Money is just one of the things we serve in place of God
By Anthony Esolen
Christ and the Rich Young Man, painted in 1889 by Heinrich Hofmann (1824-1911)
“No one can serve two lords,” says Jesus. “He will hate the one and love the other, or cleave to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and mammon” (Mt. 6:24; translation mine).
Here we have one of the great riddles of the Gospels. Exactly what is this “mammon”? It’s traditionally held to refer to earthly riches, and that is certainly a great part of the meaning. It is not the whole, and the closer we look at the Semitic word, the more of a challenge Jesus’ words pose to us.
The poet Edmund Spenser, writing in the 1590s, seems to have understood its further implications. In The Faerie Queene, the knight of temperance, Sir Guyon, meets a dismal-looking old fellow sitting upon a heap of riches, who wishes to tempt the knight to his damnation. Here is how the old man identifies himself:
God of the world and worldlings I me call,
Great Mammon, greatest god below the sky,
That of my plenty pour out unto all,
And unto none my graces do envy:
Riches, renown, and principality, Honor, estate, and all this world’s good, For which men swink and sweat incessantly,
From me do flow into an ample flood,
And in the hollow earth have their eternal brood.
Notice that this “Mammon” is not simply a god of money. He represents a broad range of things that worldly people seek – the marks of honor and success. He and Sir Guyon get into quite a concentrated argument over the character of both money and the good things you can acquire by it, with Guyon backing into the partly-correct but partly-inadequate position, that you do not need so much if you practice temperance.
If frail men would but think, says he in the poem, with how small allowance
Untroubled Nature doth herself suffice,
Such superfluities they would despise,
Which with sad cares impeach our native joys.
The problem, however, is not just how you use your worldly goods, or how much of them you have, but where your heart lies, what you worship, for what or whom do you give your life. Thus there can be only one lord, as we hear in the great prayer of the Jews: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one: and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength” (Dt. 6:4). No one and nothing can share the throne with God.
So far I don’t believe I have said anything that our readers have not heard a hundred times. And yet that word mammon remains. It is used only in four places in the New Testament, never in the Old; it appears to be an Aramaic word, derived from the extremely common Hebrew root verb ’aman, meaning, in its various grammatical forms, to verify, to support, to stand firm, to believe, to be faithful, to trust. The first m in mammon is a typical Hebrew way of making a noun out of a verb. Mammon, then, would name something to trust in. Indeed, the related verbal noun ’emunah means faithfulness, truth, trustworthiness, and is predicated especially of God: “Your mercy, O Lord, is in the heavens, and your faithfulness extends to the clouds” (Ps. 36:5).
How then to render Jesus’ words? Suppose we paraphrase them in this way: “No man can serve as his Lord both God and all those good things wherein people usually place their confidence.” Those things would include more than wealth, as I believe Spenser saw. They include power, esteem, rank, family connections, and so on. And that is why, when the rich young man, disheartened, leaves Jesus, and Jesus says that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God, Peter says, if I may translate again, somewhat freely, “See, we have cast aside all that was ours [Greek idia] and followed you” (Lk. 18:28). They rely on nothing now but Jesus. He is all their steadfastness; he is all their treasure.
During his teaching to the apostles, Jesus often quotes the Old Testament
Hence we can understand the admonitory parable that Jesus tells, of the rich man who aimed to take things easy in his old age. He had had good harvests, so he was going to pull down his granaries and build bigger ones, which would last him for many years, so that he could eat, drink, and be merry. But God said, “Fool! Tonight your soul shall be required of you, and to whom shall all your provisions belong?” (Lk. 12:16-20).
We are not told that this man had gotten his wealth by ill means. Perhaps he and his field hands worked very hard. He had, so to speak, built up a fine annuity for his evening years. He was like the industrious ant, not the heedless grasshopper. Yet God calls him “fool.” The Greek aphron suggests a dimwit, but in the Old Testament, the truly foolish man is one who builds on the sand of his own power and wisdom. He is the fool who has said in his heart that God is not around to bother with him one way or the other: in effect, There is no God (Ps. 14:1).
Where does our treasure lie? Where do we place our trust? All the mammon of the world, all those firm foundations, the wealthy bank accounts, the prestigious schools, the positions with titles to them, success in the world’s eyes and the good opinion of men, all that people bank upon, is sand. It must be. It shifts its place, the water washes it away, and if nothing else, death is our end, and not all the world’s riches, and not all our worrying about them, can keep us from the grave. There is only one God. In Him alone shall we trust.
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