New Christian Bible Study

Luke 16:13

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13 No servant can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon.

Commentary on this verse  

By Brian David

‘Brother Juniper and the Beggar,’ by Spanish Baroque painter Bartolomé Esteban Murillo. Juniper, one of the original followers of St. Francis of Assissi, was renowned for his generosity. When told he could no longer give away his clothes, he instead simply told the needy, like the beggar in the painting, that he couldn’t give them his clothes, but wouldn’t stop them from taking them.

Up until now, this parable has advocated gleaning true ideas from evil sources. This, the final verse of the parable, warns that we have to make sure we take only the ideas, and not the evil they inspire in others. Ultimately they have to fit in as part of knowledge from the Lord, not knowledge from the world.

A "servant" here represents exterior things – our actual actions. They are controlled by a "master," or a system of ideas.

There are two potential masters here. "God" represents truth from the Lord; "mammon" represents truth from other sources, without any connected desire for good. Ultimately, we can only use one to guide our external actions. If we choose to follow the Lord (by "loving the one") we will feel an aversion to ("hate") the jumble of disconnected ideas represented by mammon. If we decide to trust ourselves to figure what's good (being "loyal to one"), we will lose touch with real truth and see little value there ("despise the other).

So we might benefit from mammon in the short run, but God has to be the ultimate master.



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