Christmas is Not About Gifts

I can always tell that Christmas is coming, not by the homes that are decorated but by the amount of traffic on Route 30 in Lancaster as people head to the outlet malls to do their shopping. I do everything in my power to avoid this stretch of road for five weeks.

I can also tell it is Christmas when the amount of posts and blogs decrying the commercialization of Christmas begin appearing. I also seek to avoid those at all costs. Why? They do not get to the heart of the matter. All of the ‘Keep Christ in Christmas’ memes are only dealing with the symptom not the disease.

The symptom is the commercialization of Christmas, the disease is the virtual merging of an economy of exchange with the birth of Christ. This is the most bitter irony for the one who came to destroy economies of exchange is now identified intimately with it during the holiday season.

An economy of exchange is grounded in the ancient sacrificial principle of ‘Do ut des’, I give in order to receive. Just as the ancients would sacrifice a person or an animal to the gods in order to receive from those same gods blessing and prosperity so also at this time of year we participate in the great mechanism known as holiday shopping where we give gifts in order to receive gifts and thereby bring equality to our relationships. Our very lives are embedded in the Matrix of an Economy of Exchange when we exchange the only thing we own, our time, for a paycheck which we then exchange for ‘cash’ (virtual or real) which is then exchanged for goods and services. Thus it arises in an economy of exchange that our self worth is equivalent to our net worth. Commercials advise us to ‘show how much we care’ by how much we spend.

The entire Jesus project, the work of the Abba in the world was to do away with our economies of exchange. God is not a god who needs or wants sacrifice and who does not have to be placated in order to bless the world. It is God’s very character to love the world and God needs no prodding, reminding, begging, or act on our part to do so. Blessing in the divine economy is never tied to an economy of exchange and those who seek to tie God’s love back into this monstrous mechanism have missed the entire point of the Gospel.

If we understand the death of Jesus as the end of all sacrifice, as the propitiatory gift of the Abba to us humans to assuage our wrath, if we understand that this act was a total and complete subversion of all our sacrificial principles it then boggles the mind how the very name of Jesus could end up being correlated with a season of gift exchange. We justify it by appealing to the Wise Men who brought the baby Jesus gifts (and what nonsense it is to say that this made Jesus wealthy as some prosperity preachers do), or by saying God gave Jesus to the world as a gift thereby justifying our own gift giving. These rationalizations simply ignore that gift and grace are the same, they require no reciprocation. Grace that requires reciprocation is not grace but expectation, thus, an economy of exchange.

Rather than decrying the commercialization of Christmas we rather ought to see the ways that economies of exchange have permeated the entire gospel, from the commercialization of Christmas to penal substitution atonement to the ultimate economy of exchange, eternal conscious torment for not giving ‘God the glory, honor and respect that God deserves.’ Our entire Western gospel has been so compromised by this nefarious sacrificial mechanism that it is not even worthy of being called ‘gospel’, ‘euangellion‘ for it is a ‘dysangellion‘, the same old bad news of sacrificial gods engaged in economies of exchange. It is these gods, this theology, this religion, that the message of and about Jesus Christ deconstructs and conquers.

I am not saying that we should not give and receive gifts this Christmas. I look forward to the time when our family opens the thoughtful presents we give each other. What I am aware of is that when we give to those who give us something in return we ‘have our reward.’ It is when we give to those who cannot participate in an economy of exchange who cannot give us anything in return that we truly understand the grace and the gift of the Christ child.