WHAT IS MAMMON?
The Rich Fool. Rembrandt, 1627.
What is Mammon?
Mammon is the deification of the accumulation of wealth. One’s life becomes a quest to accumulate more and more wealth and property until it becomes a religious practice supplanting all other things, and wealth becomes an object of worship. This is why Jesus put mammon and God in stark opposition to each other. For Jesus, to serve mammon is to replace God with something else. Moreover, the pursuit of wealth displaces one’s obligation to and love of neighbor. One becomes greedy and exploitative, seeking opportunities for gain. One becomes obsessive about protecting one’s property and possessions, or guarding future interests in accumulating more.
Mammon In the Time Of Jesus
Jesus’s ministry took place within the context of the Roman Empire. The political economy of Jesus’s time was mostly agrarian. Large areas of cultivation were worked by peasants. Some of their crops were used for subsistence, but the rest were paid as tribute or as taxes. There were large towns and small cities, where craftsmen plied their trade. Jesus’s father Joseph belonged to this group. Around the Sea of Galilee, a fishing trade existed, with both fish and fish sauce becoming exports. The fishermen were not well off, patching up their boats with whatever timber they could find. Due to the conquests of both Alexander the Great and the Romans, Judea was becoming part of a vast interconnected trade zone around the Mediterranean. Yet most of the wealth went to the powers that be, whether they were rich merchants, landowners, Rome’s client kings, or the Imperial administration.
There was great hope among the Jewish people, and in particular peasants, that one day a revolt would happen that would throw Rome and its lackeys out of the land of Israel. Before Jesus began his ministry several revolts had taken place, all of them brutally put down. The hope of a divine reversal of the world and its hierarchy is epitomized in the Virgin Mary’s Magnificat (Luke 1:46–55), her song praising what God has done for her in bearing the Messiah and the expected rule that God would bring the exploited people of Israel. God would cast the mighty down from their thrones, and send the rich away empty, and lift up the lowly. Yet while most anti-Roman Jewish movements were largely focused squarely on political liberation, Jesus was not. Why this difference?
Two thousand years before Karl Marx expressed his famous philosophy analyzing the world in terms of economic relationships, Jesus too saw that there was something deeper in the human condition than merely one particular empire occupying Israel. The issue was not just the Roman Empire, but the very root that created the empire in the first place. For Jesus, it is the desire to own and the anxiety of lack, which creates the pursuit of obtaining something, even at the point of a sword. This is what creates empire. This is what Jesus referred to as mammon.
This is why Jesus tells the rich man who wanted to follow him to sell all his possessions (Mark 10:17–27; Matthew 19:16–22). Clinging on to wealth can become idolatrous in and of itself. The rich often receive Jesus’s harshest criticism. Two parables stand out which illustrate two aspects of Jesus’s attitude towards wealth. Jesus sees it as both sheer folly and as creating a class divide which neglects one’s neighbor.
The first parable is that of the rich man who wanted to build bigger storehouses once he did an inventory of his wealth. The punchline is that he died that very night, and his accumulation was pointless since he couldn’t take his riches with him in death (Luke 12:13–21). Instead, Jesus teaches us to store up “treasures in heaven”, for true wealth is not physical objects or commodities, but love and virtue.
The second is the parable of the rich man and Lazarus (Luke 16:19–31). Here Jesus is at his most black and white. Jesus tells us nothing about the rich man aside from the clothes he wears. His clothes infer someone of incredibly high status, perhaps the Roman emperor. This man ignores Lazarus, a poor suffering man who is outside his gate. Death takes both and their roles are reversed; the rich man suffers in Hades, while Lazarus is in heaven in the bosom of Abraham. The rich man asks for aid, which Abraham says he cannot do. A great chasm lies between the rich man and Lazarus. Nor can the rich man warn his friends of the impending doom which awaits them. For Jesus, the rich have the law and the prophets constantly preaching social and economic justice which the rich ignore. Not only has mammon become their God, but it has created a class divide which can only be overcome by the rich person’s own divestment of wealth. As Jesus simply put it in the Sermon on the Plain, “Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God. . . . But woe to you who are rich, for you have already received your comfort” (Luke 6:20–24).
