Matthew 6:19-24 — Treasure in Heaven

FRANK: Money is the only rival to God that Jesus puts on a throne and calls by name. Not pride, not lust, not fame... in this passage he reaches into your pocket, pulls out the thing in there, and says you will end up serving this or serving me, and there is no third option.

LINDA: Serving is a big word for a checking account. People worship money in cartoons, the old man in the top hat diving into a vault of coins. Most of the people listening to this are trying to cover rent and maybe fix the car. You are going to have to earn that sentence, Frank.

FRANK: Earning it is the plan. [laughs] Welcome to Dig Deeper, everybody, I'm Frank Edwards, and across the desk is Linda Brown, already unconvinced, which is how I like her best. Today we're in Matthew chapter six, verses nineteen through twenty-four, right in the middle of the Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus goes from moths, to rust, to eyeballs, to a servant with two owners, all in six verses. Linda, would you read it for us?

LINDA: Matthew six, verses nineteen through twenty-four. "Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy, and where thieves break in and steal. But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moth and rust do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. The eye is the lamp of the body. If your eyes are good, your whole body will be full of light. But if your eyes are bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light within you is darkness, how great is that darkness! No one can serve two masters: 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 both God and money."

FRANK: Moth and rust are not poetic decoration, and it helps to know why. A wealthy man in first-century Galilee didn't have a bank; he kept his wealth in three forms, fine clothing, stored grain, and coin, and each was quietly under attack. Wool draws the moth, and one bad season can turn a chest of expensive robes into something like lace. The word we translate "rust" is brōsis, and it simply means eating... a gnawing, a consuming, the grain spoiling in the barn while the vermin get at it. And the coins? You buried them under the floor or tucked them into the wall, which is why Jesus says thieves "break in," literally dig through, because the walls were mud brick and a man with a tool could be standing in your savings by morning. So he is not scolding anyone for owning a coat. He's naming something the whole crowd already knew in their bones. All stored wealth is being slowly eaten. Then comes verse twenty-one... "where your treasure is, there your heart will be also." Which way does that sentence run, do you think?

LINDA: Heart first, I'd have said. I love something, so I spend on it. A parent loves their kid, so the kid gets new shoes, and the money follows the love.

FRANK: Backwards. [short pause] It's how almost everyone reads it, and Jesus says the reverse. The treasure goes first, and the heart follows it there and moves in. Put your money somewhere, your hours, your quiet hopes about what will keep you safe when things go wrong, and your affections migrate to that place and take up residence, whether you meant them to or not. Which means the question "what do I really love?" is often answered more honestly by a bank statement than by a feeling, because feelings flatter us and statements don't. And underneath that sits the reason he gives the command at all. He is not against your longing for security. You were built to want something that lasts. He's telling you where lasting things are actually kept.

LINDA: My heart ends up living wherever my money went, because the money got there first. That's unnerving, because nobody signs that lease on purpose.

FRANK: Nobody signs it, and that's exactly what makes it dangerous. It happens by drift... one purchase, one worry, one quiet assumption at a time, until the heart has an address you never chose. Which is why the next verse matters so much, even though it's the one most readers skip.

LINDA: The lamp of the body. That part always sounds like Jesus lost his place in his notes. Money, money, eyeballs, money. Why is an eye sitting in the middle of this?

FRANK: Because it's the same subject, spoken in an idiom his hearers had known since they could talk. In Jewish speech a "good eye" and an "evil eye" had nothing to do with eyesight. A person with a good eye was generous, open-handed, quick to give; a person with an evil eye was stingy, grasping, resentful of what other people had. You can hear it all through the Old Testament. Proverbs twenty-two says the generous man will be blessed, and the Hebrew literally reads "the one good of eye." Proverbs twenty-eight warns about the man with an evil eye who "hurries after riches." Deuteronomy fifteen tells Israel not to let their eye be evil toward a poor brother and shut the hand. So when Jesus says the good eye fills the body with light, he's saying the generous person is flooded with it, and the grasping person is dark all the way through. And then there's the word Matthew uses for a good eye... haplous. It means single. Undivided. The picture is a piece of cloth with no folds in it, nothing tucked away, no hidden compartment. A single eye, and then, one verse later, a single master. Do you hear how those two go together?

LINDA: Folds. That's the word I'd underline. A stingy person isn't just tight with cash... there's a pocket in them somewhere, a fold they've tucked something into, and God doesn't get to open it.

