Where your treasure is

A word for the week

Think about the first thing you reach for when you wake, and the thing you would be most afraid to lose. Not the answer you would give out loud, but the true one, the one your hands and your worries already know. Jesus says there is no more reliable way to find out what you actually worship. Where your treasure is, he says, there your heart will be also. He is not moralizing. He is telling you how to read your own life.

Do not store up treasure on earth, he says, where moth and rust destroy and thieves break in. He is not against having things; he is pointing at a plain fact everyone knows and manages to forget. Everything you can pile up here rots, rusts, or gets taken. Moths eat the fine clothes. Rust takes the metal. Thieves take the rest, and if no thief does, time will. You cannot hold it, and you certainly cannot keep it past your own last day. To pour your one life into building a heap you must leave behind is not so much wicked as it is a bad trade: a lifetime spent on what cannot last.

Then he says the line that cuts to the bone: where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. Notice the order. He does not say put your heart in the right place and your treasure will follow. He says your heart goes wherever your treasure already is. Your affections trail your investments. Whatever you have sunk your money, your hours, and your anxiety into, that is what your heart will curl around, whether you chose it on purpose or just drifted there. So if you want to know where your heart is, do not consult your feelings. Look at your calendar and your bank statement. They do not lie.

He puts it another way with the eye. The eye is the lamp of the body; if your eye is clear, you are full of light, but if it is bad, you are full of darkness. A grasping, divided way of seeing darkens the whole person. What you fix your gaze on is what you fill up with. Stare at what you can accumulate, and you go dim from the inside.

Then the sentence that leaves no room to wriggle: no one can serve two masters. You will hate one and love the other, or cling to one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and money. Not you should not, though you should. He says you cannot. It is not possible to have two ultimate things. One of them will always end up on top, quietly giving the orders, and the other will be demoted to serving it. The question is never whether you will have a master. The question is only which one, and money is the most common rival god there is, precisely because it disguises itself as neutral, as just being sensible, as only prudent.

The good news underneath the warning is that you get to choose where to send your heart, because you get to choose where to put your treasure. Give it away, and your heart follows the gift. Spend your hours on people and on God, and your affection grows where you spent them. He is not trying to take your joy. He is telling you not to bury it somewhere the moths will get it. Store it, he says, where nothing can.