Last updated December 23, 2010 9:28 p.m. PT
He's sat through lots of social gospel sermons up at St. Mark's Cathedral, so our Congressman-for-Life Jim McDermott was ready recently to apply the season's message to work of the 111th Congress.
"This is Christmas time," McDermott said on a cable TV program. "We talk about Good Samaritans, the poor, the little baby Jesus in the cradle and all this stuff. And then we say to the unemployed we won't give you a check to feed your family. That's simply wrong."
The remark aroused Fox News pundit Bill O'Reilly, who rails about the "War on Christmas" while evincing limited understanding for the Feast of the Nativity, its symbolism or teachings of the baby in the manger when grown.
"Every fair-minded person should support government safety nets for people who need assistance through no fault of their own: But guys like McDermott and his allies don't make such distinctions," Bill O' wrote in a column, "Christmas a Platform for Liberal Agenda."
"For them, the baby Jesus wants us to provide, no matter what the circumstance. But, being a Christian, I know that while Jesus promoted charity at the highest level, he was not self destructive. The Lord helps those who help themselves."
The last sentence can be found nowhere in the Good Book, but instead comes from Benjamin Franklin, as Stephen Colbert noted in a subsequent commentary on O'Reilly.
Of late, the political right has been revising lots of national symbols. Glenn Beck trashed Theodore Roosevelt at the Conservative Political Action Conference. Thomas Jefferson's writings on the Enlightenment have been banished from Texas schoolbooks. The White Citizens Council was a force to keep the peace in 1960s Mississippi.
It would seem, however, that Bill O'Reilly is going up against the Gospel of St. Matthew.
How does O'Reilly know what "the baby Jesus wants us to provide"? Has the answer come to him in a vision? Prelates of his own Catholic Church argue that we should provide for all of God's children, particularly all babies? Some extremists would have us turn away "illegal" babies. But isn't a baby a baby? Then too, Bill, how can babies "help themselves"?
I went to the Gospel According to St. Matthew in a King James Bible -- its language so beautiful, in contrast to clunky contemporary translations -- and pulled out some passages apt for O'Reilly revision.
As he faced a great crowd at Galilee, at least as St. Matthew relates, Jesus did not say the hungry people should have brought their own food. Instead, in His words, "I have compassion on the multitude, because they continue with me now for three days, and have noting to eat: And I will not send them away fasting, lest they faint on the way."
Hence, breaking and distributing seven loaves and "a few little fishes," he fed the multitude, with seven baskets left over.
"Judge not that ye shall not be judged," are the famous words at the beginning of Matthew 7.
Hmmm! An awful lot of judging takes place nightly on "The O'Reilly Factor." The host says that liberals have "appropriated Jesus." Ann Coulter, responding to McDermott's remarks, declared: "Liberals think sending a check to the IRS constitutes charity."
A bit further in chapter 7, we hear from Jesus: "If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much more shall your Father, which is in heaven give good things to them that ask him?
"Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them: for this is the law and the prophets."
It sure doesn't govern the ratings on cable TV or talk radio. Of course, there are the most famous words of the St. Matthew Gospel: "Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy. Blessed are the pure of heart: for they shall see God. Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God."
Clearly, a new Fox Gospel is needed to emphasize Glenn Beck's celebrations of wealth, and O'Reilly teachings of "self-responsibility" and his sweeping statement that "there are millions of Americans who are not responsible" and that "the rest of us cannot support them."
The darker side of the American dream is on display at Christmas, even among its self-proclaimed defenders.
We are reminded, those who try to live by teachings of St. Matthew, that following after Christmas by a day is the feast of St. Stephen, Christianity's first martyr.
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