What does ‘you cannot serve God and mammon’ mean?

The saying

It comes in the Sermon on the Mount, just after “where your treasure is, there your heart will be also” (Matthew 6:21).

No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or else he will be devoted to one and despise the other. You can’t serve both God and Mammon.

The picture is slavery. The Greek verb means to serve as a slave does, and the masters are owners. A slave with two owners who want opposite things cannot please both, and Jesus says money is that kind of owner. It does not stay a tool; it gives orders. The King James Version (1611) made the line famous in English: “Ye cannot serve God and mammon.”

An Aramaic word in a Greek Gospel

Mammon is not Greek. It is the Aramaic mamona, wealth or property, in the language Jesus spoke. Matthew and Luke wrote in Greek but kept the foreign word, mamōnas, as the Gospels keep a handful of other Aramaic words, such as Golgotha. Many scholars connect it with the root of amen, to be firm or reliable, so that mammon would be what a person leans on.

In the Hebrew of the rabbis it is an ordinary word for money. The Mishnah divides court cases into dinei mamonot, cases about money and property, which three judges could decide, and cases of life and death, which needed a court of twenty-three (Sanhedrin 1:1–4; 4:1). The word itself is neutral. What Jesus does is personify it and seat it on a rival throne.

Luke’s version

Luke places the same saying at the end of his strangest parable. A manager about to be fired for waste calls in his master’s debtors and cuts their bills, a hundred jars of oil down to fifty, to make friends for the day he is out of work. The master praises him for acting shrewdly (Luke 16:1–8). Then comes an odd phrase.

I tell you, make for yourselves friends by means of unrighteous mammon, so that when you fail, they may receive you into the eternal tents.

Money here is “unrighteous,” stained by the world it moves through, and still useful: many readers take the point to be that what is given away buys friends who last. A few verses later Luke closes with the rule: “You aren’t able to serve God and Mammon” (Luke 16:13).

How Mammon became a demon

In the Gospels, mammon is money with a capital letter, not a god, and no ancient text tells of anyone worshiping a deity of that name. The personification grew anyway. By the late Middle Ages Mammon was a demon of greed, and in 1589 the German bishop Peter Binsfeld paired him with avarice in his list of the demons behind the seven deadly sins.

Poets followed. Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene (1590) sends the knight Guyon into the Cave of Mammon, heaped with gold. John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667) makes Mammon the fallen angel whose eyes, even in heaven, were always on the golden pavement, and who leads the digging of hell’s gold to build Pandemonium.

In English today mammon still means wealth treated as a god. The saying does not forbid owning things. It asks who is in charge.