A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint Luke. Jesus journeyed through towns and villages preaching and proclaiming the good news of the kingdom of god. The 12 accompanied him and also some women who had been cured of evil spirits and various kinds of maladies. Mary called the Magdalene from whom seven devils had gone out. Joanna, the wife of Herod Stewart, Chudzah, and Susanna, and many others who were assisting Christ and his disciples out of their means.
And this is the gospel of the lord. In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit, amen. There is a much quoted sentence, often misquoted sentence from Saint Paul in here this reading we had this morning in his first letter to Timothy. Where Paul says that the the love of money is the root of all evil or words to that effect. It's often quoted as money is the root of all evil.
And of course, Paul had more sense than to say that. Because if there's anything that people want, world over is to have money or whatever is the equivalent thereof. Because it's unless you have it, you don't eat. I said, or the equivalent thereof. But what Paul said was, the love of money is the source, the root, the wellspring of evil and that that is an extremely true expression.
You see, it's it's the difference between what we possess and what possesses us. And this is not a quantitative thing, it's a qualitative thing. It isn't how much a person has that makes them increasingly a lover of money. They may not love money at all because actually the love money is plain silly. It's absurd.
What's money? The only thing money has is what it can do for you or for somebody else. It's a medium of exchange, whatever it be. I mean, whatever form it takes. Every every culture, every civilization has some kind of a medium of exchange.
It's absolutely necessary. And that's what we're talking about. Now, in some instances, the medium of exchange has worth in itself. If I have a bushel of potatoes and you have several pounds of butter and we exchange them, that's real. That's actuality.
That isn't money. It's a mode of exchange, and butter is a reality and my potatoes are reality. Gold for example, that has an intrinsic worth even either because of its own intrinsic properties which are extremely unique, or because of its scarcity, and because of its permanency, it's reliable, it can be handled easily, it's very malleable. But you see that has also Gold is different from money. If you have a block of gold, it may be worth some money, but it's not money.
What do we mean by money? We mean some kind of a sign or a symbol that stands for what? For what? You call a dollar bill or a $10 bill money, but you read it. It's a it's a note of trust or the equivalent thereof that the United States government agrees to pay you, it used to say $10 in gold.
Try to get the $10 in gold. So that all you have in your hand is some paper. You have a bank account, what does that mean? Figures. It says so many dollars.
So those dollars could tomorrow be worth absolutely nothing if the reliability of the government ceased overnight. And this has happened in plenty of places of the world, plenty of places. This isn't a fiction of the imagination. So that money is a it's an arbitrary medium of exchange. It stands for something more than itself.
It's a promissory note or the equivalent thereof. Now, the point that Paul is making, to love that is to love what? An empty symbol. It's empty. It's only worth what it can get you.
To want an automobile is one thing, to want $10,000 because it's $10,000 is something else. If you say that $10,000 I value because it'll buy me a car, that makes sense so far. But to say that I want $10,000 just to have $10,000, that's nonsense. That's a sign, a symbol without substance. I've many times from this pulpit reported how when I used to go down to the old Gallinger Hospital once a week to visit the patients there.
Well, we had a very special job to do to find the Catholics and to see that they got the sacraments. But in the course of that, you said hello, good afternoon to everybody. That seemed to be prepared to welcome a good afternoon. That wasn't always the truth, well it was. But anyway, here were many people lying in a bed or sitting on a bed, and beside that bed was a little night table about what?
Maybe 30 inches by 30 inches at the most. And I'm not exaggerating this in the least because these people were the poor of the poor taken off the streets of the district. In many instances, their entire wealth in this world was lying on that table. And as far as what it was worth is concerned, it was worthless except to that person. And if you think they couldn't be jealous of their wealth, you are highly mistaken.
I don't want to mean everybody, but some were absolutely most sensitive to the possibility that somebody might steal something from that little table. So, this was this impressed me terribly because here you had people all tightened up over their worldly possessions. And it brought home to me this and even in those tender years of mine, it brought home this truth. It's not how much it is that you have, It's how much that has you, that has you. And Saint Paul was very well Saint Paul was a very smart man, you know, Leaving all religious considerations and revelation aside, he was the only educated man among the apostles.
He had a good Greek education. He was a Roman citizen. He knew a thing or two. He was an experienced man, he was a very fervent believer in God, and he was a very dedicated servant of God, and all of this before he ever had that marvelous revelation or whatever happened to him on the way on the road. Now, what Paul is saying is what we all know, that in all of life there's probably no greater force that drives human beings, with the exception maybe of the appetite to keep oneself alive and the sexual appetite to keep the human race going.
And sometimes even one or other of them take second place to money, to money. This is a fact of experience. Nobody who knows, has read, or has had lived a few years can deny it. But you see the greatest error we can make is to blame money, whereas we should be blaming ourselves. Because you see in one in one way we talk about being being indifferent to the things of this world and at the same time we're all praying for things of this world.
We do it all the time. Now how do you make sense out of this? Of course it makes sense because Christianity makes sense. Our blessed lord doesn't ask us to live crazily or absurdly. That's one thing Christ did not ask us to do.
Plenty of Christians have lived absurdly. Plenty of Christians have lived irrationally and died saints, but that doesn't mean we all have to do it. Christ didn't ask us to do it. See, all the Christ asked us was everything. Everything.
First is to love God with your whole heart, with your whole mind, with your whole soul, and with all that you are. That's what Christ asked. Secondly, to love yourself. Thirdly, to love your neighbor. That's what we're bound to do.
And Christ asked nothing less than this, but this he does ask. He makes no compromise. He doesn't negotiate. You can't straddle the fence with Jesus Christ and have it both ways, a leg in his world and a leg in this world, in the sense in which you pursue the worldly objectives which are all around us, we summarize as secular humanism. You cannot have it both ways.
And what our blessed lord is asking us is that choose him, and choosing him everything else falls into place. You get you can't help in reading some of the some of what we call literature that there's something wrong in wealth, and yet everybody wants it. We pray for it. We take a collection up in church. Plenty of monasteries, plenty of churches have been and are in a sense wealthy.
So let's face it. It isn't wealth that's wrong. It's the way people who have wealth are possessed by it. And that, let me tell you, can be defined in terms of that little night table beside your bed. So, it's up to us.
It's what we put first, second, third, and fourth. And when Saint Paul says that the love of money, he is so right. He is so right because it's putting up a God. A God challenging God almighty, and I and God almighty does not tolerate any competitors. In the name of the father, and the son, and holy spirit.
Amen.