Fr. Richard considers Jesus’ challenging statement that we cannot serve both God and money.
Many of us, myself included, have a confused, guilt-ridden, obsessive attitude about money. There’s hardly anybody who can think in a clear-headed way about it. At the end of Luke’s parable of the so-called dishonest steward, Jesus creates a clear dualism between God and wealth, or what he calls “mammon”: “You cannot serve God and mammon” (Luke 16:13). Mammon was the god of wealth, money, superficiality, and success. Jesus says, in effect, “You’ve finally got to make a choice.” Most of Jesus’ teaching is what I call nondual, but there are a few areas where he’s absolutely dualistic (either-or), and it’s usually anything having to do with power and anything having to do with money.
Jesus is absolute about money and power because he knows what we’re going to do. Most of us will serve this god called mammon. Luke’s Gospel even describes mammon as a type of illness, as Jesuit John Haughey explained: “Mammon is not simply a neutral term in Luke. It is not simply money. It connotes disorder…. Mammon becomes then a source of disorder because people allow it to make a claim on them that only God can make.” [1] “Mammon illness” takes over when we witness all of life through the lens of short-term practical gains. We have to acknowledge that money does have the ability to serve—or solve—many of our short-term problems, but once we begin hoarding it, collecting it, multiplying it, and saving it, we become preoccupied with it. Let’s be honest about that.
In this Gospel, I hear Jesus inviting us to think of a long-term solution. To participate in the reign of God, we have to stop counting. We have to stop weighing, measuring, and deserving in order to let the flow of forgiveness and love flow through us. The love of God can’t be doled out by any process whatsoever. We can’t earn it. We can’t lose it. As long as we stay in this world of earning and losing, we’ll live in perpetual resentment, envy, or climbing.
Religion cannot work from a calculator without losing its very method, mind, foundation, and source. Surely this is what Jesus meant by his statement in Luke’s Gospel. Perhaps if we say it a bit differently, we can all get the point: “You cannot move around inside the world of infinite grace and mercy, and at the same time be counting and measuring with your overly defensive and finite little mind.” It would be like asking an ant to map the galaxies. St. Thérèse of Lisieux put it much more directly to a nun worried about God keeping track of her many failings: “There is a science about which [God] knows nothing—addition!” [2] The reign of God is a worldview of abundance. God lifts us up from a worldview of scarcity to infinity. Remember every part of infinity is still infinite! God’s love is nothing less than infinite.
References:
[1] John C. Haughey, The Holy Use of Money: Personal Finance in Light of Christian Faith (Doubleday and Company, 1986), 11.
[2] Sœur Thérèse of Lisieux: The Little Flower of Jesus, ed. T. N. Taylor (Burns and Oates, Ltd., 1912), 241. This early translation of Thérèse’s autobiography, The Story of a Soul, includes “Counsels and Reminiscences,” a chapter not part of recent editions.
Adapted from Richard Rohr, “Money,” homily, September 22, 2019.
Image credit and inspiration: Aarón Blanco Tejedor, untitled (detail), 2017, photo, Finland, Unsplash. Click here to enlarge image. An open hand offering apples becomes a quiet critique of greed, embodying the wisdom and spirituality of enoughness where abundance is shared, not hoarded.
Story from Our Community:
As an elderly member of my community, I get quite discouraged to notice my younger Sisters spending money on bags of snacks and leaving them unfinished. On volunteering to tidy up what’s been left behind, I found myself resenting them. Fr. Richard’s meditation “Going Somewhere Good” opened up my short-sightedness to the eternal vistas, from “me-narrow-mindedness” to “you-respectable-personality.” I’m grateful to the good Lord who keeps reminding me through the Spirit that “We are thus bookended in a Personal Love—coming from Love and moving toward an ever more inclusive Love.”
—Louisa L.
