Thought for the Week, September 28, 2025

 

Christ Jesus uses his teaching in the Gospel to invite us and to challenge us to make a choice. And the choice is quite clear. It is a choice between loving God above all things and loving money above all things, a choice between loving the Creator more than his beautiful creatures and loving creatures more than we love the Creator.

“No servant can be the slave of two masters,” he said. “He will either hate the first and love the second, or treat the first with respect and the second with scorn. You cannot be the slave of both God and money” (Lk 16:13).

There is no room for Christians to indulge in the foolishness of wanting to seat on two chairs at the same time, of wanting to love two Gods and serve two Gods. There is one God, and we would be unwise to think we can make riches compete with God. God created riches. And, since God is greater than any of his creatures, our love of riches, even where and when it is legitimate, must be less than our love of God. God, and God alone, is to be loved above all other things.  We cannot serve both God and money.  We must not serve money.  Money is to serve us.  But we must serve God.

When riches are preferred to God, money becomes more important than one’s neighbour. At the time of prophet of Amos, profit was prioritized over the poor, and riches became more important than the poor. The poor were bought for money, the needy for a pair of sandals. The poor were used to generate wealth, while they were deprived of their own share of the wealth, and the rich thought it was alright.  The story continues even today of how the poor are made victims of corruption and diversion of public funds, victims of wars waged over control of wealth.  Millions have been killed, and many are being killed or exposed to insecurity because of wars waged over control of resources of the earth.  But God neither ignores the poor nor ignores those who exploit the poor.

The Gospel of Christ is preached to the rich and to the poor, to the materially endowed and to the materially deprived.   Jesus speaks to those who are not rich but are working and hoping that they will one day become rich, as well as to those who are already rich. We all, rich and poor, fall into the temptation of wanting to replace God with something else other than God. It is the temptation to replace God with our desires and our possessions.

It is not a sin to desire to be rich, neither is it a sin to be rich, especially when one has worked for it. What is to be avoided is an attitude that will exploit and defraud others in order to become rich, or an attitude that will make us ignore the poor and ignore God, an attitude that makes us ignore the poor because we have ignored God. It is alright to desire riches, and it is alright to possess riches. What we need to watch out for is the way we desire and possess riches. What is out of order is to love the riches we desire and or the riches we possess.

When, in our hearts, riches are placed on the same level as God, that is when we become slaves of money, that is when what we ought to possess has begun to possess us, and what we ought to pursue has begun to pursue us.  We ought to possess money. But if we prefer wealth to God and to our neighbour, we become exploiters who are possessed by the very thing for which they exploit others. That is why whoever makes money into a god makes himself poor on the long run. His poverty is the poverty of not knowing that without God he is poor. He glorifies his possessions, or what he desires to possess, instead of glorifying God, not knowing that without God he is poor. And the worst form of poverty that can afflict a human being is the poverty of not knowing that one is poor without God, even when one has the fattest bank account in the world.

We need money.  Our Lord himself taught us to pray for our daily bread.  But He taught us to seek God first.  We cannot do any good thing without material sustenance procured with money.  What we are to avoid is living a life where money becomes our ultimate preoccupation.  Union with God, not wealth, should be our ultimate concern.

Without God in our lives, we make ourselves poor. Without God in our lives, we make others poor. We make others poor when we worship our possessions. That is when human beings are reduced to mere instruments of profit-making.

The Biblical admonition to refrain from worshipping wealth, addressed to the rich and to the poor, is still very pertinent today. The words, “You cannot serve both God and money,” are spoken to the materially rich who may be poor because they do not have God in their lives. These same words are also spoken to the materially poor if, in their search for wealth they are willing to forget God and disobey his commandments.

In the poverty of our humanity, our God enriches us with himself. He feeds us in our poverty with his word, and with the body and blood of his Son in the holy sacrifice of the Mass. If we receive the Eucharist in good disposition, God is in us, and if God is in us, we have the greatest treasure, treasure that money cannot buy. We have God in us. God who has given himself to us.  “Our hearts are restless until they rest in God,” wrote St Augustine in his Confessions.  As important as material acquisitions are, our hearts cannot find rest in them.  They can only find rest in God because our hearts are made for God.  That is why we must serve God and not money.

Father Anthony Akinwale, OP