Christmas as Hope, Gifts as Ethics

The way we celebrate Christmas, especially common notions as to why we give gifts on Christmas, has long struck me as problematic.  Christianity is ultimately an Easter faith.  Mark and John do not mention Christ's birth or origins.  Paul focuses exclusively on the experience of the risen Christ.  The only reason the birth of Christ appears in the Christian Bible at all is rhetorical:  to link Jesus of Nazareth to Messiah references in the Torah.  In essence, biblical accounts of the birth of Jesus reflect the Jewish nature of the earliest iterations of the Christ faith.  As a theological matter, the birth of Jesus seems practically irrelevant to Christianity as an Easter faith.

As a matter of religion, Christmas is, for me, fraught.  Principally, the birth of Jesus as the future Christ is the instantiation of hope in the world,  I take that hope to mean hope for justice in the world, the possibility that God's law will be realized or actualized.  The possibility Jesus' birth brings is not salvific in the sense of offering hope for another world, i.e., heaven, but rather is salvific in the sense of bringing the possibility of God's law, i.e., justice, to this world.  The fact that Jesus was not born as the Christ but rather as an ordinary and wholly human infant exemplifies the material or existential nature of his possibility.

As a practical matter, Christ's birthday was utterly ordinary, notwithstanding the rhetorical needs of Matthew and Luke.  This to me is the meaning of Christmas - the instantiation of hope in an ordinary person.  The redemptive or salvific possibility of Christ exists in a person who bears no special markings, a person who is wholly ordinary.  The birth of Jesus, if it is to be celebrated, should be celebrated for the extraordinary fact that the possibility of God's law, the salvific capacity for justice, is fully human and is to be realized in the world.

The idea that Jesus is a gift from God to the world [and that this is the reason for gift-giving on Christmas] turns the radical nature of Christ's meaning on its head.  Jesus was not a gift.  Christ represents an ethical choice.  We should celebrate Christmas as an acknowledgement that the condition for justice is being human and that the possibility of justice exists in all of us.  Christmas is truly a material holiday, but only in the sense that it demonstrates the wholly existential nature of God's law, that justice is human rather than heavenly.

The transformation of Jesus to the Christ was volitional.  The possibility of Christ is embodied in ethical choice.  Gift-giving is laudable but does not, for the most part, have much to do with the birth of Jesus.  Insofar as the birth of Jesus has meaning, it has meaning because it was an ordinary birth of an ordinary child whose future would be extraordinary not because of his birth-status but rather because of how he chose to act.  Jesus was not Zeus or Krishna appearing on earth with divine power and attributes.  Jesus was a man who offered an ethical choice, which was also a divine choice:  to live justly.  Christmas should be a celebration of justice, of ethical choice, not largesse.

Of course, the problem with interpretation is that it sometimes runs counter to reality.  In the case of Christmas, that means gift-giving.  Neither I nor anyone else can do anything to change our practice of giving gifts on Christmas.  That being said, the practice, insofar as it is traced to the Bible, can be made to accord with the significance of the single instance of gift-giving on the birth of Christ - that of the three Eastern wise men or kings:

Now after Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea in the days of Herod the king, behold, wise men from the East came to Jerusalem, saying, “Where is He who has been born King of the Jews? For we have seen His star in the East and have come to worship Him.”When Herod the king heard this, he was troubled, and all Jerusalem with him. when they had come into the house, they saw the young Child with Mary His mother, and fell down and worshiped Him. And when they had opened their treasures, they presented gifts to Him: gold, frankincense, and myrrh. Then, being divinely warned in a dream that they should not return to Herod, they departed for their own country another way.

NKJV, Matthew, 2:2-12.

The function of the gifts in the passage quoted above seems not to be a celebratory matter exclusively but rather a political one:  here are secular authorities pledging themselves to God's son rather than to Herod (and by extension, Rome).  Tribute, which is what the gifts of kings is, goes to god, not to the secular authorities, not to the empire.  Hence, the notion of gifts for Christmas should be a political act, a tribute to God over the secular authorities, rather than an act of mere generosity or thankfulness.  

This squares with the radical message of Christ, which calls for uncompromising and unaccommodating fealty to God regardless of the secular authority's demands.  In truth, a plain reading of Christ's message puts the believer squarely at odds with the secular authority.  In fact, Christ's message could be read as a critique of all authority qua authority, which ultimately turns into a self-propagating edifice at odds with God.  All authority qua authority becomes an idol, a golden calf if you will.  The hierarchy or bureaucracy or ecclesiastical polity becomes so focused on meta-analysis of the rules governing it and justifying its existence that it effectively turns away from God.  The problem is not 'law' per se, but rather the claim to monopolize both the interpretation and administration of God's law.

The eastern kings or wise men and their tribute to a babe in a 'manger' further the Christ message that God's law is not formal or ethnocentric.  The gifts are not offered to be generous.  They gifts are offered because tributes to God are appropriate.  In this way, the tribute, the Christmas gift is a radical tribute to and tacit acknowledgement of the ethical priority of the other.  "Thou shalt have no other gods before me;" hence, kings or wise men give gifts to Jesus. The commandment is the starkest form of prioritizing the other.  Above all and first, God.  In Jesus' formulation, "The Lord our God is one Lord: And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength."  Mark 12:29-30.  The gifts of kings pay tribute to the absolute and utter primacy of God and our obligation to that otherness.  this radical alterity is the model for our gift-giving.  The gift is not an act of generosity or charity, though it may be that too, instead it is an acknowledgement of the ethical standing of the other as prior to the self.  The gift is a tribute to the material aspect of the first commandment, to love your neighbor as yourself, to acknowledge the other's absolute and inalienable status as a fully ethical being to whom tribute, and hence moral agency, are due.  The fact that Matthew specifically locates the secular authorities to the "east" demonstrates that the ethical priority of the other is not parochial but instead extends to every person.  This is extraordinary and worth emulating.

I still maintain that the way we celebrate Christmas is problematic.  Jesus was not a gift but rather the instantiation of hope in the world.  The message of the risen Christ only makes sense if Jesus was wholly human, one whose divine status centers on volition, an ethical choice, rather than a magical birth.  Nevertheless, we give gifts on Christmas and that is not going away.  Although I am not particularly religious, I will remember the model of the eastern kings or wise men when I give gifts this year:  my gifts partially fulfill my obligation to understand and treat those receiving them as ethically prior to myself, to treat them as I would treat myself.  In this way, whether we are religious or not, we fulfill that most basic and radical ethical command when we give gifts at Christmas.