Matthew 6:24-34
Chapter 6
God and Money
No one can serve two masters; for he will either hate one and love the other, or he will be loyal to the first and look down on the second. You cannot, at the same time, serve God and money.Trust in God
Therefore, I tell you not to worry about food and drink for yourself, or about clothes for your body. Isn’t life more important than food? And isn’t the body more important than clothes?
Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or harvest or store food in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not more important than they?
Can any of you add a day to your life by worrying about it?
Why are you so concerned about your clothes? Just look at how the flowers in the fields grow—they don’t toil or spin.
But I tell you that not even Solomon in all his glory was clothed like one of these.
If God so clothes the grass of the field, which blooms today and is to be burned in an oven tomorrow, how much more will he clothe you? What little faith you have!
Don’t worry and ask: What are we going to eat? What are we going to drink? Or: What shall we wear?
The pagans are concerned with such things, but your heavenly Father knows that you need all of them.
Prioritize the kingdom and righteousness of God first, and all these things will be added to you.
Don’t worry about tomorrow, because tomorrow will handle itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.
Commentaries
The True Treasure – Light and Darkness – God and Money.
With these words, Jesus reveals the root of evil—greed rooted in idolatry. “Mammon,” the god of money, stands as the unbridgeable rival of the God of the Beatitudes, whose holiness shines through his generosity, as highlighted in the Lord’s Prayer. Jesus ends with a simple phrase that urges listeners, both then and now, to make a clear choice—either for God or for money (24).
Trust in God.
Perhaps no other religious idea in our Christian tradition has been more misunderstood, misused, or exploited than that of God’s providence. It has been employed for many reasons: to justify a lack of effort and personal responsibility, to accept whatever happens with fatalism; to silence our conscience in the face of injustice and the oppression of the poor, trusting that providence will look after them. Deep down, if we do not understand what to expect from God’s providence, it might be because we have not yet taken the Sermon on the Mount seriously.
Jesus does not tell us how or when providence works; he simply encourages us to trust and surrender to the hands of our loving Father-Mother God, for whom his sons and daughters are the most precious beings in all of creation, and therefore to move from worry to trust.