“Do not serve mammon” equals “live an economy of happiness”

“You cannot serve God and mammon.” This is the word addressed to us today by the Sunday liturgy.

The Gospel according to Matthew and, in particular, the Sermon on the Mount

Today we read from chapter 6 of the Gospel according to Matthew. Each year, over a three-year cycle, one Evangelist is chosen in a particular way, from whom we draw the Liturgy of the Word every Sunday, at least in “Ordinary Time.” For several weeks now we have been listening to various teachings of Jesus in that collection which the Evangelist Matthew placed in the so-called “Sermon on the Mount.” It is a beautiful collection of teachings that help us understand what it actually means to live as Christians. And since Matthew comes from Jewish culture (he was a Jew, although considered a traitor by his fellow townspeople because he collected taxes for the Romans not far from Jesus’ village, Capernaum, which is located on the shore of the Lake of Galilee and near the ancient Via Maris, the trade route that connected distant Babylon to the northeast with Egypt to the southwest); since Matthew came from Jewish culture, he knew Jewish customs and Scriptures well. Therefore in his Gospel we find continual references to and comparisons with the Old Testament. In the Sermon on the Mount too, we hear Jesus proclaim: “Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets. I have come not to abolish but to fulfill.” By Law is meant the Torah, that is, the first five books of the Old Testament, the most important and significant part of the Jewish Scriptures; the Prophets are the other significant section of the Jewish Scriptures. If we today, as Christians, have in our Bible the Old Testament as well, with the Law and the Prophets, and not only the New Testament, it is precisely because Jesus “did not come to abolish the Law or the Prophets.”

God, provident master

After giving various teachings on prayer and almsgiving, and on Christian forgiveness, today Jesus reminds us that it is fitting to choose God as our master, because he is a God who is concerned for us, a provident God. He contrasts God with another master, “mammon.” Mammon is not money as such; it is rather that disposition of the heart called greed, which closes our heart toward God and toward our neighbor (whom we as Christians also call brother). Jesus does not condemn the economy as a system, which is also necessary for life in society; the economy involves a circulation of money in the effort to improve everyone’s life, in the effort to offer useful services to one another. Jesus helps us understand that God does not have a closed heart toward us, but is a provident God who holds the value of our life in high regard. “Look at the birds in the sky; they do not sow or reap, they gather nothing into barns, yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are not you more important than they?”
The first reading too, taken from the Prophets, follows this same line, that is, the “tender providence” of God. Sometimes we have an image of the God of the Old Testament as a vengeful God, a God who is ready to punish, a “Zeus” God ready to hurl his thunderbolts, while the God of the New Testament is the God of mercy and forgiveness. Well, today’s reading makes us reconsider this commonplace; there are several passages in the Old Testament in which we begin to see the face of a “Father” God, tender and merciful, slow to anger and ready to forgive. Indeed, the passage from Isaiah that we hear today is surprising: God even compares himself to a mother! “Can a mother forget her infant, be without tenderness for the child of her womb? Even should she forget, I will never forget you.” When Pope John Paul II compared God to a mother on some occasions (let us think of the Angelus of September 10, 1978, while the Camp David summit was under way; the Pope recalled Premier Begin, who cited this very passage from Isaiah, and the Pope then commented: “He is Father; even more he is Mother.”), it seemed as though he were putting forward a new theology. Instead, by listening carefully to the pages of the Old Testament, we already see the fatherly and motherly love of God revealed.

We are the hands of the Providence of God

How is the Providence of God expressed concretely? We read certain passages of the Old Testament that sing of the wonders worked by God for his people, when he opened the waters for the Israelites to pass through and then closed them again as the Egyptians passed through, when he provided manna and quail in the desert, when he helped them win battles… Yet we can say that these accounts belong to the epic of the People of Israel, which seeks to express its faith in the Providence of God. We must not think, however, that God will always place everything before us in such a striking way, even if at times in life we too can almost touch the Providence of God with our own hands.
Instead, we must remember that all of us are the hands of the Providence of God. God expresses his Providence in the world also through each one of us. Saint James reminds us:

There can be no faith without charity. But there are many ways to put charity into practice, and not only through almsgiving. I am thinking, for example, of the very interesting experience of the “Economy of Communion” that some companies are trying to implement in the locality of Burchio (Incisa – Valdarno, FI). It is a style of business economy aimed at development projects to overcome poverty; a style of business economy that seeks to care for the quality of human relationships between management and employees, between seller and customer; a style of business economy that pays attention to the local area and to the well-being of the people who live in that same area; we can call it an “economy of relationships” or an “economy of reciprocity” or, in the end, an “economy of happiness.” I believe this is the invitation of Jesus in the Gospel we hear today: not a contempt for money, but a use and management of money that is truly directed to the good of persons, and to a society authentically on a human scale.