The danger of wealth
Luke 16:9-15. November 5, 2022 - Saturday, 31st Week
In 1999 East Timor became the youngest and one of the poorest nations in the world. The whole world came to help the poor. Australia and New Zealand sent their peacekeeping forces. Governments of many rich countries began developmental projects that benefited not only the people of East Timor but also business in those countries. There were many NGOs like WFP, Save the children fund, and Oxfam, to name the most renowned among them. Their staff travelled in the best cars, lived in the air-conditioned rooms, used the latest gadgets and every month received a huge salary. At the same time, the price of local rice was higher than the one imported from abroad and the coffee beans of one of the most famous coffee in the world, Arabica, were rotting on the trees; the price was so low that it was not worth to pick them from the trees.
The word “mammon”, which appears twice in today’s Gospel probably comes from the Aramaic word that means ‘trust’. “In God we trust” is written on the most powerful currency in the world, the American dollar. Do we? ‘Mammon’ gives an impression of security and power; the same illusion comes from having a lot of money. As the Chinese saying goes: if you are rich even the devil will dance for you. But, Jesus warns us against the pursuit of wealth. There is a very disturbing story in the Acts of the Apostles about a couple, Ananias and Sapphira, who hid a portion of their intended donation to the Church to keep it for themselves. Their attempt to serve both God and mammon ended deadly for them.
In the Gospel, the noun wealth is preceded by the adjective dishonest. For Jesus, wealth always evokes negative connotations. It is like that ring from the famous novel “the Lord of the rings” that when it captures our hearts, we become enslaved by it. And so the only solution is to part with it. How? By helping the poor. No matter what the experts from the Wall Street tells us, greed is not good, and the only antidote to greed is generosity. By using dishonest wealth to help the poor, we are helping ourselves. Instead of ending up in a place of suffering, we are welcome into eternal dwellings.
The Pharisees who loved money sneered at Jesus’ teaching. How about us? After two thousand years and countless stories of people whose lives were ruined by dishonest wealth, we still haven’t learned the lesson. We think that we can serve both, God and mammon, and so we end up being enslaved by mammon.