Don’t acquire possessions here on earth, where moth or insect eats away and where robbers break in and steal. Instead gather your nest egg in heaven, where neither moth nor insect eats away and where no robbers break in or steal. As you know, what you treasure is your hearts true measure.
The most common interpretation of this teaching has been to disdain hoarding or preoccupation with material security. There is a kind of wealth that can be stolen and another kind of wealth that cannot be stolen. Jesus is clearly encouraging attention to a form of wealth that cannot be lost.
He says this kind of wealth is kept in heaven. How heaven is understood in the twenty-first century is quite unlike how it would have been understood in the first century.
The afterlife was not a major concern of Jewish faith. In striking contrast with their Egyptian and many Mesopotamian neighbors the Jewish faith of the period was very much of this world. The most common word in the Hebrew Scriptures for the abode of God is the same word (shamayim) that is used for the physical universe. The sense that God is somehow above and outside the physical universe is a fairly recent concept, and would have been quite difficult to grasp for those listening to Jesus.When we read the quote from Matthew many moderns will also – usually without knowing it – hear it under the influence of Plato and Descartes. These harmonies would not have been there for those listening to Jesus. They would have heard a much more direct melody.
If Jesus was making the same point with modern listeners he might say something such as:
Don’t invest in short-term and speculative propositions. Instead focus on long-term and sustainable returns. And if this is the key to financial success, the same values are even more important in the rest of your life. Give priority to your long-term relationships with one another and with God. In all things give priority to what is real and lasting. As you know, what you treasure is your hearts true measure.
For most of the last twenty years, my professional life has involved the Internet and related technologies as a key differentiator. As a result, during the dot.com boom of the 1990s I was involved in several investment opportunities. In one case I joined some other experienced men to launch a start-up that went after venture capital support. We were experienced enough and our concept was sufficiently promising that we almost always received a serious hearing for an investment. But at some point the VCs always pushed for something that my co-founders and I found unrealistic and unsustainable. All of our business experience told us we were being asked to paint ourselves into an unattractive corner.
When our management team would reject these preconditions our request for funding would also be rejected. After several such mutual rejections, I began to feel especially old and out-of-touch. As billions of dollars flowed through the dot.com sector it became increasingly clear that I was ill-suited to the “new economy.” But I also recognized that I could not agree to the preconditions and be myself. Well before the dot.com bubble burst, I had stopped actively seeking the VC funding. In many ways it felt like a profound failure, an opportunity to which I was unable to adapt.
About nine months after I gave up, the bubble burst big-time. On several occasions since then the unsuccessful management team has given thanks for our unsuccess.
It is much more satisfying to build a business – no matter how modest – that is well-suited to your true self, than to undertake something badly matched and then spend months or years reducing staff, explaining missed targets, dealing with legal challenges, and trying to convert an unsustainable business model into something else.
I treasure the creative process, which means I treasure my co-creators: colleagues and clients (I should include competitors, but that would be a lie, I am not that spiritually mature; respect is as far as I can go). I want to make money. I need to make money. “Give us this day our daily bread,” is a very meaningful element of the Lords Prayer. But money is not treasure, it is a pale reflection of the treasure.
Many of the teachings of Jesus are far beyond my current faith and strength. But it is clear that money – whether it is a crisp cashiers check with many zeros or a moth eaten dollar bill – is just a tool. It has no meaning in itself. Value is produced through sustained engagement in creative problem-solving and sustained engagement in meaningful relationships.
Righteousness, justice, and peace create the kind of long-term value that is truly sustainable.
The image above is Death and the Miser by Hieronymous Bosch (1494 or later)
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