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  • Haley Haskin
    • Dec 16, 2019
    • 19 min read

Christmas Allegories- This Week! The Grinch: Love, Grace, & Joy

Updated: Apr 30, 2023


Welcome back to my Christmas allegory blog, where I make comparisons between Christmas movies and New testament teachings! I am thoroughly enjoying watching God's teachings unfold so plainly in secular works, because it demonstrates what C. S. Lewis puts best in Mere Christianity: that we all have a moral compass, which origin is not so mysterious at all.

Last week I covered The Polar Express with its theme of faith. If you didn’t get a chance to read it yet, you can check it out here:

This week I will be covering The Grinch, specifically the newest Universal/Illumination remake starring Benedict Cumberbatch. I have never considered The Grinch to be one of my favorite Christmas movies, but that is because no studio has captured the magnitude of the story this honestly until now. With strikingly relatable character development that begs the audience to empathize with his plights all the way through, this movie depicts the realest, most human version of the Grinch I have ever seen. In all of my past three viewings of this remake, I’ve experienced laughter, chills, and tears, as the Grinch breaks my heart over and over again. The sincerity and simplicity with which this movie approached the themes of love, grace, and joy had me locked in a love trance as I was taken on the journey of an important story that really isn’t very fictional at all.

 

“Satan, who is the god of this world, has blinded the minds of those who don’t believe. They are unable to see the glorious light of the Good News. They don’t understand this message about the glory of Christ, who is the exact likeness of God. You see, we don’t go around preaching about ourselves. We preach that Jesus Christ is Lord, and we ourselves are your servants for Jesus’ sake. For God, who said, “Let there be light in the darkness,” has made this light shine in our hearts so we could know the glory of God that is seen in the face of Jesus Christ.” – 2 Corinthians 4:4-6 (New Living Translation)

 

Characters

Before we dive into the themes, let’s take a look at the most essential characters.

The Whos

The whos in this story are a supreme example of Christianity. They exemplify believers who let their light shine before men, as commanded in Matthew 5:14-16: “You are the light of the world. A town built on a hill cannot be hidden. Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl. Instead they put it on its stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven.”

The whos are full of love and compassion for one another, as can be seen in any of the Whoville scenes: when they greet each other on the street, when they gather as a loving community in the square to decorate the Christmas tree, and when Cindy-Lou’s friends selflessly agree to help her without needing an explanation. They even gather around the Christmas tree to sing songs of joy and worship when (what the Grinch thought was their entire Christmas) was stolen. The whos truly embody the fruit of the spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness gentleness and self-control (Galatians 5:22-23). You never see them act selfishly or short with one another. Their goodness is almost saintly. However, before we go writing off their goodness as fairytale-like and unattainable, it is crucial to realize the whos as very real versions of people with real problems, but with a spirit inside them that empowers them to be humble, gracious, good, and hard-working through adversity – the same spirit that allows them to sing through their bewilderment on Christmas day. This is especially exemplified in Cindy-Lou’s mother.

Cindy-Lou’s Mother

Donna is a single, super-mom, who works tirelessly on the night shift at the who hospital, then comes home to the exhausting task of mothering her wild twin toddlers and Cindy-Lou for the rest of her waking hours, without complaint. “All hard work brings a profit, but mere talk leads only to poverty” (Proverbs 14:23); “Do everything without complaining and arguing” (Philippians 2:14).

Yet, with every mishap, every crying baby, and every mess in the kitchen, her patience and gentleness are consistently restored. She never raises her voice or takes out her frustration on her children nor anyone around her. It is clear she is practiced in finding inner peace and renewal, which is similar to the stilling and transformative intervention of the Holy Spirit in believers who ask for it. “Be transformed by the renewal of your mind” (Romans 12:2).

Cindy-Lou

Cindy-Lou is an adorable little fireball with a lot of ambition and a big imagination. She is the light of her mother’s life and of Whoville. She is full of goodness and humble transparency. In her letter to Santa, all she requests is for Santa to help her mom, because she works so hard all the time, and even though she acts like she’s fine, Cindy-Lou knows it must be really hard for her. Cindy-Lou spends the whole movie scheming elaborate plans to catch Santa so she can ask him to help her mom. The fact that a child of Cindy-Lou’s age could have such fine-tuned observance and selfless compassion, when she should be wanting the latest greatest toy for Christmas, shows she is filled with a special kind of spirit.

