If you want a good deed to really count, it has to be done with no thought of receiving something back in return. In technical terms, it's "disinterested benevolence." We have the ancient Stoics and the Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant to thank for the "stiff-upper-lip" approach to life. It has its pluses’there is a sense of duty that overrides one's own happiness and even concern for one's own life. In an era of socially encouraged narcissism, Stoicism doesn't look that bad at first. In recent times, Jacques Derrida argued that a pure gift cannot be given, since every act is tainted by self-interest.
Some Christians were raised with an ethic that somehow confused Stoic-Kantian resolve with godliness. Only disinterested duty’to God and neighbor’constitutes a pure act. The problem with this is that God is a triune being, not a Stoic sage in Buddha-like contemplation of himself. The Father, the Son, and the Spirit created a world they didn't need but desired. "Selfish motives" may often turn out to be a simple expression of a natural interdependence that is itself good. "I took my wife to dinner, but it was also for me: I wanted to get some time alone with her away from the kids." That's not sinful; it affirms that your wife is not simply a passive beneficiary of your pure gifts, but rather another human being who has worth in herself, as well as something you need.
This goodness of mutual need and desire gets warped by sin, of course’like when you treat dinner out as a staging area for the fireworks later. But she is just as "used" when you presume from on high to bestow dutiful gifts purged of self-interest. It's selfish to treat relationships as an opportunity to authenticate your credibility as a gift-giver and to treat others merely as opportunities for your disinterested benevolence.
Now here's a shocker: Even God doesn't give with-out regard to his own pleasure. He created the world purely out of his good pleasure, not because he needs anything from us. He is the giver of all good gifts, and yet freely wills to receive glory and pleasure from creating a world of dazzling variety, with creatures made in his own image as his chief delight.
Even more than in creation does God delight in our redemption. "God so loved the world that he gave his only-begotten Son" (John 3:16), even "while we were still sinners" (Rom. 5:8). He "predestined us for adoption as sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will to the praise of his glorious grace, with which he has blessed us in the Beloved" (Eph. 1:5-6).
There is a purpose in God's decrees’his own pleasure and glory. It wasn't out of dispassionate love of duty that Jesus paid for our sins, but "for the joy that was set before him [he] endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God" (Heb. 12:2). We see it in that great prophecy of his crucifixion: "Out of the anguish of his soul he shall see and be satisfied" (Isa. 53:11). There was an end in view that benefited him as well as us.
Of course, Derrida is correct: On the basis of a pure law of duty, no gift can be purely given. But what God has actually done for us in Christ proves the Stoics and Kant wrong in the first place. The purity of a gift is not measured by your getting nothing out of it.
So what does this mean for us? If the Triune God can choose to receive glory, pleasure, and the return of love from creatures he doesn't need, then surely we are designed to step into a cycle of gift-exchange. So go ahead and enjoy other people as gifts, and not just as objects of your duty and disinterested benevolence. Go ahead and savor the satisfaction you receive from being part of that living cycle of giving and receiving, where the Father's generous hospitality never leaves anyone sitting in the corner.
