NOTES for Mat 6:14-21

It is probably not so difficult to understand what Jesus means when He says: where your treasures are, there your heart will be also. After all, treasures are not simply money or valuables in themselves, even if they are securely hidden. Treasures become treasures only when, and only for the person for whom, they become the goal and meaning of life. Neither money, nor gold or silver, nor precious stones have anything in themselves to do with spiritual life; but the attitude towards them of the person who possesses them is directly and immediately connected with it. The question of values thus becomes not a question about treasures, but about the system of values that constitutes what biblical language calls the heart. The heart, of course, in the spiritual sense in which the word is used in the biblical books, reveals itself primarily in acts of the will. The life of the heart determines what psychologists today call intentions: impulses of the will together with the external, physical, or internal, psychological objects towards which those impulses are directed (and they must be directed towards something; it cannot be otherwise). But what precisely an impulse of the will is directed towards depends on one's system of values: the real system that actually determines our priorities in life, not the system we profess, which sometimes has little to do with the real one. And Jesus reminds us that the Kingdom must be at the centre of our system of values. Otherwise nothing will come of it: the road to the Kingdom is hard, and under any other arrangement we will not be able to complete it.