The Grinch

Seed Scattered Among the Thorns

The most complex character in this story is the Grinch, who mirrors a handful of biblical figures. First, he exemplifies the seed that was scattered among the thorns in the parable of the sower in Matthew 13:22. There was a time when the Grinch didn’t hate Christmas. He was an orphan in search of a home and a family to share it with. But overtime, as that family and home never came, he became bitter and hardened to anything good, since he could never have it. Like the thorns choked the life out of the plants, the hardships and loneliness in his life choked any remaining fleck of light out of his soul – the soul he gave up on, knowing nobody loved.

The People of the End Times

2 Timothy

The Grinch also represents the people in the end times that we are warned about in both 2 Timothy and Jude. Since the Grinch couldn’t have goodness or love, he resigned himself to glorying in his shame, just the way Philippians 3:19 describes: “Their destiny is destruction, their god is their stomach, and their glory is in their shame. Their mind is set on earthly things.”

Since the Grinch could not experience love, he instead began to pride himself in his defensive emotional walls: his rudeness to the whos, his isolation from Whoville, and his hatred of Christmas. The Grinch decided to make up his own rules, as so many of us do in this individualistic, instant gratification enforced culture. He saw celebrating his badness as the only way of coping with the holes in his heart, and his guilt over the lack of goodness in his soul, just like 2 Timothy warns:

“For the time will come when people will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear” (2 Timothy 4:3); “People will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, without love, unforgiving, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not lovers of the good, treacherous, rash, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God— having a form of godliness but denying its power” (2 Timothy 3:2-5).

Jude

When the Grinch gets accidentally catapulted into the Christmas tree lighting in the town square, he is suddenly surrounded by light – literally and spiritually. The narrator says, “He walked through the crowd, and the sound, and the lights, and his ears heard the thump of their joy and delights, and it took him right back to his earliest years, to that lost lonely boy who cried all of those tears. That lost lonely boy, isolated and sad, with no home of his own, no mom, no dad. And as the Grinch looked around, he felt downright scared, as he remembered that Christmas where nobody cared.”

This stirs a heart-breaking moment of empathy, as we witness the Grinch being painfully thrust back into the loneliness of the orphanage and his intense desire to feel loved. Severely unequipped to deal with his strange emotions, he squeamishly walks among the spirited whos, as he witnesses a fellowship and a joy he does not understand. Because he never got the chance at love and happiness, and now cannot seem to wrap his head around the concept, he sees only one option: to obliterate it, along with his strange new discomfort from the town.

“Yet these people slander whatever they do not understand, and the very things they do understand by instinct—as irrational animals do—will destroy them” (Jude 1:10). So, as the verse in Jude predicts, in his destructive understanding of only jealousy and resentment, the Grinch declares that he “must stop this whole thing,” thus inciting the plan to steal Christmas. “These are the people who divide you, who follow mere natural instincts and do not have the Spirit” (Jude 1:18-19).

Paul

The final Biblical figure the Grinch embodies is Paul. The story of Paul is one of the most redemptive ones in the Bible. Paul (previously Saul) went from killing Christians to becoming one. In the same way that Saul went from house to house, dragging men and women to prison in his efforts to destroy the church (Acts 8:3), the Grinch went from house to house, taking things in his effort to destroy Christmas.

But when all that was said and done, the Grinch did not feel fulfilled, and he could not figure out why. Then he looked down into the light on the face of Cindy-Lou as she sang, almost as in seeing the face of Jesus. The narrator describes his curiosity: "As he watched the small girl, he thought he might melt. If he did what she did, would she feel what he felt?" That is when, at his rope’s end with nothing else to lose, he threw caution to the wind. He closed his eyes and listened to the music of the whos’ singing. In that instant, the Grinch’s emotional walls came tumbling down, as he "heard with his heart" and was filled with the spirit of Christmas. We watch him gasp with delight, and his face light up with an expression we've never seen before, as he is overwhelmed, for the first time in his life, with an understanding of true joy. In the same way that Saul came to accept the Holy Spirit, the Grinch’s heart grew three sizes as he accepted light and goodness into his heart.