The early church took Jesus’s teachings about avoiding wealth accumulation very seriously. The book of Acts recounts: “Now the whole group of those who believed were of one heart and soul, and no one claimed private ownership of any possessions, but everything they owned was held in common. There was not a needy person among them, for as many as owned lands or houses sold them and brought the proceeds of what was sold. They laid it at the apostles’ feet, and it was distributed to each as any had need” (Acts 4:32, 34–35). Or as someone else would later say, “From each according to his ability to each according to his need.” This abandonment of private property was a requirement of the Acts church in Jerusalem. Barnabas’s sale of his own property is contrasted with the duplicity of Ananias and Saphira (Acts 5:1–11).
We see the same exhortation repeated in other New Testament texts. First Timothy goes to say, “But those who want to be rich fall into temptation and are trapped by many senseless and harmful desires that plunge people into ruin and destruction. For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil, and in their eagerness to be rich some have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many pains” (1 Timothy 6:9–10). The pursuit of wealth not only leads to trouble but replaces worship of God with another faith—that of mammon. The book of Hebrews says, “Keep your lives free from the love of money, and be content with what you have . . . .” (Hebrews 13:5).
James is even more emphatic in its condemnation of wealth. “But the rich should take pride in their humiliation—since they will pass away like a wild flower” (James 1:10). James is concerned with favoritism shown to rich people in Christian communities. James condemns this class favoritism which leads to antagonism against the poor. He reminds his readers, “Has not God chosen those who are poor in the eyes of the world to be rich in faith and to inherit the kingdom he promised those who love him? But you have dishonored the poor. Is it not the rich who are exploiting you?” (James 2:5–6). For James, hatred of the poor is synonymous with mammon worship. Again, James condemns the rich: “Now listen, you rich people, weep and wail because of the misery that is coming on you. Your wealth has rotted, and moths have eaten your clothes. Your gold and silver are corroded. Their corrosion will testify against you and eat your flesh like fire. You have hoarded wealth in the last days. Look! The wages you failed to pay the workers who mowed your fields are crying out against you” (James 5:1–6). Hoarding and exploitation are at the heart of James’s exhortations against wealth in his letter. The rich appear noble and are loved by the people, but are in actuality thieves. Their way of life deserves no worship or adoration.
The example of the early church continued even as the church found itself a very part of the empire it once had struggled against. As more and more wealthy Romans became Christians, less emphasis was placed on economic simplicity and refraining from wealth accumulation. This gave rise to the counterbalancing force of the monastic movement, which abolished private property within the cloister. Saint Benedict, the ancestor of most modern monks, mandated that a monk was not to own anything lest he fall into the trap of mammon. Saint Francis came from a rich noble background and also maintained a rule of poverty for his order. Francis said that poverty was the preferred way to serve Christ and avoid wealth. Saint John Chrysostom saw the wealth of the rich as nothing less than theft from the poor.
Mammon In Our Time
Whereas the disciples lived in a largely agrarian and slave economy, we live in industrial (some would say post-industrial) capitalism. Wealth is no longer “in kind,” expressed through agricultural or manufactured products or even in land itself, but through money. Capitalism has remade the world. Capitalism has infiltrated every aspect of our modern society and has transformed it according to its own principles of wealth accumulation and profit motive, to the commodification of all aspects of human life without moral judgement aside from someone profiting. Virtue and vice have no intrinsic meaning aside from the monetary value of someone making money of either behavior.
However, class hierarchy and imperialism remain as true for our lives as they were two thousand years ago. What also remains true is our misplaced worship of things over people. The commodification of life has intensified under capitalism; everything from natural resources to relationships now has a price tag and minimum rate of admission. Even our labor power is something bought by those we work for. We are bombarded with advertisements that influence our buying habits and reify our belief in the system itself. Capitalism seems on the surface amoral, with no moral judgements about what is bought or sold. And yet the continued need for growth and competition leads more often to negative outcomes. Corners are cut, wages decreased, and workers exploited. On a larger scale whole nations are subjugated by more powerful nations for resources, labor, or markets.
