You cannot serve both God and money

We who hear these readings today, might find ourselves in different places. Some of us may be relatively poor and others, relatively rich. Money and worldly possessions are not easy things to talk about. Remember, everyone is always relatively wealthier or poorer than someone else.

Let's be clear that money and material things are not bad in themselves. In fact, it would be impossible to avoid needing money and material things given our physical existence. But the shadow side is that our need for material things can easily get out of hand and dominate, giving rise to anxiety, greed, selfishness, and corruption.

Too easily we can end up putting our trust and security in that which is material. Money can be like a god to us if it ends up being the most important thing in our lives. Money and material things can end up possessing the one who has them, rather than the other way round. We need to stop to think about whether our unconscious relationship to material things is perhaps dominating our thinking and acting.

Money can be like a god

This is the context for the very challenging readings for Mass this Sunday. Jesus addresses the danger of money possessing us and teaches us the right relationship we ought to have to money. The parable in the Gospel today is really strange because at first glance we might get the impression that Jesus is condoning corruption, or at least deviousness, but of course this would be completely against everything we know about him.

In order to understand the parable, we need to know that the role of steward in a large household was one of great responsibility, but also one of wealth and prestige. The job of steward went to the master's most trusted male slave. As a result, enterprising young freemen in the Roman empire sometimes sold themselves as slaves to wealthy men in order to become stewards of their households.

Stewards lived in great physical comfort, so the steward in this parable realizes he is in great trouble when the master wishes to fire him. He knows he is not suited to any other way of making a living, and as a slave, he has no property of his own.

That is how we come to the point where this bad steward, bad in the sense that he has been wasteful with his master's property, uses his master's property to curry favour with debtors who will then be friends with him or receive him with favour when he is no longer employed. And then, as if matters could not get stranger, the master, on finding out what the steward has done, praises him for his shrewdness.

Jesus uses a story about a wasteful dishonest servant

Perhaps the strangest thing is that this story is a parable, and it is used by Jesus to launch his teaching on firstly, using money for good purposes, that is, of not seeing money as an end in itself, and secondly, his teaching on honesty and dishonesty in our own money dealings.

I suppose what is difficult about understanding this Gospel is that Jesus uses a story about a wasteful dishonest servant to teach a spiritual truth. Much ink has been spilt on interpreting this Gospel passage with its strange parable. But all we need is to be clear that by telling this story, Jesus is not advocating dishonesty in dealing with money. He is not the master who praises the servant for his dishonesty or shrewdness. What Jesus is advocating is the use of money for good purposes, for ends which serve our ultimate destiny and nature.

Luke's Gospel is known as the Gospel of the poor because he emphasises Jesus' teaching concerning the poor. For example, in Luke's Gospel, in the Beatitudes, Jesus says, "Blessed are the poor for the kingdom of God is theirs." And in his preaching in Luke's Gospel, Jesus often says things like what he said to the rich young man who asked what he must do to attain eternal life, "Sell your possessions and give the money to the poor."

Jesus also said, "Get yourself purses that do not wear out, treasure that will not fail you in heaven, where no thief can reach it nor moth destroy it." And in the parable of the rich man to whom God said, "This very night demand will be made of your soul, and whose hoard will this be then," Jesus tells us to become rich in the sight of God. Also, in the parable of the poor man Lazarus begging outside the house of the rich man, we are taught the importance of sharing our resources with those in need. And at the end of today's Gospel Jesus says, "You cannot serve both God and money."

Consistent warning about the spiritual danger

Right through the Scriptures there is a consistent warning about the spiritual danger of making wealth and money too much of a thing, and the creeping, insidious effect it has on our hearts.

We see a concrete example of this in today's first reading. The prophet Amos condemns those who are dishonest and who are fixed on pursuing material wealth at the expense of the poor. Amos hears these people plotting to sell wheat by crooking the scales and cheating the poor who have to sell themselves to buy food. The last line is a message of warning from the Lord: "Surely I will never forget any of their deeds."

In today's Gospel, using the story of the dishonest steward, Jesus tells us to use our wealth, our money, for proper, good ends. We store up treasure for ourselves in heaven by sharing our resources with those in need. Where our treasure is there will our hearts be also. If we prize earthly wealth above all things that is where our hearts will be and then there cannot be any place for God in us.

We are merely stewards of all material things

The problem is not in the having of money; the problem is in our relationship to money and how we use it. We are merely stewards of all material things in our possession and we are called to use them for good ends and purposes.

This theme is also found in St Paul's first letter to Timothy in which he talks about the love of money being the root of all evil. Note that it is the love of money that is the root of all evil, not money in itself. Our attitude to money has the ability to enslave us and awaken in us a greed which is terribly destructive and is at war with the spiritual life. Jesus refers to money as being tainted precisely for this reason and calls on us to be good stewards, faithful stewards, trustworthy stewards in using money for the purposes of good. Because money is such an important aspect of our lives, our good use of money and our generosity with money can be a profound way of worshipping God.

Our aim to is live free from money's control of our lives, to not be enslaved my material wealth, and rather to be fully owned by God, and nothing else.