Notice how it was that simple. The light was sitting outside his heart all along, just waiting to be realized. The Grinch didn’t have to go through a bunch of rituals or give blood or recite a certain prayer. He saw the light for what it was and accepted it in his heart. Then he was filled with the spirit of Christmas. With the same simplicity, God yearns for his children to accept Him, as he stands at the door and knocks. “Because, if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For with the heart one believes and is justified, and with the mouth one confesses and is saved” (Romans 10:9-10). The Grinch later goes on to “repent and be baptized” (Acts 2:38), when he confesses his heart at the Christmas feast, but he couldn’t have done this without first experiencing the spirit on the cliffside.

Themes

Understanding Love

This takes us right into the theme of love. Everyone has emotional walls just like the Grinch. Some are walls thicker than others. Some walls make people seem angry and downright impossible to break into. We can come upon the most bitter and jaded grinch-like people in the world and choose not to associate with them, writing them off as incapable of being restored. But everyone at their core just wants to be loved.

Love is the most important thing. It is the end all be all. “God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them” (1 John 4:16). So, if God is love, and if we are made in his image (Genesis 1:26-27), then we were created to be love to others, including our enemies (Luke 6:35).

Love is the “juice,” the “fuel” that we were designed to live on. God created us to need love, so that He could fulfill that need. He created us to need love so that we could experience His provision, and so that His light could shine through us when we love other people: “Let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God … since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us” (1 John 4:7;11-12).

All through the movie, we watch the Grinch try to experience a warped version of love, when he really doesn’t know how. He watches the whos with confusion and hidden longing through the windows as they partake in their Christmas festivities. He tries to find forced friendship with Fred the reindeer, and his dog Max, who is more conditioned into obedience out of fear than loyalty. He even demonstrates some selflessness when he releases Fred the reindeer to go back home to his reindeer family. Through these small, subtle actions, we realize that the Grinch is not a terrible person, as most people aren’t. He is really just over everything in his life, as a lot of people who are miserable are. People usually aren't just plain evil.

Most of the time, any residual brashness, hard shells, bitterness, or resentment a person might have – anything to make a person “grinch-like,” so to speak – are the collective result of an absence of divine love somewhere in their life, somewhere along their timeline. The Grinch merely felt uncomfortable around the whos, because he did not understand love. So, he channeled it in the only way he knew how. In the same way, people who do not know Jesus, will only understand a cheap, worldly version of love, and may feel uncomfortable around Christianity. “The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know Him” (1 John 3:1).

But we should never write someone off as a bad candidate to receive God’s love, not even the grinches. To do that would discount the very power of God’s miraculous faithfulness. Though the evil one would love for us to believe that some people are past the point of saving, there is not a single person on this earth who is too lost or too far gone to be embraced by the truth.

Grace

That is where grace comes in. Grace and love go hand in hand. You can’t have true love without grace, and you can’t have true grace without love. This is my favorite thing about Cindy-Lou. She gives everyone a chance, she loves her enemies, and she shows grace. Even to the Grinch. While the rest of Whoville may have given up on the Grinch, and just labeled him as rotten, Cindy-Lou believed in his redemption. So much so, that she invited him to Christmas dinner, even after the Grinch acted like a jerk and stole everyone’s Christmas.

Upon receiving the invitation to the whos’ feast, the Grinch says, “What? Me? But I took your gifts … and your trees … I stole your whole Christmas.” To which Cindy-Lou says, “Yep. I know you did. But we’re inviting you anyway.” “But, why?” asks the Grinch. “Because you’ve been alone long enough” says Cindy-Lou as she merrily bounces away. Notice, she doesn’t tell the Grinch that they don’t care that he did those bad things. She just tells him they are inviting him despite what he did. In a situation where the Grinch deserved nothing, Cindy-Lou exhibits true forgiveness and grace.

More on Grace

I have to take a second here. Grace is a monumental, game-changing concept, that most people claim to know, but cannot actually wrap their heads around. I feel this may be the most misused and misunderstood concept in all of Christianity, which is baffling, because without grace, Christianity cannot even exist. Yet, so many people leave it out of the equation, leaving a misconstrued view of the entire thing. This image of a totally broken Grinch who has screwed up so badly, being told that he is wanted anyways, paints a plain picture of what grace actually means. Therefore, I have to seize this perfect moment to delve a little bit into God’s truth.

