JESUS and MONEY

No servant can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other,

or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and money.

Jesus of Nazareth

I'm surprised that none of Jesus' listeners challenged his assumption that people serve money. The first time the statement is recorded is in the Sermon on the Mount; the second was as Jesus confronted the religious establishment, which professed to serve God but who in fact were ‘lovers of money’ (see Matthew 6:19-34 & Luke 16:13-15). He never said anything similar about other vices: he didn’t, for example, say, ‘You cannot serve God and sex’. Nor did he say the more obvious, ‘You cannot serve God and the devil’!

Today, we take it for granted that people serve money. Money is the driving force of modern society and economic theory is a primary means of studying and explaining human life; maximising profit is the goal of modern business and every personal, moral choice has to be financially viable. Money itself is the global status symbol, promising freedom, security, purpose, power, happiness – and even love. Some people make its accumulation their life’s goal; others see it as the path to fulfilment or the things it can buy as defining who they are.

But it hasn’t always been this way and that’s why older translations of Jesus’ statement don’t say ‘money’ but ‘mammon’. The difference is still important. Money is a tool, invented at various times in history in various parts of the world, as if for the first time, to enable people to exchange goods and services easily. That’s why there’s no sin or evil in being rich, although wealth brings with it responsibility and many challenges.

But money evolved and took on a life of its own. It became more than just a tool for living – even an indispensable tool – and acquired the power of ‘the force of an idea whose time had come’. That's why generations of artists have portrayed mammon as a demon. When enough people began to give disproportionate importance to money, entire societies began to revolve around it. Everyone else had little choice but to rely on money too. That is, unless they trusted God sufficiently to underwrite their obedience to living by his criteria.

The Sermon on the Mount describes a lifestyle that puts God and people first: not first ‘by a head’ but way ahead of every other consideration. I’m sure Jesus included his statement about serving God and mammon so his followers would not be deterred from living the way he described by the financial consequences.

Most people today, including most Christians, would say that they do put God and people first, and they would be sincere in saying so, but in my experience financial issues often come such a close second they divert attention and compromise rationale and behaviour. I’ve experience this in my own lifestyle choices and seen it in others. I’ve also seen churches submit what they believe to be God’s will to financial criteria, not quite believing that God will provide the resources for what he calls them to do but waiting for the money to be banked before taking even a first step of faith.

Money is system of trust. This was the case when everyday things like seashells and coloured beads were used as the first money. It remained the case, to some degree at least, even when coins were made of gold and silver but today it’s more true than ever. Almost all money now exists as data in sophisticated banking systems and there is so very much of it that Planet Earth lacks the resources to convert it all into material wealth. Even the 2-3% of money that are coins and banknotes exist in the real world only like a novel, giving expression to an idea but not really real.

This is another reason why we can’t serve both God and money. We can either live in grateful dependence upon God, using money as the tool it was created to be, or we can rely on humankind’s ultimate system of trust, loving and serving the money we think need to live. The Pharisees who listened to Jesus were prime examples of this: they purported to serve God but loved money. Next weekend, I plan to look at why Jesus called their wealth ‘unrighteous’.

© All Souls Clubhouse Community Centre & Church and Philip Evans 2014.

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JESUS on MONEY

Introducing a new series of Reflections that go back to the basics that Jesus of Nazareth taught.

I thought it would be a good idea to do a series of Reflections that go back to basics, back to what Jesus himself taught. Although Jesus of Nazareth is remembered as a popular teacher arrested by the Jewish authorities as a heretic and executed by the Roman occupation as dangerous dissident, few people today examine his teachings. His biographers record that at the time people were ‘astonished’ at what he said because he spoke with authority, unlike their usual teachers. The first officers sent to arrest him returned without him with the excuse, ‘No one ever spoke like this man!’ Jesus said a lot about the power of money and how to control it: in fact, he spoke about this more than almost anything else and it deserves our careful attention.

It is widely thought that the ‘Jesus of faith’ is not the same as the ‘Jesus of history’: that is, the Jesus who people believe in today is not the man who actually walked in Israel 2,000 years ago. While that is often true, it should not be. People today believe some fanciful things about Jesus of Nazareth, some the result of well-meaning exaggeration and some out of a desire to discredit him and his legacy, but the Jesus we should believe in should be the same Jesus who is presented to us in the Gospels, which I think accurately describe the Jesus of history.

John’s Gospel is said to be less historically reliable because it attributes to Jesus more claims of deity than the other three Gospels that were written earlier. This, it is claimed, shows how the Jesus that people believed in had already evolved from the real person. But there is another way of looking at it.

I think John wrote his Gospel not to express something new but to preserve something that was being overlooked and forgotten. The storms of persecution were passing and Christianity was losing some of its stigma. Some of the problems John saw are described in the first part of Revelation, in letters to seven churches where Christian belief and practice were under threat. It seems to me that rather than teach something new, John wrote his Gospel to supplement the existing biographies already in circulation, in order to preserve truth that was at risk of compromise and corruption.

Towards the end of his Gospel, John explains how he selected his material from everything known about Jesus. His rationale was 'that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name'. This is the same reason I have for doing these Reflections. To believe that 'Jesus is the Christ' - or to use the Hebrew word, 'Messiah' - is to see him as the great redeemer of humankind; to believe that he is 'the Son of God' is to hear him speak with ultimate wisdom. And in the light of the fact that he said we cannot serve both God and money without despising one of them, it follows that freedom in Jesus involves liberation from a dependency on money. This is the subject of next weekend's Reflection.

The Reflections will not cover the technical skills necessary to handle money successfully (you can read about these in the free downloads on the Money-Ed page of the All Souls Clubhouse website) but consider issues that help us to develop a healthy relationship with money, to act more consistently with our own best interests and to relate with wisdom and deeper effectiveness to the people around us. And to be better disciples of Jesus.

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Revised 9 May 2014.
© Copyright All Souls Clubhouse Community Centre & Church and Philip Evans 2014.

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