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.
Luke 6:13
We pick up the thought we began yesterday.
The word for money that Jesus used appears as ‘mammon’ in older translations of the Bible. The word really means money personified, money with influence.
This might sound as if money is a personality with a will of its own but it is an impersonal force, like the force of an idea whose time has come. The ways that people relate to money, bestowing it with a disproportionate importance in their lives, gives it power over them; when enough people behave that way, the whole of society begins to revolve around money.
When Jesus referred to mammon, he was using a concept from ancient Babylon. Historians used to look back to the Romans or Greeks for the seeds of modern civilisation but increasingly they now look further back, to Babylon.
Although history remembers Babylon as a place of splendour, commerce and culture, the Bible tells of its avarice (love of money), pride, vanity, greed and oppression of the poor. There were no idols called mammon in Babylon, and no temples dedicated to it, but life there revolved around money as if it were the State religion.
Babylon is revered by many as the original capitalist society: although that may not be historically accurate, it is the mythology. One of the first modern self-help books on how to get rich is called, The Richest Man in Babylon, by George S Clason. It is a collection of parables about life in ancient Babylon that began as a series of leaflets published from 1926. Clason writes,
Babylon became the wealthiest city of the ancient world because its citizens were the richest people of their time. They appreciated the value of money. They practiced sound financial principles in acquiring money, keeping money and making their money earn more money. They provided for themselves what we all desire…incomes for the future.
To what extent does money influence our decisions? Was salary the primary reason we applied for a job? Do we knowingly buy from unscrupulous people just to save money? Would we have bought a particular objet d'art or bottle of wine if it had not been so expensive and we wanted to impress someone?
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Scripture quotations are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version® (ESV®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
These Advent Reflections do not teach personal finance skills and where these skills are mentioned the issues have been simplified. Handling money and dealing with money problems and debt can be complicated and neither the author nor anyone else involved in the production of these Reflections is responsible for any action you take, or fail to take, based on what is written here.
You are invited to put a link on your website to these Advent Reflections. You are welcome to copy these Reflections for personal study or for circulation to family and friends on a non-profit basis. For any other purpose, however, whether or not for profit, you will require written permission in advance from the author before copying, reproducing or transmitting extracts in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or using any information storage and retrieval system.