So many people think they have to earn salvation through a series of good works. Likewise, the Grinch did not think he had been “good enough” to receive an invitation to the whos’ Christmas dinner. But this “angel-complex” construct misses the entire point of grace. If we were all capable of being good enough to begin with, we never would’ve needed a savior or a lamb sacrifice.

I’ll be clear. Everyone on this earth lives in a corrupted sinful nature, because of the Fall in Genesis 3. There is not a single soul on this earth that can ever be perfect or work their way into heaven by being a “good person.” Whatever that means. Because we are not good. It is pretty prideful of us even to think that we could be capable of goodness on our own. But this is what makes grace so beautiful. God is.

God is good. God is perfect. Goodness cannot even exist without God, because He created all and is the origin of the light side of spiritual warfare. And the best part is, God is not selfish. He is willing to share this goodness with every single one of us, if we just repent and receive our salvation.

So, when we abide in Him and ask his Holy Spirit to come into our hearts, suddenly, not through anything that we have done, but purely because Jesus has already atoned for all of our sins on the cross, we can be made perfect and whole through him. “But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8).

When we mess up, no matter how big, God wants us anyways. In the same way that the whos lovingly forgave the Grinch for what he did, Jesus shows us continual loving grace that we could never do enough good works to deserve. “For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God—not by works, so that no one can boast” (Ephesians 2:8-9).

Fellowship

When the Grinch arrives at Christmas dinner, we see the most beautiful scene in the movie unfold. The whos obey the teachings of Jude 1:22-23, as they erase the Grinch’s mistakes with love and forgiveness and take him in as their new friend. 1 John 2:16 says, “whoever claims to live in Him, must love as Jesus did,” So the whos take on the role of Jesus eating with the tax collectors and sinners, whose response to the pharisees’ judgements was: “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick … For I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners” (Matthew 9:12-13). As the Grinch is loved on and accepted – “Accept one another, then, just as Christ accepted you” (Romans 15:7) – for the first time in his life, we see his awkwardness flare up, then melt away.

Matthew 18:20 emphasizes the importance of having fellowship with a supportive Christian community: “where two or three gather in my name, there am I with them." Thus, through the power of being surrounded by a great community of loving and trustworthy whos at the Christmas feast, the Grinch is filled with the courage to come to terms with and confess something that has been eating at his heart ever since he was a child. The Grinch explains to the whos: “I’ve spent my entire life hating Christmas and everything about it. But now I see that it wasn’t Christmas I hated. It was being alone. But I’m not alone anymore, and I have all of you to thank for it.” The Grinch is set free in his confession and built up by the love of his new fellow believers/the whos. “But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus, his Son, purifies us from all sin” (1 John 1:7).

Joy Negating Materialism

Initially, the whos confound the Grinch by gathering in the square to sing around the tree even after their whole Christmas was stolen. The Grinch can’t understand what they could possibly have to sing about if he just took all of their stuff. It drives him crazy that he was unsuccessful in robbing them of their joy. But the whos’ joy was not as shallow as a bunch of things. They are not sad because they know there is something far greater than trees and gifts. “So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal” (2 Corinthians 4:18).

In this scene, they demonstrate their pure hearts by rejoicing anyways, because their faith is in higher things than material possessions or things of the world. “Do not love the world or anything in the world. If anyone loves the world, love for the Father is not in them. For everything in the world—the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life—comes not from the Father but from the world. The world and its desires pass away, but whoever does the will of God lives forever” (1 John 2:15-17).

The Grinch had an impossible time of robbing the whos of their joy. In the same way, when we place our joy in our salvation through Christ, Satan has an impossible time robbing us of that undoubtable, unmovable truth. “But you, Lord, are a shield around me” (Psalm 3:3). We know that death has already been defeated. When the joy in our hearts is truly a reflection of the eternal life we have in Christ, that joy is untouchable and unaffected by the hardships of our lives. “Though the fig tree does not bud and there are no grapes on the vines, though the olive crop fails and the fields produce no food, though there are no sheep in the pen and no cattle in the stalls, yet I will rejoice in the Lord, I will be joyful in God my Savior. The Sovereign Lord is my strength” (Habakkuk 3:17-19).

