The Two Masters
Matthew 6:24
24. “No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other; or else he will be devoted to one and despise the other. You can’t serve both God and Mammon.
Jesus says we cannot serve God and Mammon. Mammon is wealth-as-security, wealth-as-savior. Mammon is the material wealth that a person relies on in the place of God. In our day and age, Mammon is the heart of our economy and the lie that without it, we cannot be successful, happy, or secure in our lives.
If God is the One Life that we all share and participate in, then to transfer our belief, practice, and the focus of our lives from the relationships, communities, and society that should sustain us to this illusion of wealth robs us of both.
In service of Mammon, we have rejected the essentials of life, alienating ourselves from any meaning or purpose we could find in it just so we can grow the wealth of others in the false belief we are creating wealth for ourselves.
If we spend our time, energy, and effort striving to produce benefits for an illusion, we cannot be surprised that we are losing connections with each other and with the simple joys of life. We need to turn our attention back to life, or stop being surprised that we feel our lives slipping even more through our fingers.
No One Can Serve Two Masters
That opening phrase really matters. “No one can serve two masters” means we cannot have more than one Lord. We cannot dedicate our lives to or be owned by two authorities. The word master is kyrios, and while I try not to delve explicitly into Greek too much, that word makes Jesus’ meaning clear.
A slave is owned by a kyrios. Caesar is a kyrios. The Tetragrammaton, the unspeakable name of God, is translated into Greek as kyrios. Paul would go on to say that believers declare that Jesus Christ is kyrios. We cannot serve more than one master, one Lord. It is either the God in whom we live, move, and have our being, or it is wealth, the state, or something else.
Too often, Christians say that no one is really an atheist. That is not true. People can easily believe there is no god, but everyone has a kyrios, a master, whether they know it or not. It could be a guiding principle, a set of beliefs, or a system that runs our lives, but everyone has one.
Mammon comes from the Aramaic word which is the wealth that someone has trust in to secure their future. Mammon, when treated as a master, invites us to turn our backs on life. Mammon encourages us to turn our backs on others to hoard wealth for ourselves.
When we focus on wealth instead of life, it changes how we see the world, it corrupts our desires, and turns us away from our relationships toward whatever will make us more wealth.
The World Jesus Was Naming
Jesus was talking to those who gathered to hear his Sermon on the Mount. Anyone was welcome, and anyone could come. He draws this distinction between the two masters after warning them not to let the light of their eyes become darkness and before he taught them to have anxiety for nothing.
It is important to understand that his words are very direct. He is talking about slavery and devotion to either God or Mammon. He makes it clear that we cannot serve both God and wealth. In other words, we cannot rely on or give our energy to both because they are at odds with each other and cannot work together.
Service to God requires a devotion to life and the living. Service to wealth requires hoarding and extraction.
At the time these words were written, those dangers were quite literal and easy to see. One only created wealth through overt oppression of others and the hoarding of that wealth to oneself. Those dangers have not gone away, but they have been obfuscated and become harder to see today.
The Cost of Divided Loyalty
Jesus warns us that if we try to devote ourselves to these two masters, we will reject or disown one and choose and value the other. He also says that we might cling to one and hold the other as insignificant. It isn’t hard to see this work out in our lives.
When we try to serve both God and Mammon, our decisions will reject one and value the other. Since God’s Law of Liberation requires us to love God, love our neighbor, and love each other, those values must be central to all our actions. They are antithetical to serving wealth.
Wealth requires us to hoard, extract, and use others for our benefit without care or concern for the needs of others. We cannot do both. So we justify our actions by saying that one idea is more significant and the other is not.
Wealth requires winners and losers, exploiters and exploited. God requires us to leave no one behind. Seeking or serving wealth requires us to break fidelity with our neighbors and to isolate ourselves from the consequences of our actions. We have to create a bubble around ourselves so we don’t see the harm we are doing.
God calls us to see the crushed and oppressed and to liberate them. We are called to bring equity to the world. That is how we bring healing to ourselves and to the world.
