Why no-one buys gold, frankincense and myrrh anymore (Advent #9)

Well, it was probably too much to expect that I could make it through an entire series of posts on Advent without once railing against the consumerism that is rife at this time of year. And certainly a trip into the city today, past the Myer Christmas Window and through a Melbourne Central absolutely packed with Christmas shoppers, I have come home with much fuel for such a vitriolic anti-consumerist post.

But I'm not going to write it. And here are my reasons.

#1: Our culture is consumerist at all times of year. Christmas might see more spending, but we spend too much all year round and replace God with more material things than we could ever need. Some might suggest that consumerism is particularly abhorrent at Christmas because it means that we are using God as an excuse to spend money. That is certainly my gut response to what I saw today, but on further reflection I'm not so convinced. God is hardly forefront in most people's minds at this time of year; there is no conscious justification of consumerism with God in mind. Rather, family and generosity and love are the excuses we use. So if anything is being blasphemed, it is these secular values, not God. The fact is, He deserves to be honoured every day of the year, in every way. Our failure to do this is the great sin we are all guilty of. Christmas consumerism only magnifies the sin; it is not the heart of the sin.

#2: In some small way, the giving of gifts can point us to God. The rest of the year, we spend obsessively on ourselves. At Christmas time, that spending is directed towards others. It may be misguided and misplaced, but surely it represents something that can be channelled carefully into some sort of openness to the Gospel, more than our blind, self-focused consumerism of the rest of the year can.

#3: The problem is not that we are spending extravagantly at Christmas. The problem is that we are spending the wrong way: spending the wrong currency and spending it on the wrong goods. The magi knew what to spend their wealth on when they came to Jesus, and they knew what to buy: gifts to honour Him, yes, but gifts also to anoint Him for His burial. You see, the gifts they gave pointed to the gift He gave: the gift of Himself.

Though a king worthy to be honoured with gold, He was found by them in a completely humbled state. Though worthy of anointing as king, He was anointed for burial, the act in which, bizarrely, paradoxically, His true glory as king was seen - and so the gift of myrrh. And, though He came to a place where the "presence of God", the Temple, was soon to be destroyed, His very presence on earth and His sacrifice brought that presence to us - and so the gift of frankincense, the incense of the Temple he came to replace. His life was a costly gift; and so we too should give of ourselves at great price, for we too were bought for a price (1 Corinthians 6:20). We should give to Him, and give that others might know Him.

Perhaps, then, the right response to consumerism at Christmas is not to see it as a distinctive evil but as something that represents the bigger problem: that we live in a culture, in a society, which, 2000 years later, still fails to honour God as it should. Perhaps we, on walking through our city streets this Christmas, should feel something a little like Eliot's Magi on returning to their homes:

We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,

But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,

With an alien people clutching their gods.

I should be glad of another death.