“We want God to be our heavenly Santa Claus…Santa gives. He doesn’t lay down any conditions prior to giving the gifts, even if parents lamely try to warn little imps that Santa gives only to good boys and girls. After dispensing his gifts, Santa makes no demands…
Some scholars of popular religion describe Santa as a god of consumerist materialism whose sole purpose is to give. And indeed, many people think of God in this way, as Santa Claus conveniently enlarged to divine proportions. God is an infinitely rich, always available, and unfailingly generous giver—or at least, that’s what we feel a god worth of divinity ought to be. God gives without conditions and without demands. As the sun shines and spring flows, so God gives—solves our problems, fulfills our desires, and makes us feel good. A Santa Claus God demands nothing from us. A divine Santa is the indiscriminately giving and inexhaustibly fertile source of everything that is, and everything that is to come our way.
God is an inexhaustibly fertile source of everything. But is it true that God demands nothing? If it were true, how could Jesus urge us, as he does in the Sermon on the Mount, to be perfect as God is? Here is what we do as worshipers of a Santa Claus God: We embrace the conviction that God is an infinitely generous source of all good but conveniently forget that we were created in God’s image to be in some significant sense like God—not like God in God’s divinity, for we are human and not divine, but like God “in true righteousness and holiness” (Ephesians 4:24), like God in loving enemies (Matthew 5:44). To live well as a human being is to live in sync with who God is and how God acts…
Unlike Santa, God doesn’t just scatter gifts, smiling in blissful affirmation of who we are and what we do no matter who we happen to be and what we happen to do. God also urges us to do this or not to do that…God’s face twists in the pain of disappointment and even frowns in angry condemnation when we fail to live as we ought, bringing devastation to ourselves as well as to those around us.
God generously gives, so God is not a negotiator of absolute dimensions. God demands, so God is not an infinite Santa Claus. So what is the relation between God’s giving and God’s demanding? In other words, what is the difference between a Santa Claus God and a gift-giving God? The bare-bones answer is this: a Santa Claus God gives simply so we can have and enjoy things; the true God gives so we can become joyful givers and not just self-absorbed receivers. God the giver has made us to be givers and obliges us therefore to give.”
Miroslav Volf in Free of Charge: Giving and Forgiving in a Culture Stripped of Grace (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2005) 26-28.
After my post on 23 August 2014 on the topic of giving and forgiving, Howard Freeman, my dear friend from NYC, reminded me of Volf’s excellent work on the topic cited here. In revisiting this must-read book this morning, I want to remind us to both celebrate and imitate God’s generosity.
As a postscript, my motivation for mentioning Volf’s comments linked to Santa Claus today flow, at least in part, from where we are: settling into our townhouse feels like Christmas! What a gift! And yet, we are not here because we deserved this place or were entitled to it. It’s a gift from the Lord to be enjoyed and shared that positions us to grow as joyful givers.