This time of year, everyone – myself included – airs out their favorite Christmas movies, talking about the wholesomeness and meaning and warm fuzzies they bring each time they’re watched. Topping the list are films such as “Home Alone,” “A Christmas Story,” “It’s a Wonderful Life,” and even “A Charlie Brown Christmas.”

One of my favorite Christmas films, however, never makes this list of classics. I suppose that’s not surprising. In fact, most people might say that except for a few scenes at the end of the film, it’s not even a Christmas film at all.

That’s technically true … that is, if one only looks at the surface. Beneath the surface, however, runs the entire message of Christmas – and that’s a message we could especially use this year.

The film I’m talking about is “Meet John Doe,” released in 1941 and directed by the legendary Frank Capra.

The plot features a young journalist, Ann Mitchell (Barbara Stanwyck), who loses her job when the newspaper comes under new ownership. Desperate to support her widowed mother and younger sisters, Mitchell sets off fireworks as she leaves, writing a fake column about “John Doe,” a man who has determined to jump off city hall on Christmas Eve to protest the state of the little man and the powers that oppress him.

This letter sets the city in an uproar, and rather than ‘fess up to the truth, Mitchell and her compadres at the paper decide to use the uproar to their advantage, hiring washed-up baseball player John Willoughby to be “John Doe” (Gary Cooper). John Doe soon becomes a nationwide sensation thanks to Mitchell, his speech writer, who draws on her late father’s love of America and its ideals to speak to those average folks in what today we call “middle America.”

The grassroots movement, however, is soon surreptitiously co-opted by D.B. Norton (Edward Arnold), a conniving tycoon who seeks to use the John Doe movement to catapult himself to power, exercising even more control over the unsuspecting salt-of-the-earth folks who support John Doe’s message. When Doe seeks to expose the truth about himself and Norton’s plot, however, the common folk turn on him, quickly returning him to his previous hobo lifestyle.

To redeem his mistakes and resurrect the now-dead John Doe movement, Doe quietly makes his way back to town, determined to follow through and jump off city hall on Christmas Eve as was first promised. Mitchell figures out his plan and intercepts him, delivering the following impassioned plea:

You don’t have to die to keep the John Doe idea alive! Someone already died for that once – the first John Doe. And He’s kept that idea alive for nearly 2,000 years. It was He who kept it alive in them, and He’ll go on keeping it alive forever and always. … That’s why those [Christmas] bells are ringing, John! They’re calling to us, not to give up but to keep on fighting.

And in that little speech, we have the entire meaning of Christmas – a Savior, born to die so that the John Does of the world could live.

But this movie doesn’t just bring this Christmas message in right at the end to tie things up with a bow. No, the message of Christmas is infused throughout the whole movie for those who have eyes to see.

Like Doe and his compatriots, we, the common men of America, work to save our country, our way of life, our values and ideals. And this is a wonderful goal which each and every one of us should work toward.

Yet, like Doe and Mitchell, we are also frail human beings. Our hearts may be in the right place, but we can’t escape our sinful human nature, and so we make mistakes in our attempt to do good. It only takes a few moments of pondering to see evidence of this fact permeating our culture, even in the last few months.

The beautiful thing, however, is that despite our mistakes – despite our missteps which tear down the good things which we and others have built and fought for – there is a Savior who never makes mistakes. And if we, like John Doe, purpose to pick ourselves up after we’ve fallen, correcting our course and patterning it after that of the Savior who came to Bethlehem 2,000 years ago, following in His footsteps rather than trying to blaze our own trails, then we will see the good fruits of our labors.

This article was made possible by The Fred & Rheta Skelton Center for Cultural Renewal.

Image credit: Picryl