Word to the Wise
Saturday, November 6, 2010 - Saturday in the Thirty-first Week in Ordinary Time
[Philippians 4:10-19 and Luke 16:9-15]No servant can serve two masters. He will either hate one and love the other, or be devoted to one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and mammon. The Pharisees, who loved money, heard all these things and sneered at him. And he said to them, "You justify yourselves in the sight of others, but God knows your hearts; for what is of human esteem is an abomination in the sight of God.
It has been said (I'm not sure of the source) that a cynic is someone who knows the cost of everything and the value of nothing! We all know from experience that it is easier to determine the cost of something, but not so easy to determine its "value." Commercials constantly assure us that the product being advertised gives us more "value for the money." The Gospel of Luke has a profound suspicion of the influence of material wealth on true values! No doubt this was a major theme of Jesus' teaching, but this particular gospel emphasizes it at every opportunity. If true value lies in money, then God can be bought and sold like any other commodity. It was just this kind of attitude in the Catholic church of the 16th century that brought on the Protestant Reformation! Church wealth and personal wealth present the same problem. Is there any unhealthy dependence on human wealth that has taken the place of our dependence on God? Politicians nowadays constantly face the accusation that they can be bought by lobbyists and special interests who entertain them, etc.etc! Some high church officials face the same suggestion - that they are partial to the wealthy and fail to serve the poor. Jesus' teaching in the Gospel of Luke is basically that those who are materially well off must use their resources to help those who are not. Our security is in God and not in what we own. Value is in human persons and not in things. The corrosive influence of our affluent secular culture can get into everything we do, including our way of living our faith. The gospel today reminds us where true value is and who it is that we should be serving! AMEN
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