Matt 6:20-24 20 But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moths and vermin do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal. 21 For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.22 “The eye is the lamp of the body. If your eyes are healthy,[c] your whole body will be full of light. 23 But if your eyes are unhealthy,[d] your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light within you is darkness, how great is that darkness! 24 “No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money.
Matt 6:20-24 MsgB Stockpile treasure in heaven, where it’s safe from moth and rust and burglars. It’s obvious, isn’t it? The place where your treasure is, is the place you will most want to be, and end up being. 22-23 “Your eyes are windows into your body. If you open your eyes wide in wonder and belief, your body fills up with light. If you live squinty-eyed in greed and distrust, your body is a dank cellar. If you pull the blinds on your windows, what a dark life you will have! 24 “You can’t worship two gods at once. Loving one god, you’ll end up hating the other. Adoration of one feeds contempt for the other. You can’t worship God and Money both.
Dallas Willard says: The most important commandment of the Judeo-Christian tradition is to treasure God and his (rule) above everything else.[1] Obviously that includes money, but let’s put there other things that we can treasure: Our reputation. Our country. A Relationship. Family. Our time. Our future. Our need to win. There’s a lot.
In the parable of the sower in Mark 4 and more specifically in his explanation of it to his disciples, Jesus talks about the seed that falls among the thorny weeds as a picture of those who hear God’s word, 19 but all too quickly the message is crowded out by the worries of this life, the lure of wealth, and the desire for other things, so no fruit is produced. NT Scholar Tim Gombis points out that this is not referring to people who leave the faith all together but those who stick around, continue to practice a form of Christian faith, but do so whilst accommodating the concerns that are generated by the kingdom of this world. (Repeat.) Jesus here talks about money, it’s not less than that, but there is also shades of nuance here that if we were to make it all about money, we’d miss completely.
I’m going to go right ahead and say that as a white, western, millennial Christian serving in an institutionalised church set in a consumer culture; this is The. Number. One. Risk. To my faith being of a God-honouring nature and I’m betting yours too. Individually and therefore corporately, if we are not producing fruit this is where we need to start looking for the reasons as to why. Right here. It is as plain and as simple as that. This is really the basic point we need to underline this morning but at usual, before we step through the text, let’s looks at the context.
- A context of polytheism.
The first century world was a world at the pinnacle of Polytheism. Up to this point, the basic history of the earth was written in the philosophies of polytheism. From the gods of the ancient Ugaritic peoples, Phoenicians, Canaanites, Egyptians, Persians, Greeks and then of course Romans. In fact, you could arguably call everything B.C. as the age of polytheism and A.D. as the age of Monotheism.
Of course, against this grand backdrop, you have this tiny, weird tribal culture descended from a man named Abram who after a unique ‘religious experience’ completely turns his back on the ancient Sumerian paganism of his upbringing and ends up being the ancestor of the Jewish people. Fast fwd to Jesus preaching on this hillside, mainly to an audience of Jewish people, a people whose entire national identity, (think about this) was defined by their resistance to the polytheism. When everyone was doing their ‘multiple gods’ thing, these were a people whose most basic definitions of what was right, true and just arose directly out of the concept of a single God. When they sinned, it was this concept that they were abandoning. When they were commended, it was when they were getting rid of the multiple gods.
Jesus is talking to people who define themselves against the polytheistic atmosphere they breathe. It is their deepest point of pride and self-identity. Now Jesus speaks, and rather than say, nice one folks, this is the one area that you’ve got all ticky-boo, he basically says to their utter shock; “you’re no better than them.” Dear friends, to follow Jesus is to spell the end of polytheism. When we realise what was behind the ancient polytheistic pantheons of gods and how we are not really much better today, we begin to understand how controversial Jesus’ words are to every age.
- Textual/immediate context
Following immediately on from the discussion on fasting, framed by the idea of expectation; Jesus says: 20 But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moths and vermin do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal. 21 For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.22 “The eye is the lamp of the body. If your eyes are healthy,[c] your whole body will be full of light. 23 But if your eyes are unhealthy,[d] your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light within you is darkness, how great is that darkness!
Yet again, Jesus takes people by the hand and leads them into their own heart where only they and him know the real processes going on. Clearly, you can define yourself against others all you like, but depending on how you see the world, all you become is a master of self-deception. This of course isn’t an issue if we are investing our lives in what God is doing rather than what we are doing.
