His Excellency,
The Most Reverend Edward K. Braxton, Ph.D., S.T.D.
Diocese of Belleville
Twenty-Fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time
September 21, 2025, 9:00 AM Mass
St. Luke Parish, Belleville
“You Cannot Serve Both God And Mammon.”
(Luke 16, 1-13)
(This is the text as originally written. During the actual delivery, some passages were omitted and other comments were added spontaneously. Nota bene: This text has not been thoroughly proofread. Therefore, there may be errors in spelling, grammar and punctuation.)
Dear Sisters and Brothers in Christ:
Jeopardy is the most popular American quiz show. Imagine that this morning we are all contestants on a special edition of Jeopardy. The category is: The Bible. Listen carefully to the clue. Jesus of Nazareth said, “If you are completely devoted to this, then you cannot be completely devoted to God.” The prize for the correct answer is $100,000. What is the answer? It seems that no one knows the correct answer. So, the prize doubles to $200,000. The moderator gives you a second clue. “You just heard the answer in the last sentence from the reading from the gospel of Luke. Here is the clue again, “If you are completely devoted to this, then you cannot be completely devoted to God.” Eureka! Mammon. Someone remembers the last sentence was, “You cannot serve both God and mammon.”
Now the $250,000 jackpot question is: what is mammon? Does anyone know? What is mammon? No Jackpot winner. Mammon is what causes us to stumble and lose our way in the spiritual life. Some Bibles translate the Aramaic word, mammon as “money.” “You cannot serve God and money.” But that is not a good translation. Fortunately, when the American Bishops approved the latest translation of the gospels, we decided to keep the word, mammon because it has many possible meanings. Mammon means much more than “money” or “wealth.” Mammon is derived from amen in Aramaic; the language Jesus spoke. While it can mean money, it also means something in which we place our trust, as well as ‘faithful,’ and ‘true. So, Jesus is using a word with multiple meanings in the native languages of his hearers. These layers of meaning are lost if the word is translated simply as ‘wealth,’ which could imply that money is intrinsically evil. Mammon is anything or anyone we followers of Jesus are tempted to serve with more love and devotion than love and devotion with which we should serve God.
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Now that we know what mammon is, we are back in the Jeopardy game. The category is: “Saints.” Here is the clue: “These 103 saints, who the Catholic Church honored yesterday, died because they were unwilling to love and serve mammon more than they loved and served God. Who are these saints? Those who go to daily Mass learned yesterday that they are the South Korean martyrs: Saint Andrew Kim Tae-gŏn, the first native South Korean priest, Saint Paul Chŏng Ha-sang, a lay catechist and their Companions, a group of 103 Korean Christians, who were martyred for their faith between 1839 and 1867 during severe persecutions in Korea, before religious freedom was granted in 1883. St. John Paul II canonized them during his Pastoral Visit to South Korea in 1984. Their feast day was yesterday, September 20.
Fr. Andrew Kim was baptized at 15 and ordained a priest in Shanghai. He was tortured and beheaded in 1846. Paul Chŏng was a married layman and catechist who was martyred in 1839. The Catholic Church in Korean was unique in that it was founded entirely by laypeople, not missionary priests. From the very beginning, Christians in Korea faced intense religious persecutions by the king, who viewed Christianity as a foreign and colonizing presence. An estimated 10,000 Catholics in Korea were martyred for their faith. The king told St. Paul Chŏng that the Catholic religion was forbidden and demanded that he renounce his commitment to Christ. Paul answered, “I am a Catholic. I will be a Catholic until the day I die.”
These faithful Korean Christians knew that king who persecuted them wanted then to serve him and not God. He was mammon. They were strengthened by Jesus’ words, “You cannot serve both God and mammon.” They valued their commitment to Christ above everything else. In dying for their faith, their martyrs’ blood led to the flourishing Catholic community in South Korea today. Saints are followers of Jesus who will not place any form of mammon above God. You and I are called to be saints.
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The most difficult question that you or I could be asked on this special edition of Jeopardy is this: What is mammon in your life and in my life? However, the moderator could not give us clues for the answer. Only we can find the clues by examining our consciences and by honestly looking at our daily lives and admitting to ourselves the situations when we serve something or someone more than we serve and love God in Jesus Christ.
Keep in mind mammon can be anything we put in a place higher than God in our lives. Mammon can be something bad, like the selfish desire for great wealth, power, and prestige more than the desire to serve God. However, mammon is not always something bad or negative. Great wealth is not necessarily mammon. All of you know St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee. It is renowned for its remarkable work in caring for children with life threatening cancer completely free of charge to families. Did you know it was founded by the Catholic entertainer, Danny Thomas, who served God by using his great wealth to save the lived of thousands of children. Danny Thomas’s wealth, which could have been mammon in someone else’s hands, became, in his hands, an expression of his love for God.
Something very good can be mammon if we treat as if it is of greater importance in our lives than loving and serving God with our whole hearts. It takes great spiritual honesty to recognize that we have placed something that is, in fact, good above the supreme good of loving God. Mammon can be different for each of us at different times in our lives.
At one point, we may act as if getting a good education and finding a good job is more important than our faith and our spiritual life. At another point, our relationship with someone we love deeply may be all consuming leaving us no soul space for our relationship with God. Having young children can be a wonderful blessing. But, if meeting the needs of and caring for these children consumes all of the time and energy of the parents, making it impossible for the parents to make time for prayerfully reading the Scripture, meditation, and spiritual direction it could become mammon. At yet another point in our lives, amassing a certain amount of money and buying the home we want may be so important that we simply do not have time for daily prayer, going to Mass, going to confession, and helping others in need. These are all situations when it is possible that things that are good in themselves can become mammon in our lives, if they lead to neglecting our relationship with God, or ignoring it altogether. As committed Christians, it may be somewhat easy for us to choose to serve God and not mammon when mammon is something obviously bad or sinful, However, when mammon is something that is good and desirable, there may well be times when the human satisfaction of choosing a merely human good over the supreme good of God is irresistible.
The final Jeopardy category is: Salvation. The clue is: This is what every Catholic needs to be strong enough to reject mammon in all its forms and embrace the absolute goodness, truth, and beauty of God. The answer is: the Grace of the Lord Jesus Christ which He will offer us momentarily in His Body and Blood, the Eucharist. “You cannot serve both God and mammon!” If we live by Jesus’ words, the result will not be a Jeopardy jackpot. It will be Eternal Life!
Praised be Jesus Christ. Both now and forever. AMEN!