You Cannot Serve Two Masters

Vox Nova is again pleased to present a guest post by Fr. Carl Diederichs of the Archdiocese of Milwaukee

Bread In The Wilderness

Father Carl Diederichs

All Saints Catholic Church

In the Gospel we proclaimed today, March 2, 2014, Jesus continues to teach us how to live as His disciples (Matt 6:24-34):  He begins by saying, “No one 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 (money, property or that in which one puts one’s trust and finds one’s basic security).”

Jesus continues to urge us not to “worry” about life, what we are to eat or drink, what we are to wear, because God, our Heavenly Father will provide for us.  Our Heavenly Father feeds us, so don’t worry, Jesus says.  And as for clothing, why are you worried about what you will wear?  God will take care of what we eat, drink and wear.  But we do worry, don’t we?  We fret and scheme and spent so much time worrying about ourselves.

Many of us have made the decision about which master we will serve.  And we know this not by what we say, but by what we do.  We all need to meditate on the prayer we say at each Mass, the Our Father, when we ask for “our daily bread.”

We cannot reap and keep if we are serving God.  We must care and share.  And this isn’t to deny we have needs and as good stewards we plan for those needs, but we also know that many of our financial decisions are based on “wants” and not needs.  And this is where the challenge to share and care comes from, before we worry about our “wants,” we have a responsibility to give to the needs of others.

And we don’t need to look far to see the unmet needs of our brothers and sisters who are poor and hungry.  If we are Godly people we know that feeding them is an essential part of our life’s work.  It means we have chosen to serve God.

The need to rethink our consumerism and to see how often we act greedily is part of our journey to become more like God: to be generous, loving and kind to all, but especially the poor.

We know we didn’t cause the problem of poverty, but we are here to alleviate it, if we have chosen to follow God.  Our sensitivity to the needs of others will be the sensitivity of God.   And as we become more and more sensitive to the needs of poor people, we will hear these words of Pope Francis in a more profound way: “Today finding a homeless person who has died of cold is not news…the many children who don’t have food ~ that is not news.  This is grave.  We can’t rest easy while things are this way.”

So, God has provided enough food and clothing for all.  It is our responsibility to share.