To serve God or Mammon?

Righteous St. John of Kronstadt

 

The words of the Lord are a true lamp on the path of our life, and so it is with the words of today's Gospel. The eye is the lamp of the body, says the Lord. Why does it not say "the eyes," but "the eye"? Because here the Lord does not mean the bodily eyes, but the spiritual eye, that is to say, our heart. By "eye" is therefore meant the heart, the seat of conscience, of the inner law that shows us what is Good and what is Evil. By "body" is meant our entire inner life, our thoughts, desires, intentions – all that we do throughout our life on earth. The meaning, then, of these words of the Savior is that our heart, or our conscience, is for man a lamp that must enlighten him in all his actions and thoughts.

Further on the Lord says: if your eye, that is to say your heart and your conscience, is clear and pure, then all your thoughts and actions will be full of light, just, pure; but if your eye is evil, your whole body will be in darkness, that is to say, all your thoughts, your whole life will be evil, perverse.

And so, if your heart, which was given to you by the Lord to be a lamp, has become darkness because of your negligence and laziness, what will your life be, what will your actions be? Is it not so in life? Do we not see examples of it constantly?

Let us take two persons. The first is content with very little, has no need of a lavish table, sumptuous clothing, a richly furnished dwelling, etc. She has daily bread, a few clean and decent changes of clothing, she has some income or a small salary – she is content with it and gives thanks to God. She desires nothing more.

But look at the life of the other person. Nothing satisfies her. Her table is not a table, her clothes are not clothes, and so it is with her dwelling. Something is always lacking. How much time and worry she devotes to her clothing! Yet our clothes are only a temporary covering, a bandage on a wound, because clothing is merely a consequence of sin, when man and woman became aware of their nakedness. And so, is it really necessary to adorn bandages on wounds? Would it not be better to focus on healing the wound as quickly as possible—that is, to purify oneself of sin as soon as possible? Let us remember that at our baptism we all received a garment of incorruptibility. It is this garment that we should care about above all. Let us preserve this garment, let it be our most beautiful adornment. But let us return to this second person: nothing ever satisfies her. Why? For the simple reason that her heart is false, darkened, that it is prey to the passions. And it is so because she does not know, and does not wish to know, the commandments of our Lord, because she is not guided by the light of the Gospel of Christ. Because she blindly fulfills the will of her flesh, enslaved to the passions.

No one can serve two masters. For either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will cling to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and Mammon. You cannot serve God and money, that is to say, our sinful flesh through which the devil acts, striving to anchor it to the world. This is precisely what the Lord means by serving Mammon—it is what turns our whole life upside down. Instead of caring first for our soul and for our salvation in general, we busy ourselves with satisfying the insatiable greed of our belly, and through our negligence we let our soul perish in its sins—this immortal being created in the image and likeness of God.

I will conclude with the words of the Savior: “Do not be anxious, saying: What shall we eat? or What shall we drink? or How shall we clothe ourselves? For the Gentiles seek after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them.” Listen to the word of the Lord: it is the Gentiles, not the Christians, who worry about what they will eat, what they will drink, or what they will wear, and who do not think about the works of God and the fulfillment of His commandments. Seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all the rest shall be added unto you. Amen.

 

Translated from the French edition