“Sufficient for the Day…”

You can’t serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or hold to the one and despise the other. But can’t have two. No way. How do we know? Jesus. Jesus says so. So it must be right. There can only be one master in your life.

Particularly it is impossible to serve God and Mammon. Again we know this—how? Because Jesus says so. Or as a nice New Yorker cartoon put it recently, with a picture of Jesus and this other guy standing on the clouds of heaven and the guy has a harp and a puzzled look on his face as he stares at Jesus, while Jesus says: “Of course, that’s just the opinion of one omniscient guy…” So I think that clinches it. You can’t serve God and Mammon. Can’t do it. No way.

But what is “Mammon”? Hey, that’s a good question! I’m glad you asked. It’s a funny word in the original Greek because it does not seem to be originally a Greek word at all, but a word the Greek speaking Jews coined from Aramaic or Syriac. So you don’t find this word in other Greek literature but only very occasionally in the literature of Greek speaking Jews. And they have not left a dictionary lying around in which the word is precisely defined. You’ve got to do a little detective work, looking it up in various places, and seeing how it is used…

But after doing a bit of this work, it isn’t too tough to see that the meaning of Mammon (for Jesus’ original audience) would have been something like: “possessions” or “property” or “earthly riches”. Whenever they use the word around Jesus’ time, it doesn’t have a positive connotation. It usually indicates something in which one has wrongly put their trust or become attached to at the expense of faith in the One God.

The single word that seems to work for all the occurrences of Mammon is “possessions”. Property is a little too neutral. Mammon is not just the stuff you happen to have accumulated, lying around your house. It is the stuff you’ve wrapped your hands around and have a firm grip upon. It’s the stuff about which you utter a strong and decisive “Mine!” two-year old toddler style—especially if someone else picks it up and starts playing with it. It’s the stuff about which you go “Put that down. And back away. Slowly. Hands where I can see them…” That sort of thing. That’s Mammon.

Now you have Mammon. I have Mammon. We all have Mammon. Whether it’s your Mickey Mantle rookie card, your Benz, your X-Box, your MacBook, or that stunning pair of shoes you just got at XXI, we all have at least a little bit of Mammon lying around the house. Maybe it’s just your Visa Platinum Card. That is something we tend to clutch fairly tightly. Any possession you’ve got a firm, solid grip on, any earthly treasure about which you say “Mine!”. That’s Mammon. And be honest. You’ve got some squirreled away somewhere. So do I.

It’s the “Possess” thing that makes it Mammon, not the thing itself. That is to say, it’s our grip on it that turns it from a gift of God into Mammon. To put it another way, one guy’s X-Box is a gift of God with which he’ll play happily, but another guy’s X-Box is Mammon. Because the one doesn’t cling to it, doesn’t have a grip on it, doesn’t say “Mine!” if someone else touches it, and knows the sun will still rise tomorrow just fine if it should develop the three red rings of death. But because the other guy has both hands firmly on the controller and can’t let it go, it’s Mammon to him.

So it’s tricky to identify Mammon. It doesn’t come with a label. It’s a matter of your attachment to the thing or lack thereof.

Another way to say this is it’s a faith thing, Mammon is. Mammon is whatever you put your trust in for life, peace, happiness, security—that isn’t the Triune God. Because only God can be trusted for life, peace, and every good. Still another way to say this is that God grants us to have no Mammon in our lives. That is not to say we cannot enjoy earthly gifts of God—houses, cars, X-boxes, and shoe shopping. Those are God’s gifts. He knows we need and like that stuff. Stuff is fine. You can enjoy lots of stuff. But you can’t have lots of stuff. You cannot possess these treasures as your own. For you, as a son or daughter of God, there is only One you can possess—the Triune God, Father, Son, Holy Spirit. He alone is your treasure. He made you for Himself, so you will find joy in possessing no one and nothing else in the End.

See, that’s what faith is. Faith is holding on to one thing only—the Kingdom of God which is given in and through Christ Jesus our Lord. All the other things, all the other stuff, are just gifts, passing through our hands, which we do not possess. It’s the possessing, see—it’s saying Mine! that turns the new shoes or shiny car from innocent “stuff” to evil “Mammon”.

This is shown by Jesus’ little talk expounding on how you can’t serve God and Mammon. You either have Mammon or you have God. There is no having both. Because each is an exclusive lord.

This is easier to see in the original King James translation (which for my money is still the King). The word rendered as “worry” in the New King James is “take thought” in the original King. And “take thought” is a more literal rendering of the Greek merimnate. It’s “taking thought” in the sense of caring about something. “Worry” really presses the Greek too far. We all know that worry, anxiety, is bad. But Jesus is warning us off something seemingly more benign—taking thought of clothes, shoes, food, drink, caring about these things, even that, He says, leads to making Mammon of these things, making idols of them.

Instead, Jesus says seek first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness and all these things will be added to you—thoughtlessly to enjoy, that’s Jesus’ way with stuff—that keeps it from becoming Mammon you possess and eventually, possesses you. When our thoughts are fixed on God, no Mammon can keep us from the joy that comes when God is all in all. All stuff is then His stuff, reflections of Him.

But who can live like this? No one. No one can. No one will. Only One has—Christ Jesus. All the rest of us are so weighed down by Mammon, we can’t see anything but our own selfish interests. So Jesus came and sought us. Finding us, He laid down everything of His for us, His very body and blood, His life. Gave it all away to us who had to have it all. In Him, on the Cross, we got it all. All there is.

Only when our hands have been emptied, like this, of our grip on Mammon, can Jesus take hold. On the cross, in Baptism, dying with Jesus, this happens: we lose all our possessions and gain instead, through faith alone, Jesus and His Kingdom. And there, we take no thought for the morrow: sufficient for the day is… well, you know the rest.

This Gift is given only in the Word and Sacrament ministry of Christ’s Church. Here we find Christ Jesus—not as a means to our ends, but as The End, Himself. He is literally everything we want, all we need. By such Spirit-wrought faith alone, we enter the Kingdom where all is free because Christ is all in all, where there is no thought for the morrow, for the forgiveness and righteousness of Jesus now suffices us, and the Peace that surpasses understanding guards our hearts and minds in Him. Amen.