FRANK: Idolatry of the heart is the old name for that pocket. God tells Ezekiel the elders of Israel "have taken their idols into their heart," and the point is that the idol was never only a statue on a hillside. It was inside, sitting in the affections, which is precisely where Jesus puts treasure. Matthew Henry, writing in the early 1700s, put it in one line: "God requires the whole heart, and will not share it with the world." Not most of it. Not the unfolded parts.

LINDA: Money as an idol, though... that's where you lose me again. Money is a tool. It's paper and numbers on a screen. Calling it a master reaches for drama in a way I don't buy.

FRANK: Look at the word Jesus actually uses, because the translation hides it. The original isn't the ordinary Greek word for money. It's "Mammon," an Aramaic word, the street language of Galilee, and Matthew leaves it untranslated, sitting there in its foreign clothes while every other word in the passage got rendered into plain speech. Mammon meant wealth, property, the resources you could count on. And it grows from a root tied to firmness and reliability, the same family of words that gives us "amen." The thing that is solid. The thing you lean your weight on. So to a Galilean farmer, Jesus is taking the ordinary word for "what I rely on" and setting it on a throne across from God, as a lord who demands service. A throne claimant. Money doesn't just want a share of your attention; it asks for exactly the trust God asks for. Can you see why "worship" isn't too big a word?

LINDA: I trust my paycheck to cover the rent. That's not worship, that's being a responsible adult. If I didn't lean on it, I'd be the one getting evicted, and nobody would call that faith.

FRANK: Fair, and Jesus isn't telling you to stop paying rent. Paul tells Timothy to instruct the rich "not to have their hope set on the uncertainty of riches, but on the living God," and he never tells them to empty the accounts. He tells them to be generous. So the test isn't whether you use money. The test is what you'll give up to protect it. A master shows itself when the two owners want different things on the same afternoon.

LINDA: Different things... okay, then make it concrete, because "what you'd give up" still sounds abstract to me.

FRANK: Here's concrete. In Luke's gospel, a man shouts out of the crowd, "Teacher, tell my brother to divide the inheritance with me," and Jesus refuses, and then tells the parable of the rich fool, and then gives almost this exact teaching about purses that don't wear out and treasure in heaven that doesn't fail. Notice who's on the other side of that money. A brother. That's usually where Mammon asks for its sacrifice. Not in a vault. At a family table.

LINDA: Haven't called your brother since the estate got settled? Maybe the number on the check was fair and maybe it wasn't, but the calls stopped, and now his name comes up on the screen and you let it ring. I'll give you that one. That's a master. But I'm still not ready to call a savings account an idol.

FRANK: I wouldn't ask you to, and the text doesn't either. A savings account can be an act of stewardship. The question is which one gets to decide, when the account and the brother pull in opposite directions. James puts the other side of it brutally, "friendship with the world is enmity with God," and that's just Jesus' verdict stated backwards. You can hold things. What you cannot do is have two final authorities. One of them will end up despised, like the passage says, and very often the one being despised has a phone number.

LINDA: The apology is the part that costs. Picking up the phone means saying, out loud, that the money mattered more than he did. That you counted it, and you counted him, and he came out lower. Nobody wants to hear their own voice say that sentence.

FRANK: No one does. And this is where the passage stops being a warning and becomes good news, because you don't produce a single eye by gritting your teeth. Think about what God did with Israel's priests... he told the Levites they would get no share of the land, because "I am your portion and your inheritance." The treasure was always meant to be him. And then look at Christ. Paul says he was rich, and for our sake he became poor, so that through his poverty we might become rich. He is the one person who ever lived with no fold in him, nothing held back, the good eye looking on people who were grasping and resentful and giving himself anyway. His open hand is what opens yours. You don't give in order to be loved. You give because you already are. What does that do to that phone call?

LINDA: It takes the price out of it. If my worth was never riding on the number, then admitting the number mattered too much isn't the end of me. It's just true, and it's already been paid for.

FRANK: Paid for, yes, and that's why Jesus can say "store up treasure in heaven" as an invitation instead of a threat. Treasure in heaven isn't a spiritual savings plan you earn interest on. It's the life that's attached to him, the one thing moth can't eat and no thief can dig through. Then he gives the positive command that resolves all of it: "seek first God's kingdom and his righteousness." Get the master right, and the treasure and the eye fall into their places.

LINDA: Worship. I said it was too big a word at the start, and now it rings exactly the right size. Money was never asking to be spent. It was asking to be leaned on, and that's the one thing God won't share.

FRANK: Your heart is going to follow your treasure somewhere, so put it in the one place nobody can dig through.

LINDA: This episode is part of the Dig Deeper app, and if you don't have it yet, you can find Dig Deeper in the App Store or on Google Play.