the best film ever, full stop.

Released in 1946, the film focuses on the life of a man called George Bailey who lives in the small town of Bedford Falls. As a young man, George intends to “shake off the dust of this crumby little town” and get away to see the world and achieve great things. Yet through tragedy and his own sense of responsibility, he ends up spending his entire life in Bedford Falls running the building cooperative that his late father established.

He sacrifices a lot. He ends up giving the college money he has saved to his younger brother so he can go to university instead of him. During the depression he and his new wife give their honeymoon funds to keep the Building & Loan bank going. All the time he battles against the richest and most ruthless businessman in town, Henry Potter, who is determined to build his business empire at everyone else’s expense.

The film focuses on a Christmas Eve where George stands accused of fraud and faces scandal and jail. It’s all too much for him – the lost dreams, the feeling of insignificance and the heavy burdens he has carried for so long – crash in on him. Drunk and alone, he finds himself on a bridge, wishing he had never been born and preparing to commit suicide.

Yet at this lowest ebb, salvation comes. Through the visit of an angel, George is enabled to see what would have happened if he had never lived. He sees the impact that his life has had on so many people and on the whole town. He realises what a wonderful life he has had.

The film has a basic, raw message about living right. Our cynical age tells us that there is no point in trying to change things. But this is not true.

So why is it such a great film?

I love this film so much that, rather embarrassingly, I bought the DVD of it for my best friend two Christmases in a row. The main reason is because it has given me inspiration in my life and work.

Why? I think it’s for the following three reasons.

It’s realistic about the hardship of life. Mainly due to the final scene many now perceive it as quite a sentimental film, but when it was released, it was not popular because it was considered too dark. It’s because the film depicts the struggles that many ordinary people face – such as debt, low self-esteem and feelings of insignificance.

Also, in the character of Henry Potter, it sharply criticises the greed and self-interest of money-makers who don’t care about people. Henry Potter acts within the law but does not care about how people are affected by his money making. Profit overrides everything else.

In standing up to Potter, George Bailey is ‘sticking it to the Man’ and this is costly and tough. The renewal of community does not come without resistance against the powerful forces of greed and self-interest.

It shows that how we live does make a difference to the world. George Bailey’s life makes a massive difference to his town. Through unglamorous dedication he helps hundreds of people escape Potter’s slum housing and own their own homes. His bravery and leadership builds up his community and offers dignity and hope to others.

The film has a basic, raw message about living right. Our cynical age tells us that there is no point in trying to change things. But this is not true – we can make a difference if we have courage and commitment. George Bailey’s life shows the importance of how we live and the choices we make – we will invest simply in profits or will we invest in people?

But the key thing is that we will never really know the difference we are making. It’s a mystery beyond what we can grasp. We cannot avoid the need to have faith.

It’s about the love and grace of God. The opening scenes of It’s a Wonderful Life commences with George’s friends and family saying prayers for him because they know he is in trouble. And at the end of the film, with their prayers answered, together all of George’s friends sing ‘Hark the Herald Angels Sing’.

People who want to make a positive difference in our broken world don’t need lofty idealism or utopian dreams of naive optimism.

It’s significant that the film starts with prayers and then ends with a hymn – because essentially, it’s all about grace, redemption and salvation.

Too often words like this simply sound like religious jargon – as if they just refer to ‘getting into heaven when we die.’ But this is a damaging misunderstanding. Salvation is needed now – people are desperate in the face of meaninglessness, low self-esteem and suicidal thoughts. Also, people need redeeming from lives of greed and selfishness. Jesus meets people in these needs – he both comforts those who are disturbed – and also disturbs those who are comfortable.

God’s love and grace comes to us in the midst of real issues. This is the core message of Christmas: that God became human, in history. He came to earth to share the real struggles that humanity faces and to conquer them with his redeeming love.

People who want to make a positive difference in our broken world don’t need lofty idealism or utopian dreams of naive optimism. We know how damaged the world and its people are. But whether you are Christian or not, we all need inspiration, encouragement and hope to make a difference. And this is where It’s a Wonderful Life works a treat.

Article

Christmas culture

Creed

18 December 2023

4 min read

For the knowing of the how: creating at Christmas

Learning a new craft unfolds the layers of meaning Christmas is clothed in.

Andrew Davison

Andrew works at the intersection of theology, science and philosophy. He is Canon and Regius Professor of Divinity at Christ Church, Oxford.

A white crocheted angel decoration against a dark background.

