(Illa/Me)" 23

Mammon and Thanksgiving

No one can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the
one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and
despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth.
(Matthew 6:24)

You cannot both serve God and serve money, says Jesus. Well
first an elementary logical point: it does follow from this that if
you are serving God, you cannot be serving money. Nor does it
follow from this that if you are not serving God, you must be
serving money. You may be doing neither. We all know people
whose lives are spent in the service of scholarship, or who are
dedicated to political liberation, or who are simply head-over-
heels in love, who are not serving either God or money. The
fact that they are not out for personal profit does not, I’m
afraid, mean that they are, in some hidden way, unbeknownst
to themselves, serving God. They may be admirable people in
various respects, but they are not necessarily serving God. But,
of course, they may be. What Jesus is saying is that if you are
serving money (unlike scholarship, or the revolution, or your
girlfriend), if you are serving money, then you cannot be serving
God. Whatever we mean by God and the service of God, it is
something incompatible with serving money, though it is not
incompatible with serving other things (at least. Jesus doesn‘t
say it is).
SO, perhaps if we look into what serving money means we

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may 101116 to understand something about what serving God

means. 131151` let us be clear that lor \i'latthew, and forljesus,
the wortl we translate as ‘wealth‘ or ‘money’ (таттоп) didn’t
mean what it means for us. Because of this passage in
\ilatthew, and the similar one in Luke (Luke 16:13), we have
come to use the word to mean a kind of false god of money,
standing for greed and rapacity. But for the writers of the
gospels it simply meant money not something that obviously
bad.
So what is Jesus saying here? Some people say that Jesus is
making a contrast between being concerned with material
things (money) and being concerned with non-material things
…: spiritual things). But this isn’t what he says.
He doesn’t contrast material and spiritual things. The
contrast he goes on to make is between two material things: the
body and its clothing: ‘Is not . . . the body more than clothing?’
(Μακεδών 6:25) And, in any case, being concerned about
spiritual things (scholarship let’s say) is not at all the same as
being concerned about God.
In this part of Matthew’s gospel Jesus doesn’t talk about
spiritual things at all * unless you reckon money itself as a
spiritual thing. And, ifyou think about it, money is a good deal
more spiritual than bread or beer or your body. Money isn’t,
in any important way, a thing at all. It is a power over things,
and a power over people. After the experience ofinflation it is
easy to see that what matters about money is not how much
there is of it but how much power it has (the same is true of
beer, but that’s in a different sense).
So Jesus isn’t contrasting having to do with material things
and having to do with something else. He 15 contrasting two
ways of having to do with things (whether they are material or
not): the way represented by serving money, and the way
represented by serving God. The way of power, and the way of
thanksgiving. The way of acquisition, and the way of the
eucharist.
‘Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing?”

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Χ…1.'1111161111.'2'…1'΄τ 1116 contrast llt'l‘t‘ is. not 1)1‘1\\`1‘1'1|\.|)111111&|1 and

material. Neither is it between sonu'thiug important and
sonlt‘tltiltg‘ trivial. It is a contrast between what you are and
what you then have. You are a body: you haw a hat. ()lit'ourse
1165110111ο1"1181'1'11…σ' a body too. but obviously you don‘t have a
body the way you have a hat. You don‘t wear your body on
.mything; it is what you wear things on.
So there is a difference between the material thing that you
are. your living body, and the material things you have, like
hats and sandwiches and houses. And the second ones are
important only because of the first.
Jesus is saying: ‘Look, you didn’t get the first important
thing, the thing that makes everything else important, by
worrying about and striving for it: Your bodily existence is free
gift from your heavenly Father. If he provides that as free gift
to you, do you not think that he provides all the rest as well?’
Of course, to take that question on board depends on
remembering that what and who you are is gift from your
heavenly Father. If we forget that we are gift from God, if we
forget, so to say, what comes before us, what is presupposed to
us being here at all, if we simply take our lives, ourselves, as
our base-line, so to speak, as where we start from, then life. is
about what we have and what we can get.
Of course, we need food and clothes. And of course we have
to get them to live. But Jesus is asking us to remember the
much more fundamental sense in which we have to have God
[о live. But for the first gift of God, our lives and bodies, we
should not even need food. It is not just the gift of God that we
have food; it is even the gift of God that we are hungry v that
we are there at all to stand in need of anything.
Jesus is not recommending that we just sit around waiting
for God to put food in our mouths instead of getting it
ourselves. Certainly the birds of the air don’t do that tcf.‘
Matthew 6:26). And I don’t think the lilies of the field do
either (cf. Matthew 6:28). Jesus is reminding us that our very
selves, including our work and our struggles, are God‘s gift.

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111 one sense we depend on loud and (‘l(.)[l](,‘S. And the proper
response to this is to acquire some. In another, and deeper,
sense we depend on God. And the proper response to this is to
thank him. And this is to serve him. Serving God isn’t doing
.mything for him, as though he needed our help. It is
recognizing his gift to us, recognizing ourselves as his gift,
thanking him.
When, forgetting this, we see our lives simply as what we
have done. what we have acquired and achieved (or failed to
acquire and achieve), how we have, or have not, power over
things and people, then we are giving to money (the power
over things) the service of thanksgiving that is due to God.
The attitude that goes with giving to God the service of
thanksgiving that belongs to him is joy and peace. We can
thank God for our food when we have it. But we can even
thank him when we haven’t it. We can thank him for being
alive enough to be hungry. But if we give this service to money,
our attitude oscillates between self-congratulation when we
have succeeded and anxious worry that we should fail. For to
fail would now be to lose the meaning of our lives; for now life’s
meaning would lie in what power we can exercise.
If we serve God, we are recognizing that what matters first is
what we receive and not what we do or make. What matters
first is that we are loved. And this we have before anything we
deserve or achieve. To understand this is to understand that it
is not only our deeds and our works that matter, but that we
matter ourselves. We matter, not first because of what we have
made of ourselves, but because of what God has made of us.
And that includes what we make of ourselves. To serve God is
to stop congratulating ourselves and to begin to love ourselves:
to love ourselves as God loves us: not for being rich or clever or
powerful, but just for being ourselves. And when we know
God’s love for us, and when we can love ourselves, then we can
share in God’s love for others. Unless we serve God, unless we
thank him for our being, unless we love ourselves, whatever we
do for others will not be love. It may be admirable enough in

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…… own way. It may simply be a delight in doing what we. are

good at. Or it may be a more sinister delight in the exercise of
power over others. But, whether it is good, or whether it is
sinister, it will not he love: not that love which is a sharing in
God‘s love for us.
Serving God does not mean that we do not try to succeed, to
exercise power, to achieve what is good and necessary. It
means that, whether we succeed or fail, we search into our life
to detect in it the love from God which is sustaining us both in
success and failure. Sometimes this task is clear and easy, and
sometimes it is obscure and dark. Sometimes we can see
nothing of the love of God; sometimes even life itself does not
look like God’s gift. And then we simply know it is so, even
though we do not see even a glimpse of it. We know this
because the eternally beloved Son of God himself was poor and
a failure; because he emptied himself, was a slave, and died the
death ofa slave. And it was just in the darkness of this failure
that the Father’s love for him appeared to us and is shared
with us.

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