DAILY HOMILIES #mammon

Like the steward who had to let go of what would have come to him as profit, Jesus is telling us today to make sacrifices, to let go of the vain things and fleeting pleasures of life for the greater good of making heaven. Our attachment to wealth and material possessions often obstacles the practice of our Christian virtues.

Why tell a lie to make money? Why do you deceive your customers in your business place? Don’t you trust that God can provide for you? “Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Consider the lilies of the field and how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon was not arrayed like one of these in all his glory. But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which today is alive and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you?

Jesus teaches us to avoid telling lies and other dishonest practices for the sake of money: “He who is dishonest in a very little is dishonest also in much… And if you have not been faithful with that which is another’s, who will give you that which is your own?”(Luke 16:10-12) Someone once said: “If you lose money, you lose nothing. If you lose friends, you lose something, but if you lose your character (perhaps, in a bid to make money), you have lost everything.”

Our attachment to wealth and material possession very often acts as an obstacle to the practice of our Christian virtues. Jesus told us that we cannot serve two masters, neither can we serve both God and mammon (Matthew 6:24).

From the miraculous birth of children to barren women to the miraculous crossing of the Red Sea by the Nation of Israel when the Egyptians were chasing after them, to the miracles of Jesus in the New Testament such as the feeding of five thousand with just five loaves and two fish, God continues to teach us a lesson in PROVIDENCE. The problem with us humans is that we don’t want to learn, we don’t trust God.

Just as Jesus said that with God, all things are possible, the Angel said to Gideon: “But I will be with you, and you shall smite the Midianites as one man.” That is to say, if we are to depend on ourselves, we are nothing but if we have God on our side, nothing will be too hard for us.