Christmas Charities

“For ye know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that, though He was rich, yet for your sakes He became poor, that ye through His poverty might be rich.”—2 Corinthians viii. 9.

The passage: Paul says that Christ, though rich, became poor for our sake, so that through his poverty we might become rich.

When a beggar asks alms of me for Christ’s sake, can I safely refuse? When wise and experienced people assure me that answering his prayer does actual harm to society, dare I give him anything? These questions trouble many of us, and not only regarding street beggars — they apply widely. Some tell us that almost every gift we make indulges a fancy and violates a law. Others say the most indiscriminate kindness is most like God’s own, who gives liberally to all and sends his rain on the just and the unjust. These opposing views do not merely distract us; they often drive us to conclude that no principle at all can guide us — or, more dangerously still, that there are two principles: one for earth, proved true by experience and followed as the rule, the other for heaven, enjoined by the Bible and followed only occasionally.

Perhaps this conflict is sharpest at Christmas, a season tied to our old notions of charity. We cannot rid ourselves of the feeling that we ought to give then, if never else — not merely because it falls in winter, when work is scarce and nights are cold, nor merely because the rich feast while others starve nearby, but because we cannot bear the thought that the Son of God became a poor man among poor men while our own hearts and hands stay shut against our own flesh and blood. We half suppose that our usual maxims may be set aside in homage to the Nativity — that we may indulge liberal impulses while keeping the feast, though we must restrain them once the anniversary passes.

Such a scheme cannot be honest. What is right at Christmas must be right always. Either the Incarnation means nothing, or it governs our thoughts and deeds all our lives through. We should go to it not to find exceptions to the laws that govern men, but to learn what those laws are. It will not encourage any sentiment at odds with principle — but earnest reflection on it may bring us to a principle more comprehensive and more workable than either of those I mentioned, doing justice to both.

I. First: if we receive the Incarnation of Christ as the revelation of God’s mind and character, then any language ever used to express the fulness and universality of divine love, far from needing to be softened, must seem tame and cold. The Incarnation answers all the dark conceptions men have formed of the One in whom they live and move; the Gospel of it will beat down every devil-worship in the world — but that is only half the truth. Not only ideas of God as a cruel tyrant, but even reverent phrases that strip him of personality — “the Divinity,” “Providence,” “Omnipotence” — become offensive once we grasp that the fulness of the Godhead dwelt in the Son of Man. The Name of Father, which Christ proclaimed, becomes the name that interprets and includes all the others. The Divinity we reverence is the mind of a living Father. The Providence we confess is a Father’s foresight, devising what is best for his children. The Omnipotence that seemed to side with evil — at the manger, when the Innocents were slain, at the Cross, when soldiers and priests mocked him — is shown by the manger and the Cross to be the very instrument the Father wields for his grace and for the world’s redemption.

So far, then, the defenders of an expansive, undiscriminating charity have much to say for themselves. If we are to be followers of God as dear children, if nothing can be wrong in us that is like him, nothing right that is unlike him, then there is no danger of regarding mankind with too much affection and sympathy — only the greatest danger in stinting it. Our consciences affirm this. We may be troubled by solemn warnings against being too compassionate, and feel they strike at some real infirmity in us — but when we examine ourselves honestly, it is never the infirmity of having cared or sacrificed too much for others. No one honest with himself feels open to that charge. He may have talked too much of benevolence without having been too benevolent; he may have indulged a frothy sentimentalism, but that only shows he has been too tender of himself, not of others. The Psalmist’s blessing on him who considers the poor has not become a curse, as some seem to suppose. It is inconsideration, now as ever, that is the source of every curse.

II. Again, if we have not followed a cunningly devised fable in believing that Christ, being rich, became poor for our sakes — if this history carries any sacredness for us — then it cannot be a sound maxim that men should generally be left to the consequences of their own acts, that we should pass by one who has fallen into poverty or crime, telling ourselves it was his own fault and we need not save him from the results of his folly. No history shows more clearly than the Gospel that individuals and nations may be left to taste the fruit of their own misdoing — the Son of Man wept over a hypocritical city and yet left it to be trodden down by its enemies. But surely the chief sin of that city, of its priests and rulers, was that they were wrapped in selfish pride, that they spurned the Lazarus at their gate, that they worshipped the letter of the Law while forgetting its meaning and end. Their great complaint against Jesus was that he received sinners and ate with them. His complaint of them was that they did not look for a Shepherd who would go into the wilderness after his wandering sheep — and because they would not have such a Shepherd, they themselves, the inferior shepherds, had become mere hirelings.

