Saturday of the Thirty-First Week in Ordinary Time
The money and the sex
I tell you, make friends for yourselves with dishonest wealth, so that when it fails, you will be welcomed into eternal dwellings. The person who is trustworthy in very small matters is also trustworthy in great ones; and the person who is dishonest in very small matters is also dishonest in great ones. If, therefore, you are not trustworthy with dishonest wealth, who will trust you with true wealth? If you are not trustworthy with what belongs to another, who will give you what is yours? No servant can serve two masters. He will either hate one and love the other, or be devoted to one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and mammon.” The Pharisees, who loved money, heard all these things and sneered at him. And he said to them, “You justify yourselves in the sight of others, but God knows your hearts; for what is of human esteem is an abomination in the sight of God. Lk 16,9-15
We open the newspaper and we find that politicians, administrators and leaders are embroiled in affairs of sex, drugs, corruption, bribery and favoritism of any kind. They are not the only ones affected by these social ills, but, bearing more power, their transgressions are more practicable. Mostly, these are more easily detected, because now the political battle is no longer conducted in the comparison of the principles, of the ideas and of the programs, but on the destruction of the opponent. Why do these characters hold prominent roles in the society? Why, when these people reach certain positions, the latent transgressions are enhanced and are detected in all their squalor? Why these people are elected? It seems to exist between voters and rulers a dangerous connection, about which the philosopher Platoon more than two thousand years warns us: “When a people, consumed by the thirst for freedom, is found to have a chief butler to pay him what he wants, up to get drunk, then it happens that, if the rulers resist to the requests of ever more demanding subjects, they are declared to be tyrants”. (Plato, The Republic, Book VIII). The Bible (Lev. 18:21) speaks of a monstrous idol, called Moloch, adored in Palestine before the arrival of the jews and to whom worship was made by burning children in front of him. The moloc of our times is the money. It has a twin gods, the sex, represented by the goddess Astarte. One supplies worshipers to the other. Why the providence and the love, God’s gifts, are so easily transformed in the idols of the money and of the sex? The main reason lies in the man’s sin who, turning away from God, takes possession of his gifts as an administrator who runs away with the cash. Just when we corner the received gifts, we do not use them for the right purpose and we do not share them, they are automatically transformed into idols and they lose all their original luster: “The pharisees, who loved the money, heard all these things and sneered at him”.