O Lord, make us beacons of hope and peace. May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable in Your sight, our Strength and our Redeemer. Amen.
This is such a beautiful time of the year, as we reflect on creation. All the beauty around us that we can smell, taste, hear and see. A time when we reflect and meditate on how we as created beings are interwoven and interconnected with one another.
As we continue on these reflections and meditations, we meet Jesus this morning, giving a teaching, which is quite a difficult one when you first read it. In my opinion, the key to understanding it lies in the 13th verse:
“No slave can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth.“
We all know what is meant by wealth: all our material goods, our possessions and money. Jesus this morning is reminding us that if God comes first in our lives, then He must stay first and remain at the centre of how we go about our daily dealings.
And so we go back to the beginning of this teaching, where Jesus tells of the rich man, who had a manager to run his daily affairs. Yet, the manager was embezzling the money of this rich man. After being called in, he is asked to explain himself, to give an account of what he was doing, because of the accusations that were brought in against him. We learn that this manager goes and reduces the amounts owed by those in debt to the rich man, in fear of what might happen to him in the future and how he will be treated by others, after he is dismissed from his work. After that, the rich man commended him for this. What? What I think is that the rich man might have seen himself in this manager. How did he become that rich, one might ask. He might have acted in the same shrewd way. I don’t think Jesus is saying anyone in this story is good, but there is still more.
“For the children of this age are more shrewd in dealing with their own generation than are the children of light.”
This is the part that helps us a little to connect to the last verse, that we spend so much time on the wrong things and not in and with God. Putting all our cleverness and brainpower to use on how to cheat, scam and defraud others, and not on how to please God.
Jesus continues, “And I tell you, make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth, so that when it is gone, they may welcome you into the eternal homes.”
Through the writings of some scholars, I have found out that this is a weird way of saying that we have a choice regarding how we use that which we have, for good or for bad, that we should use the money, the possessions, the wealth that we have to do good.
At the heart of this teaching, we learn that Jesus does not condemn wealth, possessions and money, rather he urges us to again tap into how interwoven and interconnected we are with one another and that we should use these material things to help each other. So that these material things don’t possess us and we become worshipers of the things around us, but that we remember the God who gave us these things. So that we continually use these material things to turn back to God, by serving our fellow brothers and sisters who are in need, as we are able.
May we this week share the love of Jesus with everyone we encounter, being open to the guidance of the Holy Spirit on how to further serve those in need.