You cant serve two masters

In the King James Version of the Bible the text reads:. The World English Bible translates the passage as:. This famous verse continues the discussion of wealth, and makes explicit what was implied in Matthew 6: The two goals are mutually exclusive.

This "You cant serve two masters" saying also appears at Luke In Luke's Gospelthe saying is thus clearly one about God and money. In Matthew, the previous verses imply it can mean placing anything above God. Leon Morris notes that the Greek: What Jesus is noting is not a legal impossibility, but a psychological one. While the slave might at first believe he can serve both masters equally eventually he will come to prefer one over the other.

The slavery metaphor also can mitigate Jesus' warning. One cannot be a slave to both God and money, but it does You cant serve two masters mean that one cannot be both a slave to God and also pursue a reasonable interest in money. This verse is not a call for the renunciation of all wealth, merely a warning against the idolization of the pursuit of money. The word translated as "love" is Greek: The word mammon was a standard one for money or possessions, and in the literature of the period it is generally not a pejorative term.

Frequently Jews were called upon to honour God with their mammon, by making donations.

Some other texts, such as 1 Enochdo use the pursuit of mammon as a negative contrast to the pursuit of holiness. Traditionally it was believed that Mammon was the name of a pagan god who was synonymous with greed, but there is no evidence that a god by this name was ever worshipped and it is uncertain how this word entered the lexicon.

Despite this the word is still frequently left untranslated as though it were a personal name. The character of Mammon also appears in the works of Milton.

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