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.

The holiest day of the year?

More businesses, it seems, will be allowed to trade on Easter Sunday, if the Government has its way. And, naturally, some people are upset and others don't care. This is no surprise. What strikes me about it all is that, once again, we seem to be missing the point. There's a phrase that gets used regularly for days like Easter Sunday (ironically, it seems to get used about a few days, including Christmas too) - "the holiest day of the Christian calendar", or something to that effect. Now, I don't know what this phrase is in the original New Testament Greek, so some of you might have to help me out there, but I don't think I've seen it in the Bible. Naturally I believe it's essential to remember Jesus' death and resurrection. But the only time that Jesus actively said to His followers, "Do this to remember me," He was referring to a regular act of remembering, a reminder that came with bread and wine, two staples of every Middle Eastern meal in those days. In a sense, every time you ate and drank together you reminded yourselves, "This is why we come together: because of Jesus." So no particular day (except the Sabbath) was to be special or holier than other days. Holiness was much more about where you stood with God and how you lived your whole life rather than a particular observance on one day of the year.

Now, I never normally agree with Father Bob McGuire, but I suppose he has a point when he says that now employers will have another chance to overwork their employees. But I'm no more comfortable with non-believers using Jesus as an excuse for a holiday than I am with businesses capitalising on the chance to make an extra buck out of the celebration and good will He creates. The question shouldn't be what we do about Jesus on Easter, but what we do about Him every other day of the year. I hardly think the Bible would say, "It's fine to worship consumerism 364 days of the year but for God's sake don't do it on Easter." If consumerism runs counter to the Easter spirit once a year, it runs counter to it all the year. Perhaps we need to look at our hearts, not our trading hours, to see where the real issue lies.