Our greatest gift

CHRISTMAS, of course, is unavoidably associated with
gift-giving. And that’s simply because Christmas is a season of
love—the very love of God who in redeeming us has given us his Son as
a gift. We could have no greater gift than God giving his Son to us
for our own redemption.

            And this gift of love of God is even greater than what he
showed us when he created us out of sheer goodness. For this love is
given when we ourselves actually do not deserve anymore to be loved by
him due to our sins. And yet he continues to love us. There is greater
love involved here.

            And so, every time we give or receive gifts from relatives
and friends, we should always remember that these gifts are mere
tokens of the greatest gift that God has given us. They should move us
to also give ourselves as gift to God and to everybody else. We have
to take part in the dynamics of this giving of the gift of love
initiated and perpetuated by God.

            Forgetting this basic truth would inevitably spoil us and
lead us to all sorts of dangers. Gifts should be an expression of the
love of God and the love we ought to have with God and with everybody
else. Otherwise, they can only be expression of something else that is
not proper to us.

            We should be thankful to God every time we receive gifts.
We have to be thankful to him first before we give thanks to whoever
gives us the gift. Let’s be careful in this detail, since very often
we automatically thank the gift-giver and just forget about God from
whom all good things come. As a consequence, we fail to capture the
real and ultimate meaning and purpose of gift-giving and
gift-receiving.

            When we give gifts to relatives and friends, we should
also remember that what we are doing is to actually act out the
gift-giving of God’s love, goodness and mercy to mankind. That should
be context of our gift-giving. Otherwise, it will degenerate into
something harmful to us.

            For sure, this concept of gift has to be understood well.
It cannot be set within the framework of the purely human. That would
make gift-giving a shallow and showy act of goodness, full of icing
without the cake, rich in packaging with poor item inside.

            The proper logic of gift-giving carries with it nothing
less than the full wisdom of God. It involves justice but goes beyond
justice. It brings the full weight of prudence to bear on all the
steps of decision-making.

            It involves nothing less than total self-giving, and
necessarily leads us to the cross. And that’s simply because that
gratuitous love of God for us has been fully shown to us by Christ who
loved us all the way to the cross.

            It surely has its moments of sweetness and tenderness, but
it cannot avoid being exacting, since things have to conform to
nothing less than God’s will, and not only to ours.