Workers feel pervasive alienation while they work to create something which they do not own. We are alienated from each other as actual human beings, seeing one another less as neighbors and more as potential enactors – or victims – of exploitation. We are also alienated from God, who has been displaced by mammon as the very focal part of our lives. Too often cost-benefit analysis becomes our primary mode of thinking, rather than loving God and our neighbor. Christianity has not escaped from this either. Too often churches and clergy reflect capitalist ways of thinking. The Protestant Reformation occurred during the rise of capitalism and the two have become interlinked. The prosperity gospel, with its “slot machine theology” proclaiming that God will simply hand out wealth in response to faith, is anathema to the theology and communalist practices of the earliest Christians.
Mammon is also an environmental betrayal of our faith in God. In Genesis, God calls us to be “stewards of the earth”—in other words, caretakers. Again and again, we are told that the Earth is God’s, not ours. Yet mammon would seduce us into believing that we own the Earth as our own personal property; or if not the entire world, then the parts of we control. This belief has led to wars, evictions, and suffering. Now we are on the brink of environmental annihilation. Instead of being good stewards of God’s creation, we have become its owners, but not to take care of the earth, but to ruthlessly exploit it for our own gain. We delude ourselves into thinking God gave us that right, but God has always placed provisions in the Law to take care of creation and to cease our productivity. Most notably, this was the meaning of the Sabbath: we must take time off to enjoy life (Exodus 20:8–11). A portion of one’s goods must be left for the poor (Leviticus 19:9, 23:22; Deuteronomy 24:19). The land must be replenished and redistributed fairly, and all debts must be cancelled every seven and fifty years (Leviticus 25:8–13, Deuteronomy 15:1–6).
What Is to Be Done?
Christians must return to the communalist beliefs of our ancient faith. At the very least, Christians need to advocate the restoration of the commons, that is to say services and functions that are public property (held in common by all) and not privatized (owned by the few for a price of use). This means Christians must once again enter the political sphere. Join a good political organization. Help organize and support your neighbors.
Christians must embrace simplicity when it comes to possessions, remaining content with what we have. Recently the term Bien Vivir has arisen in certain circles. The concept is “living well”— being content with what one has and focusing on being one’s best self. Life is not about what one owns but how one lives. While originating with indigenous peoples in Latin America, this concept is not unique to their culture. It is also at the foundation of our own faith. We must as a church find a way to cultivate the practice with our own members to decouple ourselves from mammon.
Christians must become more politically involved to not only struggle against mammon, but to proclaim that a better world is possible. This was the mission of the earliest Christians as they struggled against an empire where property accumulation meant everything and offered a better way, a better Kingdom. We must, as faithful disciples of Jesus Christ and members of an ancient tradition who has struggled against mammon, take up the call and banner. Whether within the church or outside political organizations, we must make sure that the reign of mammon is no longer the driving force of our lives. Mammon cannot be our true god.
The struggle against mammon is an ancient struggle, but it is one that we must with God’s help win. If there is to be a better world and the Reign of God in it, then we must create a better system where resources can be distributed. As Martin Luther King Jr. put it, “Call it democracy, or call it democratic socialism, but there must be a better distribution of wealth within this country for all God’s children.”
The Jewish prophetic and Christian traditions have long imagined a world without mammon. “Hear, everyone who thirsts; come to the waters; and you who have no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price” (Isaiah 55:1). The end of mammon is not simply the end of wealth as an object of value, but the end of material scarcity and anxiety but human satiation and community. As Isaiah prophesies, “They shall not hunger or thirst, neither scorching wind nor sun shall strike them down, for he who has pity on them will lead them and by springs of water will guide them” (Isaiah 49:10).
