The Problem With Gifts

"Now Jacob loved Joseph more than all his children, because he was the son of his old age. So he made him a coat of many colors. But when his brothers saw that their father loved him more than all his brothers, they hated him."   Genesis 37:3

Jacob meant for this gift to be a token of great love and affection for his son. Instead of causing great joy, the coat brought incredible grief to Joseph and his brothers. The coat and the anger and jealousy that resulted became the story of a family and of a nation. The future of Israel shifted because of that coat.

Paul Tournier, in his The Meaning of Gifts, lines out in great detail the power of a gift for good and for evil. By "evil" I don't mean like an intentional offense, I mean like the laws of unintended consequences that cause pain or discomfort. Evil in the Biblical sense of "missing the mark." One of the main points that Tournier makes in his excellent book is that with any gift, the giver puts the receiver at a disadvantage.  The giver has the power. In many cases, the gift makes the receiver feel ill at ease instead of grateful.

Before I delve a little further into what gifts mean, I want to return to the Bible story.  Any Bible story has meaning on several different levels. Joseph Campbell, the world famous mythologist, suggests that the bedrock truth of a Bible story can change the direction of your life. There's the story itself--the characters, the plot, the setting and the historical context. All of that is important for understanding what the writer had in mind. But a Bible story should go much deeper than that. Any Bible story only means what it means to you.  In the case of Joseph's coat, what has ever been given to you that you treasure above everything else? And isn't it more that this person gave it to you than the gift itself? Also with the story can be the metaphor that we all wear coats of many colors.  We are son, daughter, wife, husband, mother, father, lawn mower, chief cook and bottle washer. We have a title at work, we have a nickname from our childhood, a school friend or the neighborhood children. We volunteer at a hospital. We all wear a lot of different hats and assume a lot of different roles. Which one of them defines us? Which one of them tells the world who we are?  Can we agree that it is the combination of all those roles that define us?   No, I can't even agree with that. Our person, our selves are beyond definition. A two year old child doesn't care that you are a wife, he cares that you play with him. But your husband may only care that you're cooking dinner.   We don't perform these roles in sequence; we perform them simultaneously. Each color of Joseph's coat was brilliant and beautiful. But the story is about "the coat of many colors" and not the writer's favorite color in the coat. The "coat" is one thing.

Giving a gift can be a wonderful thing.  You care about someone and you want to show it in some tangible way. Or it's an occasion that more or less demands a gift and you want to participate.  There are certainly many good things about giving gifts.  I think the thing you need to be most aware of is when you give a gift to someone, especially someone who has no ability to repay you in any way, is that it can backfire. The person may just feel bad about it. Granted, I would think that the beggar on the street is not concerned about this, but many people are. The next time someone gives something to you, notice how you feel. Hadn't you rather be giving something to them? Is it hard to just say, "thank you" ?

One possible level of meaning in any Bible story, according to many, is that it is "literally true." Recent polls indicate that more than half of Americans believe that the stories of the Bible are "literally true". So when John the Baptist was baptizing at the Jordan River and he saw Jesus, he said, "Behold the Lamb of God." Then he baptized Jesus; Jesus left the river and went "bah, bah bah all the way home".