One must serve someone, but a person whose service is divided will love one master and hate the other. Masters only rarely owned a slave jointly (for example, m. `Eduyyot 1:13; Gittin 4:5), but when they did, the slave naturally preferred one master to the other. Jesus warns us that we must choose: if we work for possessions, we will end up hating God; if we work for God, we will end up hating possessions. (Hate may mean by comparison of one's love for something else-10:37 par. Lk 14:26.)

"Mammon," translated Money in the NIV, was a common Aramaic term for money or property (Flusser 1988:153), but its contrast with God as an object of service here suggests that it has been deified as well as personified (compare Sirach 34:7). Early Christians extended the principle of not serving two masters to avoiding theaters (where other humans were routinely slaughtered for public entertainment, perhaps akin to some movies today; Tert. Spect. 26) and to gaining the world and thereby forfeiting one's soul (2 Clement 6). But Jesus here applies the principle to one of the greatest temptations: the idolatry of materialism (compare possibly Col 3:5).

Unfortunately, covetousness (materialism) has achieved nearly cultic status as a traditional American value (with some other Western cultures not far behind), under such euphemisms as "the good life" and "getting ahead." As Craig Blomberg (1992:124) laments, "Many perceptive observers have sensed that the greatest danger to Western Christianity is not, as is sometimes alleged, prevailing ideologies such as Marxism, Islam, the New Age movement or humanism but rather the all-pervasive materialism of our affluent culture." Reminding us that the New Testament summons churches in one part of the world to look out for the needs of the church elsewhere (2 Cor 8:13-15), Blomberg further reminds us that because "over 50 percent of all believers now live in the Two-Thirds World . . . a huge challenge to First-World Christianity emerges. Without a doubt, most individual and church budgets need drastic realignment" (1992:126-27). Unlike the rich man in Luke 16:19-31, however, few suburban First World Christians could go to hell for allowing a man to starve at our doorstep: those who are starving rarely are able to get near our doorstep.

North American Christians can pour nearly a billion dollars a year into new church construction. Church buildings are helpful tools in our culture, but the Bible does not require them-and the Bible does expressly command serving the poor. How many churches pour equivalent resources into church-sponsored homeless shelters and other means of service (and witness) to the needy of our communities? The streets of our most affluent Western cities host hundreds of thousands of homeless people, many of them children. Many young people sell their bodies on those streets to get a place to sleep at night, and mere sermons against prostitution are not going to do anything about it.

Church buildings are important in our present culture, but the early church did live without them for its first three centuries, and in a time of persecution we would be obliged to do the same. The early church therefore had funds for other purposes: second-century pagans continually noted Christians' charity toward both Christian and non-Christian poor. Church buildings are valuable, but when they take precedence over caring for the poor or evangelism, our priorities appear to focus more on our comfort than on the world's need-as if we desire padded pews more than new brothers and sisters filling the kingdom. Have we altogether forgotten the spiritual passion of the early church and nineteenth-century evangelicalism?

Jesus in this passage uses graphic imagery about idolatry not to force us into legalism but to prevent us from rationalizing away his point. First World Protestants are quick to judge Christians in other parts of the world who venerate their ancestors or worship the saints. When symbols of respect become objects of worship, our concerns are surely justified. But in condemning such practices we may be sporting a "plank" in our own eye (7:3), for those concerned with wealth become as sterile in their Christianity as those who forget their faith or fall away under persecution (13:19-22).

Most of us respond to Jesus' devaluation of possessions in one of two ways: (1) we retort that there is nothing wrong with making money, or (2) we claim we do not love wealth, we just accumulate it. The first response is tangential: the issue is never how much money we make (as long as it is made honestly, the more the better), but what we do with what we make. The second response is simply dishonest, like the man immersed in television six hours every evening who says that it does not really interest or affect him. If we are seeking and accumulating wealth for ourselves, then we do love it.