I lean on Dallas Willard again here: “Jesus compares the eyes of our heart to our actual eyesight. We that if the eye works well, the body naturally moves around well in its environment. Thus the person who treasures what lies within the kingdom of God sees everything in its true worth and relationship. The person who treasures what is on ‘earth’ by contrast sees everything from a perspective of distortion. The relative importance of things is warped.”
In another biblical irony, the people who have the greatest access to understanding what Jesus is talking about are those who have struggled with an addiction. If you have, you’ll know that sooner or later, you begin to internally measure everyone and everything’s value on the basis of whether it or they get you somehow closer to your next hit. Sooner or later, this comes to define you and all of your interactions, conversations and arguments therein. And you can’t see it. You’re stumbling in the dark. Unless if you’re blessed, you wake up one day realising that you’ve spent so long being a mere consumer, you’ve forgotten what it is to be a child of the king.
I’m talking about it like alcohol, pornography or drugs, but there are just as addictive, just as destructive but way more culturally acceptable things of course. Approval addiction. Addiction to being right. Addiction to control. Addiction to drama. Addiction to power. Addiction to culture. Addiction to Image….and so on.
So next comes the bit where preachers normally say something like: ‘But there’s no one here falling to this but let’s be on our guard’. But actually, rather than do that, what if we freely committed to humble ourselves to real community and freely without fear ask a fellow disciple; “hey seriously, is that me?” “am I at risk here?” and what if we committed to gracious responses? What if we took that, responded and then said “brother, sister thank you for going there, how about me? Where do you see that I am at risk of falling?”
- The Polytheism of the heart.
And now comes the lightning bolt statement from Jesus to those defined by their life of Monotheism: 24 “No one can serve two masters. (Lords) Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money.
I love how Jesus draws his audience on to the thin ice, he says of course that you cannot serve two masters or (Lords) bearing in mind that people were calling him Lord (we’ll come back to that in ch 7) and not gods. But just as some are breathing a sigh of relief, he then immediately connects it with the idea of God and money. What Jesus just did was pull the rug out from the Jewish legalist and the pagan legalist in a single sentence. For the Jew, by using the word ‘god’ he has highlighted that they are engaging in a Polytheism of the heart. For the few pagans that are listening, he goes right around the back door of all their religious terminology and rather than talk about Artemis or Ploutos he just simply names what’s really behind them: mammon, or money. Jesus unmasks the gods.
We today, of course, we don’t use such names for gods, instead, we say terms like ‘progress’, ‘lifestyle’, ‘choice’. Of course, it’s all still just about cash. But we try and fudge it because deep down we know the truth that Peterson’s translation brings out so well: treasuring temporary stuff over God doesn’t just distract us from our relationship with him, it sows hatred of God.
Jesus isn’t being deliberately nasty or inconvenient. He’s loving us enough to cut through the stupid marketing spin and point out that the idea of Polytheism, be it the religious framework or the posture of the heart is simply impossible to sustain. Life just don’t work that way. The best picture I can paint for you is imagine trying to use a compass on a planet with not one but two magnetic north poles. Can you imagine trying to get a clear direction with the north needle spinning like a stopwatch? Little wonder one of our most common questions that get’s asked in western contexts is ‘what is God’s will for my life?’
Nothing affects what we actually do, like what we really believe.
- To conclude.
Let me finish with Dallas Willard again: “If we do not treasure earthly goods (above everything else) we must be prepared to be treated and more or less crazy.”[2] Friends here is one of my pipe dreams for Waratah Church; my dream is that we become known for being a bit weird. Seriously. Right now, I fear that to most people in our community, the word ‘Waratah’ means either an after-school care business, a retirement village or that church that does carols each year. But what if people said stuff like: “that church down the road; they just gave a bunch of money away for no reason.” “that church down the road, there’s some ‘really interesting’ people that go there.” “that church down the road, there’s been some weird spiritual stuff going on there.” “their so weird, they invite random people for lunch who don’t even go there.”
I say this as a ‘younger pastor’ and I mean
these words: to Hell with focusing on being relevant, let’s be weird people
whose lives are poured out before an audience of one, because nothing less will
do in a world of many gods.
[1] Willard, Dallas: The Divine Conspiracy (London: William Collins, 1998) p224
[2] Willard, Dallas: The Divine Conspiracy (London: William Collins, 1998) p235