I’m not talking about happiness. I’m talking about joy. This joy is a separate thing. It stands on its own. It is constant. It is authoritative. It is life-changing – we’re talking 180 degrees. It is higher than any fleeting happiness we can enjoy on this earth, and it covers all wounds. “Whom have I in heaven but You? And on earth I desire no one besides You. My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever” (Psalm 73:25-26).

Erasing the Reputation

Just like the Grinch had a rotten perception of Christmas, there are a lot of people in this world who’ve had a rotten run with Christianity. Either they’ve dealt with hypocritical, legalistic people who didn’t understand grace, or people calling themselves Christians have acted hatefully toward them, or they’ve been scared away from salvation in thinking their sins are too great to be forgiven. It is our job as kingdom workers to show God’s children the true meaning of Christianity, by living as authentically as possible. We do this by spreading the good news of the Gospel, and exemplifying pure love and light every day, in hopes that we can erase that sour taste a lot of people have in their mouths when they hear the word “Christian.”

This means doing the hard things, the small things, the things that are actually harder than feeding the homeless or visiting the nursing home, because they are the personal heart issues that refine our day-to-day character. This means swallowing our pride. This means showing grace and love when our sinful nature begs us not to. This includes being patient when we want to have road rage. It includes forgiving the people who have wronged us. It includes holding our tongues when we want to tell someone off, or gossip, or complain. It includes giving someone our place in line. It includes looking up from our phones to see the people we could be holding the door for or helping carry their groceries to their car.

It means sacrificing our precious time in order to be God’s servant for others. It means taking the focus off of how we feel for a moment to consider others’ backstories and others’ feelings. It means realizing that our time is not our time. It is God’s. Our money is not our money. It is God’s. Our friendships, our families, our possessions, our jobs, our lives are not ours. They are God’s.

These can be hard pills to swallow for our highly individualistic, “self-love,” “do what makes you happy culture.” A lot of things make me happy. A lot of sins, actually. They are yummy like dessert. But happiness is the cheap and artificial version of joy. And living indulgently in the sinful state of trying to make myself as happy as possible, will not bring me the fruit of joy.

We spend so much time looking at ourselves to see how efficiently we can use our resources to make our lives the most comfortable and awesome they can be. But God calls us to do the opposite of this, taking the spotlight off ourselves and asking ourselves how we could be using the many gifts and blessings he has given us to help others, not to add to our list of good deeds, but to extend praise for his provision and to glorify his character.

The parable of the sheep and the goats in Matthew 25:31-46 sums up this calling and the themes in The Grinch very well. Here is an excerpt from verses 34-40, in which God is talking to the believers at the gates of Heaven, who have dedicated their lives to serving him:

“Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’ “Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?’ “The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’”

I want to make it clear that I am not as consistent as I want to be in doing these things, and I certainly can’t do them through my own power. I have to ask for renewal from the Holy Spirit each day, so I can have the strength to do His work despite my sinful nature. And even then, I still mess up literally all the time, as the evil one tempts and fights for my heart. In fact, I feel like if you ask anyone if they’ve been “good enough” this year, most people would probably say no. But luckily Jesus is not Santa Clause, because we’d all be on the naughty list. No human is perfect, and if you expect Christians to be, lest they be hypocritical, you have the wrong idea of salvation entirely. We are all fighting the daily battle of a spiritual war. But thankfully, we have already had all our wrongs paid for by Jesus Christ dying on the cross. “For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 6:23). We are essentially off the hook. We have a free pass to the nice list! We get a free chance at a new start on a daily, heck, even hourly basis! As the beautiful story of The Grinch shows us, no one. Absolutely no one, is past the point of redemption. This beautiful news should blow our socks off and provoke us to do amazing things in the name of the Lord!

I hope this second chapter of my Christmas allegory blogs has inspired you with some who-like compassion to treat others as Christ would treat them, not only during this holiday season, but year-round. Remember, you are not unfixable. You are saved by grace. You are loved. And there is an ever-present joy that comes from truly accepting your salvation in Christ. Thank you for reading. Comment your thoughts. And let me know if there is a movie or story you’d like me to cover next! (It doesn’t have to be Christmas!)

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