Money

The title is taken from a rather familiar text in Matthew 6: "No servant can be slave to two masters; for either he will hate the first and love the second, or he will be devoted to the first and think nothing of the second. You cannot serve God and money." That's the way it reads in the New English Bible. It's a familiar text—Matthew 6:24—but it has a few surprises for us.

First, there is the rather strange fact that generations of Bible readers had to go around, or through, a translation smokescreen in order to get the full impact of that basic statement, "You cannot serve God and money." Our familiar King James Bible, as well as the RSV, carried along the original Aramaic word "mammon," a word that meant simply "money" or "wealth." But there seemed to have been some reluctance to come right out and say it: "money!" Somehow it just didn't seem right to the translators that you should have to face such a choice—God or money.