We could not confess a Saviour at all if we did not believe men had fallen into an evil condition from which they needed rescue. We could not confess a Saviour like Jesus if we did not believe the worst part of that fall was voluntary — that men had themselves to blame for their greatest calamities. This principle belongs to the very idea of an Incarnation, and Christ carried it into the smallest details of his acts. Knowing all men, he could have chosen the most respectable and bestowed his blessings on them; instead he deliberately proclaimed the opposite rule — the Physician is for the sick, not the healthy. He cured a man and told him to sin no more, lest a worse thing befall him. He healed those possessed by unclean spirits. He cast seven devils out of Mary Magdalene.

Most of these acts were done for men’s bodies. Our Lord drew no artificial line between cures of body and soul; he claimed to be Lord of both, and proved himself Deliverer of both. His example may fairly be pleaded by those who say we are not bound, in giving our gifts and services, to choose only the meritorious — who remind us that if we all had to prove our title to live, none of us would be left standing.

III. But there is another aspect of the Nativity, as important as either of these, prominent in the Collect for Christmas Day: the Father gave his Son to take our nature and be born of the Virgin, that we, being regenerate and made his children by adoption and grace, might be renewed daily by his Holy Spirit. Christ did not merely stoop to our condition — he stooped to us in order to raise us. He came to claim, for those he was not ashamed to call his brethren, the dignity of Sons of God. This ultimate purpose appeared in every part of his work while he wore our mortality. He did not merely heal the sick and cast out devils; he called forth faith and trust in those he restored, and this was the very highest part of their restoration. “Thy faith has saved thee,” he told the Samaritan leper who was already clean, unlike the other nine who did not return to give God glory. In other words, he called forth the true manhood in the poor, degraded creatures who came to him; he woke them to a sense of their glorious parentage; he led them to lift their eyes from the earth they had crawled on, to the living God. He found the sheep he sought and brought them home rejoicing. So he distinguished between man and man more truly than those who label one set respectable and religious, another odious and profane. He spoke to each heart by his acts more than his words. If a heart held any sense of oppression, any desire for deliverance, it answered his call and became the heart of a man. If it was shut violently against him, it suffered the worst punishment it could suffer: it remained in its old obtuseness, growing harder and more impenetrable every day.

Here, then, is a justification, drawn from the Nativity and from our Lord’s example, for those who say that many of our so-called charitable deeds are not good but mischievous. We need not introduce distinctions that only perplex conscience, between acts good for Society and acts good for individuals, nor balance duties owed to one against duties owed to the other. It is plainly not good for any individual to live as a mere animal when God intended him for a man, as a slave when he ought to be free, as a liar when it is his privilege to speak truth. If our alms tempt him to remain a miserable creature, sustained by chance bounty, selling his soul for pence, we are guilty of our brother’s blood; we are not leading him to feel he is a child of God, but may be keeping him from that new, high life which Christ took our flesh to win for him.

