Today’s readings: Amos 8, 4-7; 1 Timothy 2, 1-8; Luke 16, 1-13.
Since “money makes the world go round”, people have always been lured to believe that money is miraculous. As Pope Francis writes in his The Joy of the Gospel, one of our major problems is our relationship with money, since we calmly accept its dominion over ourselves and our societies. Money turns people into gods and in turn itself becomes a god.
The days of Amos the prophet and the situation Amos is addressing in the 8th century BC are so distant from ours, yet so near. The poor in society have always been victims of grand ideologies and of personal greed to an extent that social injustice comes as natural in the globe and becomes also acceptable.
From the faith perspective, injustice and poverty are an affront to God. As in the specific case of Amos, what becomes very serious is that the worship of God is tamed down to silence in the face of injustice. Amos screams in protest because his God never settles down to compromise where people are unjustly treated and where we become complacent to all sorts of inequality.
Jesus in Luke’s gospel goes straight to the point and unmasks for us the real issue: it is our relationship with money. Money is an easy idol that enslaves, to the extent that people who cannot be trusted with money are simply not trustworthy persons. “If you cannot be trusted with money, who will trust you with genuine riches?” Luke introduces a very interesting distinction between money and genuine riches. Because life’s worth cannot be nailed down to money, it cannot be quantified.
The message of Jesus here is loud and clear: we can so easily be lured to believe that at the end of the day we can negotiate even our own survival. That is why for Jesus it boils down to being “children of the world”, in the way we ourselves pretend to deal with life, or “children of the light”. Yet the gospel is being provocative, in the sense that it provokes those who claim to believe in God to assume their responsibility in the world and for the world’s malaises.
It does not suffice at all simply to pray for the poor; it brings us nowhere simply to resign ourselves to a status quo which has always known poverty and injustice, looking at reality as if it was an unsurmountable mountain. Fighting injustice has always been part and parcel of the church’s mission to evangelise, even though Christianity itself has gone through its bad patches where this aspect of its mission became overshadowed.
Yet there is a constant thread of thought crossing from the times of Moses to the prophets of social justice, to the vibrant Church Fathers denouncing injustice and inequality in the early centuries of Christianity. Till we come to Bartolome’ de las Casas, the 16th century harsh opponent of the atrocities committed by the Spanish colonists and who was the pioneer to what in our days came to be known as the Theology of Liberation.
Christianity cannot proclaim only freedom from slavery to sin and ignore the liberation from those unjust systems which unfortunately, many a time, even had our blessings. The theologians of Liberation even in our time were asking the simple question: can we continue to proclaim God’s kingdom in a world of injustice without addressing the causes of that injustice?
Pope Francis, again from the document quoted, writes: “Some people continue to defend trickle-down theories which assume that economic growth, encouraged by a free market, will inevitably succeed in bringing about greater justice and inclusiveness in the world”. But, the Pope affirms, this has never been confirmed by the facts.
Unfortunately, very frequently, the so-called free market as we know it today is not just a theory worked out at some desk, but a life-style that is being fueled by greed which returns in a new and ruthless guise as viral, with no respect for people and the environment alike, putting profit always over people.