Matthew 6 – God vs Mammon

In our ongoing study of Matthew 6, we’ve looked in verses 19-21 at Jesus’ teaching on the absolute necessity for a Christian’s ultimate priority to be ‘in heaven‘, in other words God, not here on earth.

We’ve also considered in verses 22-23 his warning that a Christian who values their earthly possessions too much – too much to ever be able to share them with someone in need – is likely to be compromised and self-serving in all other aspects of life.

Today’s verse (24) will conclude this brief discussion about priorities in life, and lead directly to a longer discussion about the security and confidence Christians can have in God’s promise to provide for their daily needs, without the constant state of anxiety felt by everyone else.

Let us therefore read Matthew 6:24: No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money.

This teaching fits well into the context of what Jesus has been addressing in the preceding verses, in terms of valuing God over material possessions. It also ties in with the idea of being “single-minded”, which is possibly implied in verse 22.

His statement that “no one can serve two masters” may seem a little odd. If you’ve ever worked two jobs to make ends meet, or even combined a job with being an active parent at home, for example, you will have some idea of what it feels like to “serve two masters”. And even in Jesus’ day it was possible for two people to have shared or joint ownership of a slave, who was required to serve both of them.

Jesus’ point was not so much that it’s impossible to work for two different people, have two different jobs, etc – his point was that it’s impossible to have genuine loyalty to both.

As a Christian you will almost certainly have (or have had) to combine a job with your faith at some point in your life. Jesus clearly wasn’t forbidding that.

The question isn’t whether you have other responsibilities or obligations in your life. The point, as in the previous verses, is where your loyalty truly lies.

Is it with God or with Mammon?

What is mammon anyway?

The NIV which I quoted from here makes the distinction between God and “money“. Other versions such as the NRSV have “wealth“. Other versions use the word “mammon“, which is (the English transliteration of) the actual word in the original Greek.

What is “mammon” and what was Jesus talking about?

For context, the concept of wealth was very different in Jesus’ time and culture than it is in ours. For them, wealth did not mean a large bank balance or stock market portfolio, nor a vault full of coins nor any other kind of moveable assets. Wealth was measured by land ownership, and the vast majority of land in that area was concentrated in the hands of a small number of very powerful elites, who rented it out to be farmed and managed and, of course, taxed.

Most people were not in any way wealthy. They did not have bank accounts or assets or savings. They were largely surviving from one day to the next, trying to keep up with their taxes both to the local landowner and the overarching Roman authorities. Probably the only time they would have handled coinage would have been when they paid those taxes. In the gospel accounts, the only times Jesus ever handled money was when discussing taxation – for example, when he was asked if the Jews ought to pay taxes to the Roman emperor or not, and he responded “Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s“.

There was a great deal of anger and unrest about this state of affairs. Many families had once been owners of the land on which they worked, only to have it snatched from them and added to the growing estates of these elite landowners. Seeing these landowners collaborating with the occupying forces of the Roman Empire would have only added fuel to the fire.

Political movements such as the Essenes and the Zealots advocated respectively for complete withdrawal from this corrupt society and for violent action that might today be called terrorism, to drive out the usurpers and restore the people’s rights and independence.

It’s possible, therefore, that Jesus’ teaching in its immediate context wasn’t simply a warning against the accumulation of wealth, since that wasn’t likely to be a realistic option for the vast majority of his listeners anyway (with the exception of, for example, wealthy tax collectors like Matthew or Zacchaeus).

It may ALSO have been a warning not to make the economic situation of the day a priority in their thinking.

Elsewhere he taught that being downtrodden or living in poverty did not in any diminish a person’s eligibility as a child of God. This was in sharp contrast to what many of his contemporaries believed, namely that poverty was a punishment for failing to serve God, whereas wealth was a reward for pleasing him.

In Matthew 5:44 he instructed his followers to pray for those who persecute or mistreat them, not to rise up against them and demand justice.

So in this context it’s possible that “mammon” referred to any way of thinking that prioritises material possessions.

What does that mean for us?

It means we should not prioritise seeking material prosperity or comfort.

It means it may not be appropriate for us to always demand all of the material benefits that we think we are entitled to.

It means our time and energy should not primarily be devoted to seeking justice and equity in material terms, either for ourselves or others.

Obviously I’m not suggesting we entirely give up on pursuing material things – there will always be things we need – nor that we should give up on ensuring others have what they need. But these things should always be done with God’s principles in mind.

We should be satisfied with what we need and be prepared to sometimes go without the things we want.

Even if there’s something we are genuinely eligible for or entitled to, if the means of getting it could pull us away from God, perhaps it’s better to go without.

And the same applies if we see injustice and inequity in the laws or institutions of our society, or in the lives of people around us – if the means of overcoming these social ills might take us away from God, it’s better to either find another way or leave things as they are.

Really?

Jesus would have noticed many examples of social inequity or injustice within the society in which he lived, whether from the elite Jewish landowning families or from the occupying Roman forces. And yet he spoke out against none of them. Remember that back in Matthew 5:39-41 he said this: But I tell you, do not resist an evil person. If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also. And if anyone wants to sue you and take your shirt, hand over your coat as well. If anyone forces you to go one mile, go with them two miles.

Why did he say this? Because he didn’t care about social injustice or the suffering of the downtrodden? No. Of course he cared. But it wasn’t his number one priority.

His number one priority was to preach about the Kingdom of God, about the need to repent and become citizens of that future world rather than focus all of our energies trying to fix this one.

While his instructions were absolutely that we should care for the poor, we should do so with the mindset of caring for these people as individuals, introducing them to Jesus through our acts of care, trying to live our lives as if we were in the Kingdom of God right now – not with the mindset of seeing the poor as a collective who need to be lifted up by the introduction of new social policies or the forced redistribution of wealth.

Giving people the material things they need is what Jesus would want us to do, but he would not want us to do that without also teaching them about him and the true riches that can only be found in heaven.