MONEY
For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil.
1 Timothy 6: 10
Bitcoin? Is that money? Gold? Is that money maybe? Or Silver? Those shiny, stainless-steel looking coins, which were the ancient means of exchange for thousands of years? In the Roman Empire they were mined by pick and shovel through slave labor, literally moving mountains in Spain to uncover this precious metal. Then slaves’ lives were cheap and brutal, but silver – and gold – were needed to finance the legions who needed to conquer ever more remote regions to capture ever more humans there to be abused in the millions to acquire ever more silver and gold. Yes, silver and gold come at a price: human lives. I don’t have to remind you that Jesus’ life was bought with 30 pieces of silver, all showing the portrait of the Roman Emperor.
Today it’s a somewhat different story. We, the 21st Century magician-kings, living in our climate-controlled petites palaces, finally have mastered money: at long last we have discovered the age-old mystery, the eternally evasive alchemy that was never solved before in the perennial pursuit of creating gold out of ‘nothing’. We did it! Today we create money ‘ex nihilo’ the same way God created the world. We have made it! The secret of creating wealth has emerged! Christine Lagarde, Jerome Powell, are the new high priests, with the status of demi-gods: they now have the power to create money out of nothing: just type in a figure on that magic computer screen, anywhere from zero to trillions, and the money is there: Praise the Lord, Hallelujah! After all these millennia of digging and mining, of cheating and scraping, of broken limbs and ruined lives, we now have uncovered the magic source of money: the Central Banks of the world!
Remember the Ten Lost Years, from 1929-1939, when money was scarce, had almost disappeared and governments wanted balanced budgets? Hardship; unemployment; poverty; breadlines; soup kitchens; were the result. Ach, poor people! Stupid economists. Not we: We are smart. Deprivation, destitution, are things of the past: now untold numbers of these money units: Dollars, Euros, any denomination, all created at the touch of the finger. Based on what? A trillion dollars here, a trillion euros there, pounds in abundance: based on what? On trust, while trust is collapsing everywhere? No, it’s based on future growth in a world teetering on the abyss of Climate Change, balancing on a still evolving pandemic, threatened by a melting Arctic with unpredictable weather consequences: in other words, the future of this money is as secure as the whims of the weather, is as safe as betting on an ever – higher stock market and increasing house prices, and as sure as vanishing inflation.
What we see today is the desperate last gasp of a dying world, exponentially ignoring its expiring status, and so accelerating its own demise. The biblical lesson, “For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil”, is conveniently forgotten. That same ‘root of evil’, has now grown into a gigantic tree, overshadowing all else, but no longer rooted, because its root-rot has become invisible to the naked eye.
Yet, money is needed.
I know: Many trillions of dollars are justifiably being spent to strengthen human healthcare and boost the global economy, but at what cost: deforestation and the illegal wildlife trade continue unabated, ensuring that worse and more frequent pandemics will strike again in ever more severe forms.
Money always reminds me of that curious episode in the Jerusalem Temple when Jesus got so angry at these merchants doing their quite legitimate thing. That temple there had its own currency, so exchange was necessary. Also, people wanted to honor Yahweh through offerings, and that too was made possible. All these actions were completely legit, so why his sudden burst of rage?
Well, I offer an explanation.
Here Jesus portrays something hardly ever talked about: Jesus embodies the New Creation, the Kingdom to come and this is equally true for the temple: it too foreshadowed the New Creation. Its Holy of Holies contained replicas of trees and flowers, depicting Paradise, the Garden of Eden. Jesus, correctly, saw the temple as a symbol of that New Creation, where everything is available in natura, where commercial trade does not exist, where money is taboo, where the gifts of the earth are available free, where equality in the purest sense is the norm, where there are no class differences, no hoarding, no gold or silver as an exchange medium. Jesus, reflecting on the New, Perfect world to come, seeing it in the temple, saw the evil money was causing his beloved cosmos to degenerate into total depletion. That, I believe, is the correct way of explaining this event and his rage. Jesus loathed the way commerce was done: saw money, and our desire to acquire more, as the root of all evil, fully well knowing that money will betray him for a lousy 30 pieces of silver.
Can we function without money?
In spite of all its drawbacks, money, as a tool to facilitate the commerce between human beings, was and is, nevertheless, an inspired invention, with tremendous potential for both good and evil. That is why, when first invented, it was administered by the priestly class. Today, more than ever, Money makes the world go round and goes around the world with a velocity equal to the speed of light and in torrents unequaled in history: the daily flood amounts to Trillions of Dollars. Because of Money the global economy is like a jet plane, fast, comfortable and when it crashes, its fall is also spectacular.
Can we function without money? Jesus did to some extent. When he came to earth, he could have been a human being of any description, stature, degree and condition; and yet he chose to be poor. The English poet Christopher Harvey said of him in the Seventeenth Century:
It was Thy Choice, whilst Thou on Earth didst stay,
And hadst not whereupon Thy Head to lay.
Where Jesus mostly lived without money, our lives are centered around it. Jesus once made a severe statement: “You cannot serve God and Mammon.” But in our Western world everything is about money/mammon: the stock market, the strength of the dollar, the price of gold, three items mentioned in almost every newscast. Let’s not kid ourselves: Mammon is God, the Dollar is King in the world and its possession a holy grail. We now put a price tag on everything. First on Jesus – 30 pieces of silver – and now also on God and creation: the woods are paved, the mountains mined, the seas eaten, species eliminated: all offerings to Mammon. We all participate in that criminal act. Jesus was sold for the price of a slave: we are selling creation to serve us as a slave. We, white Westerners, a 10 percent of the world’s population cause 40 percent of the world’s pollution, in perfect accordance with the aims of Capitalism which defines itself as Creative Destruction. I am more and more inclined to think that Capitalism and its exponent, the global money economy, is the Megamachine, the Anti-Christ.
Now, approaching the End, today’s transmissible disease simply discloses something that we surely have known already: it clearly gives us a taste of the things to come. And at the root of it all is “our lust for money!”