Greed as Personal and Collective Failure
Greed begins as a personal moral failure. Sometimes it is learned; other times it is born from fear or loss. It is a systemic failure that anyone can be consumed by.
We have left people behind and allowed them to feel ostracized from the community, leaving them only with the belief that they have to rely on their will and greed to survive.
Our communities and governments have never been arrayed against the rise of this kind of greed. Unfortunately, most societies have institutionalized it into how they work. The success of Mammon is a collective problem that we cannot fix on a personal level.
If we are going to cure its poison, we have to watch out and be careful not to leave anyone behind. We are also going to have to reform our societies, cultures, and governments to prevent such systems from taking hold.
Greed is the only sin that is simultaneously a personal failing and a collective one. It can only be repaired if we work on both fronts.
The Invitation Back to Life
Our loyalty has to be to life. When we hoard wealth, we isolate ourselves from others. We separate what we have from the flow nature requires for any system to be healthy. This isolation leads to a stagnation of our emotional and communal health.
If we are going to live the gospel, or at the very least build a better world, we have to think about the needs of everyone and not just ourselves.
The real tension Jesus reveals is that we are only lying to ourselves and others when we say we can support systems opposed to the ways of nature. Nature requires systems to flow, grow, die, and replenish themselves.
When we remove anything from the flow, we are starving the whole system of the benefits that could and should be flowing through it. Pooling wealth out of the system, even if that wealth is contained in illusory markets, extracts that wealth from those who created it and keeps it from maintaining and sustaining the world it was extracted from.
We have to drain those fetid pools and stop playing games with the lives of people and restore our economies to work in service of the lives of the people who live within them.
When the Blood Cries Out
James 5:1-6
1. Come now, you rich, weep and howl for your miseries that are coming on you.
2. Your riches are corrupted and your garments are moth-eaten.
3. Your gold and your silver are corroded, and their corrosion will be for a testimony against you, and will eat your flesh like fire. You have laid up your treasure in the last days.
4. Behold, the wages of the laborers who mowed your fields, which you have kept back by fraud, cry out, and the cries of those who reaped have entered into the ears of the Lord of Armies.
5. You have lived in luxury on the earth, and taken your pleasure. You have nourished your hearts as in a day of slaughter.
6. You have condemned, you have murdered the righteous one. He doesn’t resist you.
James 5:1–6 invokes language reminiscent of the murder of Abel. The wealth they have stolen from their workers calls out like the blood of Abel and testifies against them.
I don’t want to look at this from the apocalyptic perspective that James does, because like Jesus, I believe our focus needs to be on the here and now.
From that point of view, like James, we need to see wealth in and of itself as a sign of immorality, especially the concentrated wealth we see in the world today. This wealth is not related to the work these people have done, but the work that others have done for them. They stole enough of the wages of their employees to make themselves wealthy.
If they paid an equitable wage to their employees, they could not have concentrated so much wealth in their own hands.
When we start talking about billionaires, for every billion dollars they have amassed, they could support 500 to 1,000 people for 30 years ($30,000 - $60,000 per year). Just the top ten wealthiest people could sustain 1.44 million to 2.88 million people for 30 years just off their accumulated wealth.
To put that into perspective, there are 35.9 million people in the United States living under the poverty line. Just ten people could lift 4.01% to 8.02% of people out of poverty. That is a moral stain that needs to be cleansed.
The Blindness Mammon Creates
Luke 12:15
15. He said to them, “Beware! Keep yourselves from covetousness, for a man’s life doesn’t consist of the abundance of the things which he possesses.”
Jesus says it plainly. We are to guard ourselves against every form of greed. A clearer way of saying that is, “Be alert to the hunger that never says enough.”
This greed is a hunger misunderstood as trust. It makes people believe that possessions and hoarded wealth are a way to fill the void we feel from a lack of meaningful relationships.
Luke 16:19-31
19. “Now there was a certain rich man, and he was clothed in purple and fine linen, living in luxury every day.