Kelly Sikkema via Unsplash.

Childhood Christmas was for me a time of craft and productivity, of baking and decorating, of paper chains and printing cards with dissected potatoes. Christmas was all about making, so homemade presents outshone everything else.

That was fine if you were a painter, knitter, sculptor, seamstress, or woodworker, and each member of my family was at least one of those things. I was the odd one out: at least until the autumn before last, when I took up crochet.

My inspiration came from John Milbank: theologian, philosopher, political theorist, poet, and general ruffler of feathers. Not, I have to say, because he sets example with hook and yarn. Rather, he’d written an essay, an essay that spoke to me, as someone often in art galleries but rarely making. We get so invested in fine art, he wrote, that we forget the priority of applied art, of craft and decoration. That’s the foundation. The art we go to see in museums is great only if it succeeds in ‘intensifying this art which is proper to humanity as such.’ So, I took up crochet.

Crochet, as I hoped, is rather like playing the recorder. It’s not too difficult, even at the beginning, but has plenty of scope for complexity and skill. I’m now three blankets in, plus six cushion covers and a hat. Even my first efforts were gratefully received as presents, and I some of my recent work is much more intricate, and not half bad.

I’ve finally joined the ‘Christmas is about making’ project: and Christmas really is about making. John Donne put it like this, addressing the Virgin Mary:

… yea thou art now
Thy Maker’s maker, and thy Father’s mother;
Thou hast light in dark, and shutst in little room,
Immensity cloistered in thy dear womb.

Mary becomes her ‘Maker’s maker’. In a further twist, which Donne would appreciate, Mary’s child grew up to be a carpenter, or – as the Greek would better be translated – an all-round, general purpose village maker: from hearths to homes, from shelves to structures.

In thinking about how God took up a human life, writers have often turned to the language of making. In the same poem, Donne has God weaving himself a kind of garment in Mary’s womb: ‘He will wear, / Taken from thence, flesh’. Thomas Pestel (1586–1667) opens an unjustly forgotten Christmas hymn like this:

Behold, the great Creator makes
Himself a house of clay,
a robe of virgin flesh He takes
which He will wear for aye.

More familiar still is Charles Wesley’s ‘Hark the Herald Angels Sing’, with its lines:

‘Veiled in flesh the Godhead see, / Hail the incarnate Deity!’

The language of wearing, of robes and veils, hasn’t always fared well among theologians. I heard of one stern tutor in doctrine who would look round the chapel whenever Wesley’s carol was sung, reserving a stern word for any student who failed to fall silent at that line. He didn’t like the implication that God was merely draped in humanity, making only an outward show of being human.

Thomas Aquinas saw that worry, writing in the thirteenth century, but argued for charity. The language of clothing isn’t perfect, but we shouldn’t expect it to be. Illustrations gesture towards the truth, they aren’t identical with it, and all the more when we’re talking about God. As long as we don’t think expect the clothing image to say all that needs to be said, there’s mileage to it. For one thing, clothing can make someone visible (as the late Queen knew very well): ‘veiled in flesh, the Godhead see’. Moreover, Christ’s humanity was shaped by his divinity, like a garment is shaped by the body of the one who wears it, yet the body remains unchanged (and so does the garment), just as God became human without becoming any less divine.

Alongside clothing, Pestel also suggested God working with clay:

‘Behold, the great Creator makes / Himself a house of clay’.

That takes up, and reworks, another textile image. John’s Gospel gets to the heart of the Christmas message with a line so solemn that Christians have been accustomed to drop to their right knee on hearing it read: ‘And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us’. That’s how we know it, but a more accurate translation is that the Divine Word ‘pitched his tent among us’. The houses that Pestel knew, however, were made of bricks not cloth, which is to say of clay, so he adapted the image. Or, just as likely, with that clay, he had the ‘house’ of the human body in mind. That would recall lines in Genesis, where God makes Adam out of clay, or ‘the dust of the ground’. In fact, the Hebrew word ‘Adam’ means just that – something like ‘earthling’ – just as ‘human’ is related to the Latin ‘humus’, meaning soil.

Whether weaving and wearing, or building, or sculpting, or potato printing, this is the message to stop us in our tracks at Christmas: that the Maker made himself human. There is something beautiful that we greet that with homemade presents, with printing cards, with decorating and baking, with craft and productivity, with paint and cloth, paper, wood, and yarn, and with that sublime sort of making that is music. As Pestel puts it, in closing ‘Behold, the great Creator makes’