Reflection for November 6, Saturday of the Thirty-first Week in Ordinary Time: Luke 16:9-15

Gospel: Luke 16:9-15

Jesus said to his disciples: “I tell you, make friends for yourselves with dishonest wealth, so that when it fails, you will be welcomed into eternal dwellings. The person who is trustworthy in very small matters is also trustworthy in great ones; and the person who is dishonest in very small matters is also dishonest in great ones.  

If, therefore, you are not trustworthy with dishonest wealth, who will trust you with true wealth? If you are not trustworthy with what belongs to another, who will give you what is yours? No servant can serve two masters. He will either hate one and love the other, or be devoted to one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and mammon.”  

The Pharisees, who loved money, heard all these things and sneered at him. And he said to them, “You justify yourselves in the sight of others, but God knows your hearts; for what is of human esteem is an abomination in the sight of God.”

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Reflection:

Do you allow yourself to be influenced by the love of material things?  

Advertisers continuously bombard us with ads that entice us to love material things for example, these smart phones. Manufacturers would always come up with new models to drive up their sales and profit. So what we do is we buy simply because we allow ourselves to be captured by the very enticing advertising even if there’s actually no need yet for us to buy it.  

This is what we must watch out for because if we are not careful there’s that tendency to serve the God of this world which is mammon or money.  Who is behind this advertisers that induces us to mindlessly spend so that we are always busy to earn more money until we eventually shun God in our lives?  

The one behind is the Devil it deludes us to believe that mammon or materialism is the be all and end all of life. And if we are not careful we may believe it thus we may favor mammon over God.  But we all know that mammon is an instrument of the devil to take us away from God.  

We therefore have to choose God over the God of this world which is mammon or materialism. If we choose God we would have peaceful lives. We may not be able to ward off every problems that may come our way. But we would be able to handle it no matter how difficult it may be. Why? Because we’ve chosen to be with God and not allow ourselves to be captured by this materialistic driven world. – Marino J. Dasmarinas