My favorite gift last Christmas was a pack of thermal socks. Looking back, I was angry, sure, but there was a lot more going on: a cocktail of resentment, embarrassment, and disappointment. But the dominant emotion, I now realize, was confusion. Why would anyone give socks and sweaters as a gift? You may remember an iconic scene from A Christmas Story , where a humiliated Ralphie reluctantly models a pink bunny suit gifted to him by Aunt Clara.
Aside from the petulant entitlement of suburban kids, what do Ralphie and I have in common? We both had fundamentally misunderstood the nature of gift. Jacques Derrida, one of the major players in the postmodern philosophy known as deconstruction, argued that, by definition, a gift must come with no strings attached:. For there to be a gift, there must be no reciprocity, return, exchange, countergift, or debt.
If the other gives me back or owes me or has to give me back what I give him or her, there will not have been a gift, whether this restitution is immediate or whether it is programmed by a complex calculation of a long-term deferral or difference. As the Bible understands them, gifts do come with strings attached. Now, I can hear Protestant alarm bells ringing, so let me clarify. Gifts create obligations in the most basic sense of that word: ties that bind two people together.
My grandmother expects me to wear my Christmas socks, just as Aunt Clara expects Ralphie to wear his bunny suit. The gift is as much about the giver as it is about the recipient.
The entire notion of gift is only intelligible within the context of a world where God has already decided not only to share his life with his creatures, but also to deputize them in the governance of the world he made, which is the very story Genesis is telling.