On this ground I rest the condemnation of that lazy, self-indulgent giving into which we all tend to fall, which our own consciences know has no right to the name of Charity. On this ground too we may say that many religious institutions of other days were not godly institutions, because they kept up a race of vagabonds who never learned the worth of labour, who never learned therefore to be brave and faithful, who prayed to chance rather than to their Father in heaven for their daily bread. We are not called to pronounce that such institutions were never useful, or could never be turned to good use even at their most corrupt, or that their sympathy did not sometimes compensate for the wrong their prodigality inflicted. Just as little need we decide of any particular act of almsgiving in our own day that it was wrongly directed merely because it does not conform to some rule we have set for ourselves. Rules are most fallacious things; they will be continually violated — I had almost said they ought to be, because no human being’s condition is exactly like another’s, and it is best that each case be tried on its own merits rather than labelled by some arbitrary classification of ours. What we need is to understand the end we should keep in view. We shall make many mistakes about the means, and learn by failure — but at least we shall know when we have succeeded and when we have failed. We shall have a standard by which to try our own acts, and to see what wrong habits of mind made them defective or harmful. We shall not be absolved from the duty of helping our fellow-men, whatever their errors or ours, their reluctance to be helped or our clumsiness in helping them. We shall know that we are only God’s almoners, and that he has found more ingratitude and more misunderstanding of his purposes in us than we shall ever find in those we are quickest to complain of. And we shall be sure that the Spirit of him who gave his Son to take our nature will grant us greater wisdom in giving, more sympathy and faithfulness, the more we distrust our own discernment and cast ourselves upon his guidance.

We need not, then, treat St. John’s Day as a day for forgetting his precept, that we cannot love God whom we have not seen unless we love the brother whom we have seen. We need not make Christmas any less a season for opening our hearts to the needy than we have made it hitherto. We may turn any day into a St. John’s Day by taking his maxim as the rule of our lives. We may carry Christmas through every season of the year by remembering what it tells us of our divine birth and our relation to every member of Christ’s family.

So that this lesson may not be dead for you, let me tell you why I think District Relief and Provident Societies like yours fulfil all the conditions of true Christmas Charity. When you relieve as private individuals, you can do a good no formal, legal distribution of alms can do, because you meet human beings face to face — but then you are felt to be the benefactor, and any gratitude fixes on you alone. When you go forth as members of a district, you have the same chance for personal kindness and vigilance, with greater assurance that those you visit truly need help — but you can also remind them, without preaching, by the very name you bear, that you and they belong to one body, that there is a Christian fellowship binding you both, that Christian prayers and sacraments join you to your neighbour and brother.

This is one great thing. I rejoice, too, that you join the words “Relief” and “Provident” together in your purpose. I do not mean they can always be joined in practice — you must relieve many who are not provident and whom you cannot make so. In doing this you bear witness to God’s love for his creatures, witness that Christ, who was rich, became poor for their sakes, and that witness is not wasted even toward the highest ends. But if you can convince your poor that the only true relief is the kind that awakens them to exertion, hope, and foresight, you fulfil your duty to your fellow-men in a far more satisfying, more evangelical way.

I use this last expression deliberately, for I fear many of us suppose foresight to be a secular rather than a Christian virtue. It may become secular: men acquire large fortunes by a foresight that is merely selfish, and their own wild speculation, or a prodigal heir, commonly scatters in a short time what took long to gather. But I am convinced that if providence is ever to become a mark of the poor — who have so many motives to squander their little earnings, and to whom it is not honest to hold out the chance of winning the world’s lottery — it must have a deeper root than this. They must learn that the word’s two meanings are not as distant as we have made them: that we are to be provident for our children because God is provident for his; that it is man’s glorious mark to look before and after, because he is made in the image of God who is, and was, and is to come. Christ took our nature and was born of the Virgin so that he might bestow divine attributes on men. He called forth foresight in them by calling forth faith in them. He taught them to trust a Father, to work cheerfully and hopefully, unanxious about tomorrow, certain they could commit themselves to him who had appointed their work and would give them strength to do it. He taught those who trusted him that they were not confined to the instant they stood on, because they shared his life and immortality.

Our poor people will not learn providence by copying the practice of the higher or moneyed classes — those classes may rather need to be reformed by them. England may become again a thrifty, provident nation, saved from sinking into a nation of gamblers, through her labourers. But if we are to gain that benefit, we must ground their providence in the Gospel that Christ, by his nativity, has claimed for them a second birth. As they receive this Gospel, they will not wait on accident like savages, or wish to live on fruits that grow of themselves; they will sow and plough in hope, waiting for the common harvest, because they refer it to the same God who will fulfil all his promises, who will show that all our kindness has its ground and completion in his love, all our knowledge in his wisdom — who will perfect every Christmas blessing when his Son appears without sin unto salvation.