20. A certain beggar, named Lazarus, was taken to his gate, full of sores,
21. and desiring to be fed with the crumbs that fell from the rich man’s table. Yes, even the dogs came and licked his sores.
22. The beggar died, and he was carried away by the angels to Abraham’s bosom. The rich man also died, and was buried.
23. In Hades, he lifted up his eyes, being in torment, and saw Abraham far off, and Lazarus at his bosom.
24. He cried and said, ‘Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus, that he may dip the tip of his finger in water, and cool my tongue! For I am in anguish in this flame.’
25. “But Abraham said, ‘Son, remember that you, in your lifetime, received your good things, and Lazarus, in the same way, bad things. But here he is now comforted, and you are in anguish.
26. Besides all this, between us and you there is a great gulf fixed, that those who want to pass from here to you are not able, and that no one may cross over from there to us.’
27. “He said, ‘I ask you therefore, father, that you would send him to my father’s house;
28. for I have five brothers, that he may testify to them, so they won’t also come into this place of torment.’
29. “But Abraham said to him, ‘They have Moses and the prophets. Let them listen to them.’
30. “He said, ‘No, father Abraham, but if one goes to them from the dead, they will repent.’
31. “He said to him, ‘If they don’t listen to Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded if one rises from the dead.’”
Jesus warns us how blinding this greed can be. If someone will not listen to wise counsel, they wouldn’t even listen to one returned from the dead to warn them.
This story always makes me think about A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens. Scrooge also refused the wise counsel of someone returned from the dead to warn him about his greed. What finally changed his mind and heart was realizing all of the relationships and people he sacrificed in the name of amassing his fortune.
This story reveals a great truth. It is hard, practically impossible, to get someone to see the harm a life in service of Mammon has caused without getting them to see the damage they have caused to others and themselves. Even then, there is no guarantee they will see the error of their ways.
Greed is one of the most blinding experiences a person can have. It ties itself into our fears and ego. It controls us as much as any other hunger. It forges a craving like people have for food, water, and even air that convinces people they cannot survive if it is not fed. It is all an illusion.
When Mammon Whispers to the Poor
Mammon whispers in the ears of the poor and the unfortunate, anyone society has failed. It isn’t hard to understand how someone who feels abandoned, with their backs against the wall, can hear its promises and give in.
It always starts small, a little infraction that opens the door for it to enter.
I know this kind of desperation, and I wasn’t always good at listening to my better angels. It can feel like the only way to save our lives or those who depend on us is to sell our soul to Mammon. That is trading one raw deal for another.
If I hadn’t encountered a supportive community that offered me a different way at just the right time, who knows how my life would have turned out. I was lucky. So many others are not.
We have to provide a path out of struggle that preserves the dignity of those who need a way out. Charity doesn’t and cannot do this. Community can. That is how we can turn this all around.
Choosing Life Together
It is hard not to pity those who have succumbed to greed, but pity gets us nowhere. In many ways, they are like victims of any addiction. While it is important to remember that they are blinded to the real world by the delusions of wealth, they are still responsible for their actions.
They need to learn to see through their blindness, but until that day comes, we need to mitigate the harm they are doing to society. Mutual aid, care, and support are a good start, but there is much that has to change to prevent them from causing more harm.
We cannot wait for them to see again. We have to help one another to build a better world for all of us.
If I have learned anything in this life, it is much easier to ignore the outstretched hands of a supportive community than it is to see them. Our goal has to be not just to reach out, but to provide a dignified path out.
It isn’t enough to give people food, housing, and medicine, though we need to do all those things. We have to offer them a life they can live.
The trick is learning to listen to the needs of the people and the culture they are in, and not to pretend that our simple benevolent will is enough. This is a project of deep listening and learning for people on both sides.
In service of the One Life, we have all that we need to do the work. We only need the courage, faith, and will to do the work.
Watch the discussion here:
Another amazing blog on the day before Lent.
Be blessed.