An important thing to note about this is that there's two ways to share a variable like this - you can have each object of the class have its own copy of the variable, or you can have every object of the class share the same one variable. The keyword static lets you do the latter:
class Test {
public String message;
}
class TestStatic {
public static String message;
}
If you have instances of the first class, they behave like each instance has its own message:
Test testA = new Test();
Test testB = new Test();
testA.message = "Hello!";
testB.message = "Greetings!";
System.out.println(testA.message);
System.out.println(testB.message);
But with the second class, what happens is that the class itself has a message and all instances of the class refer to it, so there's only one message that's shared between all of them:
TestStatic testA = new TestStatic();
TestStatic testB = new TestStatic();
TestStatic.message = "Hello!";
System.out.println(testA.message);
System.out.println(testB.message);
Note that we didn't set message using either testA.message or testB.message as above - we set it using the class with TestStatic.message. This is because message doesn't really belong to either testA or testB, it belongs to the class and testA and testB simple have access to their class's members.