Well, okay, fine … there are probably more than that. But I’m thinking of two very different kinds. The obsessive
sort of hatred is obvious: it turns the stomach sour, occupies the mind
constantly and spoils the enjoyment of life. Saul’s hatred must have been
something like that. He expended ridiculous amounts of emotional energy and
resources in attempting to rid the world of David, very much to his own
detriment.
The other kind of hatred is despite.
That Old Devil Mammon
To despise something is not necessarily to loathe it passionately and constantly mull over its bad points. It is to
undervalue it so completely that you may not even think of it at all. That at
least seems to be the sense of the word kataphroneō,
which the Lord uses in a very familiar passage about that old devil mammon from
the Sermon on the Mount:
“No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and money.”
Two masters, two sets of responses. The “either” and “or” clauses form what
appears to be a fairly standard Hebrew parallelism of the sort found all over the Psalms and Proverbs. Linguists conclude the purpose of the device was to flesh out or expand an idea by repeating it with a
slight variation: “hate” and “despise” at one extreme, and “love” and “be
devoted to” at the other. If this is indeed what the Lord was doing, then devotion and despite are the particular twists on love and hate to which he was drawing attention.
Undervaluing the Valuable
The Lord uses the same word a few chapters later in Matthew when he tells his disciples, “See that you do not
despise one of these little ones.” Now, I’m sure there is a very small subset of human
beings who absolutely abhor children and can’t abide their presence (“I like
children,” said W.C. Fields, “if they’re properly cooked”), but Fieldsian misanthropy
is surely not the attitude with which the Lord is primarily concerned here. He’s
wanting to ensure that his disciples do not overlook believers who might otherwise
seem insignificant to them.
The danger is not of obsessing about how perfectly horrid children are (whether we think of literal or spiritual
children), but of undervaluing them — of not thinking of them
appropriately or considering them at all.
That’s despite.
Blind to Their True Passion
In scripture, even “hate” is often a relative term. “Jacob I loved, but
Esau I hated,” says the Lord, and he’s not talking about emotions. He means that Jacob was (and
remains) sovereignly singled out for God’s personal attention and ultimate
blessing in a way that Esau was not.
So when we consider the moral danger of attempting
to serve both God and money, we should probably not picture the sort of
individual who actively detests God, fuming visibly at the mention of his name.
Such people exist, of course, even in large numbers, but they are not really the
subject matter of this verse. The temptation to order one’s life around one’s
finances does not of necessity produce visceral antipathy toward Heaven, and loathing
God doesn’t necessarily make one inordinately acquisitive. In fact, men and
women regularly claim to love God with perfectly straight faces while remaining
stone blind to their true passion.
Enslaved to the Appearance of Necessity
My experience is that few lovers of mammon are sufficiently self-aware to comprehend the nature of their chains. The mere desire for security is rarely labeled greedy, but if every financial decision you make is predicated on your own continued well-being, it’s hard to see how the two attitudes may be functionally distinguished. Many of us are unconsciously enslaved to the appearance of necessity.
The real moral danger of money is not hostility to God or even rampaging greed, but a sort of
blasé kow-towing to perfectly ordinary consumerism that utterly fails to reckon God’s transcendent reality and desires into the equation. The spiritual peril is not
in what we feel but in what we do more or less by default, for it is in those life decisions, big and
small, that we give evidence of what really matters to us, and which Master it
is to whom we are truly devoted.
No comments :
Post a Comment