Issue 134
Christmas is an economic festival. Before you cry heresy, you may like to reflect on how much you will spend over the Christmas period and how many businesses depend on our collective spending to employ their employees for the rest of the year.
Even if your business is not seasonal in this way, you share the need for wealth generation and the investment, distribution and management of finance with your seasonal friends.
Like it or not, money is the driver for many things in the world. Manufacturing or creation of products or services, followed by their sales or delivery, forms the foundations of our ability to live. Money in short supply can be life-threatening, and in adequate or excessive amounts life enhancing and prolonging.
Christmas is also an economic revolution. The style and format of the revolution will unfold in a million dramas as the power and message is applied, but that it is revolutionary is clear.
Some biblical statements are so large that they challenge each one of us to do the work of understanding and figuring out what they mean in our own world. Mary’s Christmas economic revolution is described in two ways: it has to do with filling the hungry and sending the rich away. The whole point of Christmas was that God entered into our world so it is not surprising that the unseen Saviour now becomes invisible in the world of finance. The Christian faith was never so spiritual as to be disconnected. The spiritual shows itself in all our tangible worlds.
So what does it mean? Clearly, wealth distribution means that some end up hungry and some become rich. The Christmas Saviour has come to fill the hungry with good things and send the rich away empty. It seems to form a major part of his economic policy. This is the same Saviour who clearly enjoyed a party, drank wine and celebrated living. He was no ascetic kill-joy but he was a revolutionary and this song was his overture.
So the challenge to all our personal and professional economic policies this Christmas, is to ask to what extent they fill the hungry with good things (not scraps). How much does your personal and professional lifestyle create justice and prosperity for those who need it? The risk is the converse: do your policies send the hungry away and fill the rich with good things? The more influence you have over the finances in your organisation, the more responsibility you have to work for economic justice. Sending rich shareholders away full and employees away hungry may increase the competitive edge of a company but this is not the spirit of Christmas. It was only 30 years later that this Child of Bethlehem overturned the tables in the Temple. The spirit of Christmas is a challenge to economic revolution.
Luke 1: 46-55
Mary’s Song
46And Mary said:
“My soul glorifies the Lord
47and my spirit rejoices in God my Saviour,
48for he has been mindful
of the humble state of his servant.
From now on all generations will call me blessed,
49for the Mighty One has done great things for me–
holy is his name.
50His mercy extends to those who fear him,
from generation to generation.
51He has performed mighty deeds with his arm;
he has scattered those who are proud in their inmost thoughts.
52He has brought down rulers from their thrones
but has lifted up the humble.
53He has filled the hungry with good things
but has sent the rich away empty.
54He has helped his servant Israel,
remembering to be merciful
55to Abraham and his descendants forever,
even as he said to our fathers.
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Geoff Shattock
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