If you wanted to make yourself really unpopular right now, the best way to do it, apart from being a banker yourself, would probably be to stand up and suggest that bankers are quite excellent people who deserve every penny of their astronomical salaries and bonuses. Politicians have obviously got the message about what the general public think about this, and are making suitable noises about curbing the bonus culture in the banking industry. The financiers themselves just don’t get it. You can still hear them blustering about how, if we don’t reward them as they demand, it will be really bad for us because the best people will go abroad. Those would be the same ‘best people’, no doubt, who masterminded the financial meltdown that destroyed so many jobs and businesses, wiped out people’s savings, and left the taxpayer with a bill for billions of pounds to bail them out. I can’t be the only person who thinks if those really are the best people, they’re welcome to take their talents elsewhere. We’d be happy to let things be run by people who are more concerned about doing a good job and serving their customers, than lining their own greedy pockets.
The latest news to add insult to injury was the closure of the steelworks on Teesside, with the loss of 1700 jobs, on the same day that RBS were outlining their latest proposals for the bonus payments they were going to give themselves. There can’t be many people who didn’t find that an offensive juxtaposition of headlines.
Why is the financial sector out of control? The answer is simple, if unpalatable. It is that we have all, for far too long, colluded with the financiers and with governments of all complexions, to make Money into a god. We have been more than happy to worship and serve this god, because of the benefits we believed it would give its faithful worshippers. We can’t complain if it has, at last, been exposed - as all the idols and false gods of the Old Testament were exposed - as an empty sham.
When Moses brought the Israelites out of Egypt, he went up the holy mountain to receive the Law from God. He was gone for 40 days in all, and it wasn’t long before the people started losing patience. They persuaded Aaron to make a golden idol for them, saying, “Up, make us gods who shall go before us. As for this Moses, the man who brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we do not know what has become of him.” Within a very short time they were falling down in worship before a golden calf. They had turned from worshipping the true God, to the orgiastic and mindless worship of a man-made thing; and they became depraved, less than fully human, in the process. That’s the trouble with idolatry. We were created by God, in his own image, because we can only be fully human if we worship him. If we lift up anything we make, as an object of worship - even if it be a human ideal as noble as Freedom, Democracy or Environmentalism - we soon find ourselves losing our humanity. Even idealists can become cruel and tyrannical in pursuit of their ends, if they raise them to the status of gods.
And we live in an age which has forgotten God, just as much as those ancient Israelites did. We have lost sight of Jesus Christ, and the God he revealed to us as a Father. We have said to our leaders, “Up, make us gods who shall go before us,” and the golden calf we have served is called Money. Jesus had another name for it: the name Mammon. He warned very clearly, “You cannot serve God and Mammon”; and the consequences of our ignoring this warning have been quite obvious in the financial crisis and the recession we are still struggling to get out of.
The only remedy for the worship of false gods, which will always fail their devotees, is for the nation to return to the worship of the true God, the one who will never fail us nor forsake us. It’s my prayer that as a new year begins, more and more people will come to realize this truth.
Published in the Marston Times, January 2010