WAS JESUS A STOCKBROKER ?

We often read in the four versions of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the following phrase: ‘God or Mammon’. To fully understand what Jesus had in mind when He said this, it is important to know what Mammon is and from where it was derived.
First of all there is a great difference between ‘mamon’ (with one m) and ‘mammon’ (with a double m). If a person wanted to invest a sum of money, say €10, 000, or $10,000, he would find a stockbroker of trust and ‘entrust him’ with that sum of money; so the modern stockbroker was the ‘mamon’.

When the ‘trust’ was shifted from the person doing the transaction, the stockbroker, and was placed on the ‘money’ itself, or on the ‘wealth’, money and wealth became synonymous with ‘mamon’ and to distinguish it from the original meaning of ‘mamon’ it was written with a double mm, ‘mammon’.

But, you might ask what has this to do with next Sunday’s Gospel or with Jesus Christ? If we stop to think we realise that when a person dies, he is put in a box (cheap or expensive) and buried out of sight, six feet deep. No buried person has ever taken his estates with him, his bank accounts, his wealth, his car, not even his dear ones (God forbid).

It was the culture of the Pharaohs to do just that. The famous pyramids we, as tourists like to visit, were originally planned to be the burial site, of the Pharaohs; with the dead king they used to put his wealth, his expensive furniture and his servants. He even had a boat tied to travel to the next world, as they believed. Thieves and robbers plundered many a pyramid and made a feast on the rich treasures.

But we are not Pharaohs not even if we were. Whatever we have is loaned to us by God in His eternal mercy. Every talent is given to us, to make good use of it, and we have to realise that some day ... it might be tomorrow or next month, we have to give account of the ‘talents’ we have misused. Going back to mamon, Christ warned the people of His time and He is warning us today, that we should have trust in Him, as our stockbroker, and not on the wealth, the talents He might have provided us with.

If any person thinks that he is wealthy, talented, prosperous just because he worked for it, because he is a genius, he is bright and cunning; he is very wrong. Whatever God has given us, rather loaned us, is simply to make good use of it for His glory and for the good of our neighbours.