Wednesday, December 24, 2008 Carvajal: Christ’s spirit of sharing By Orlando P. Carvajal Break Point
CHRISTMA is tomorrow. It is such a joyous day it deserves all the glitter, all the partying and merry-making, all the lavish and not-so-lavish gift-giving we can afford. But, why?
The reason can be found in the meaning we Christians traditionally give to Christmas. It is the birthday of Jesus who, we believe, is God’s only Son.
Thus, the day the “Word became flesh,” becomes the day God took on our humanity and shared with us His divinity. Christmas is the day God started to proclaim the good news of our salvation through a life spent building God’s kingdom on earth on the foundations of love and solidarity.
Unfortunately, Christ’s spirit of sharing has over the centuries fossilized among Christians into mere almsgiving or “charity” understood as giving of our abundance, ironically, to the victims of our own greed. Thus, Christmas has ceased to become good news to today’s poor who need more than almsgiving and our occasional charity to make them feel that Christ came for them too.
Yet, if we just bother to give Jesus’ life a deeper second look, it is quite easy to see that Jesus had more than almsgiving or “charity” in mind as the reason for his becoming man and for sharing his divinity with us. He joined us and became one of us in order to give us the opportunity to grow to be fully human and truly divine in the process of building God’s kingdom of love, peace and justice on earth.
Christ’s spirit of sharing goes way beyond “charity.” Indeed in His life, Christ did have occasion to feed the hungry and cure the sick. But He certainly did not limit himself to that. In the words of a Dominican theologian, Fr. Albert Nolan, “Jesus did not confine himself to private conversions and individualistic spiritual achievements. He gathered people together in family-life communities as seeds of the emerging kingdom...”
“It will be in families and in small sharing groups of one kind or another, in the churches or outside of them that we today will come to experience something of what it means to be treated as persons and to treat others as persons, and what spontaneous love might mean. It will be from such base that we will reach out to all our human brothers and sisters in solidarity and love…”
“Today more than ever…we need to find ways of reviving Jesus’ spirit of sharing…Our solidarity and love for one another cannot remain an abstract idea or a warm feeling. In practice, it will have to become…an economic reality.”
The relevant way to give today is to help build families and communities whose economic realities revive and mirror Jesus’ spirit of sharing and where the poor do not get a trickle but their equitable share of the community’s resources.
