We enjoy thinking of ourselves as
basically generous, benevolent, giving people. That’s one reason why
everyone, even the nominally religious, loves Christmas. Christmas is a
season to celebrate our alleged generosity. The newspaper keeps us
posted on how many needy families we have adopted. The Salvation Army
kettles enable us to be generous while buying groceries (for ourselves)
or gifts (for our families). People we work with who usually balk at the
collection to pay for the morning coffee fall over themselves
soliciting funds “to make Christmas” for some family.
We
love Christmas because, as we say, Christmas brings out the best in us.
Everyone gives on Christmas, even the stingiest among us, even
the Ebeneezer Scrooges. Dickens suggests
that down deep, even the worst of us can become generous, giving people.
Yet I suggest we are better givers
than getters, not because we are generous people but because we are
proud, arrogant people. The Christmas story–the one according to Luke
not Dickens–is not about how blessed it is to be givers but about how
essential it is to see ourselves as receivers.
We prefer to think of ourselves as
givers–powerful, competent, self-sufficient, capable people whose
goodness motivates us to employ some of our power, competence and gifts
to benefit the less fortunate. Which is a direct contradiction of the
biblical account of the first Christmas. There
we are portrayed not as the givers we wish we were but as the receivers
we are. Luke and Matthew go to great lengths to demonstrate that
we–with our power, generosity, competence and capabilities–had little to
do with God’s work in Jesus. God wanted to do something for us so
strange, so utterly beyond the bounds of human imagination, so foreign
to human projection, that God had to resort to angels, pregnant virgins,
and stars in the sky to get it done. We didn’t think of it, understand
it or approve it. All we could do, at Bethlehem, was receive it. A gift from a God we hardly even knew.
—William Willimon, taken from an article in The Christian Century, Dec 21-28, 1998
