Twenty-fifth Sunday of the Year - September 19, 2004

    Jesus said in today’s Gospel, “no servant can serve two masters. Either he will hate the one and love the other or be attentive to the one and despise the other. You cannot give yourself to God and money.” There is something odd about this, what our Lord has said. Did you notice it? “You cannot,” our Lord said, “give yourself to God and to money.” Give yourself to money. Sell yourself to worldly wealth. Become a slave of not even someone but something. Money. Wealth. Things.
    We are not used to thinking of money or wealth this way. Our culture really would inculcate in us the belief that money, having money, means power and freedom. But Jesus is clearly warning us that money can enslave us. A cruel master money can be over them that give themselves to it.
    The root of the problem goes back way before the invention of bartering, coins and banks. These are not bad in themselves. The problem goes way back to the misty dawn of time when a man and a woman created in the image of God stood before the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and then chose to eat, chose to disobey God their maker. It was not so much that they just broke a rule; they broke a relationship. God as Creator is by right our Master. This Adam and Eve denied by their action; they were saying we will be our own master. We will know for ourselves without reference to God. We will be happy apart from God and obedience to Him.
    Now the whole scene in the Garden of Eden is described in such rich and sumptuous terms so as to communicate to us what God had in mind for Adam and Eve: perfect happiness and contentment. Submission to the will of God was the Garden of Eden. Rebellion against God meant banishment from paradise. The whole history of mankind is the subsequent fruit of that disaster. And in a sense, we are presented constantly with more or less the same choice. Will God be our master or worldly wealth? Will we eat of the forbidden fruit again? That vain attempt to find happiness apart from God and His will for us.
    The hard fact, the brute fact, that we have to recognize here, the very thing we may not even be aware of or the very thing about which we are in denial is the fact that we will be mastered by someone or something other than ourselves. For the lie of the serpent in the Garden of Eden was just this: that you can be as god. You can be the director of your own life and contentment. You are autonomous; you are free.
    Nonsense. Nonsense the Church has always said. And history bears that out, the long sad story of the human race trying to live apart from the Creator. For what happened was that with this initial rebellion against God by Adam and Eve, there occurred in the human person a disorder and disharmony that went right down from top to bottom. A loss of grace and friendship with God caused man to turn inward, to himself, and there was not the wherewithal to help him. Without the ordering and harmonizing presence of God, man fell, fell into himself, and finding no help there, he looked back outside himself -- but not to God -- and has tried to convince himself that he can find in the things around him whatever he needs to satisfy this craving within him. And so the lure of things, created things, money, wealth, power, and prestige attract him as possible sources of fulfillment. But they were never meant to be that, and they end up being the master of a lost soul.
    This is not a very pretty picture. But the Church has ever been very realistic about the condition of humanity. She refuses to buy the worn out line that we are slowly progressing toward another Garden of Eden in this world. Utopias, we call them. Dreams of no substance, the Church says. No, the way back to the Garden is to lay down the arms of our rebellion against God; the way back is to surrender back to God the Creator the life He has given us. The way back to Eden is through having God as our master.
    Again, we must remind ourselves: we will be mastered by something or someone. Either God or things or our disordered urges for things. But there is a really wrong-headed way of looking at this. We may say to ourselves: Well, then, so I give up things in this life in order to procure eternal things? This is the wrong way of looking at it. What we have to remind ourselves of is that we were made for the Garden of Eden. We were made for God. We were not made for things. Things were made for us. We really are crowned with a dignity high and noble. We are made in the very image of God, made to reflect God’s glory to the universe. In fact, in us, human beings -- who are matter and spirit -- all the created things of the cosmos come together in us and find a intelligent voice to praise and worship the Creator. We give the cosmos its voice of praise to God. And we would bow down to things, to money? No, rather, we are the high priests of creation, stewards of God’s world, servants whose joy and privilege it is to always offer up to God a sacrifice of praise. And in doing so we find ourselves. Thus we are clothed with meaning, destined for a glory that baffles the angels. How can we serve money and things then?
    Jesus warns us against this forbidden fruit, not to keep us bound and servile to a cruel master called God, but to set us free, to liberate us, so that we can, once again, be what we were made to be -- servants of the most High God, in whose service we find our freedom, our fulfillment, our delight, our joy so rich that the Garden of Eden is only a pale reflection in comparison.