The next blogs will be about the interpretation of two statements, one from Jesus and one from Paul, which I take to be conveying the same general idea:
“No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and money.” Matt. 6:24
“For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evils…” I Tim 6:10
I’m wondering what it means to love money, and how I can be assured that I do not. It’s easy to quickly dismiss the possibility that this verse applies to me or to you, because we might say: “Well, I’m not as rich as some in our society.” This line of reasoning fails immediately for three reasons. First, I and everyone reading this blog are in fact some of the richest people in the world. And second, there are enough Scriptural counterexamples to show that merely having money is not the same as loving it. David, for instance, was filthy rich, as were most of the patriarchs. And we can also turn that around - it’s easy to imagine a person in poverty who loves money and is willing to lie and kill to get it, but simply doesn’t have it yet. So finding a few people in America who have more money than we do is perfectly irrelevant to the question, “Do I love money?”
So it's clear that having money does not equal loving money. But what could those passages mean then? Surprisingly, it’s difficult to come up with clear examples of money-loving. For instance, spending a lot on a home could be justified as an investment, as could sending your kids to an expensive college, or buying the organic milk for twice as much as regular milk. From the perspective of some, these could seem like luxuries, but if you have the money, who wouldn’t give their child the best education possible? On the other hand, there are always easy, extreme examples of money-loving, such as the purchase of a luxury car. If you spent $100,000 on a commuter car when a $20,000 car would have done just fine, I can’t think of any other motivation for that purchase than that you wanted everyone to see how much money you have. And of course there are always ‘gangster’ examples – those who enrich themselves by killing others. That’s a clear example of money-loving causing evil-doing.
But coming up with extreme examples is not really that healthy for us. When we think of the owner of the $100,000 commuter vehicle, we may start thinking, “Thank you, God, that I am not like that.” But this strikes me as exactly the same attitude as the hypocrite in Luke 18:11 who prayed “God, I thank you that I am not like other men, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax collector.” Just because we can find someone worse than us does not mean that we're off the hook. Yes, I feel confident about saying that I love money less than someone who kills for it. But so what?
The difficulty in properly interpreting these passages is dangerous. It makes it easy for us to justify to ourselves that we are not money-lovers. But…what if we are? This blog series is different than some of my other ones. I often have a direction, but I don’t know where I’m going with this one. So any comments would be useful – what do you think it means to love money? And how do you ensure that you do not?
