What Did Jesus Say About Money and Wealth? No One Can Serve God and Mammon

Jesus warned that money competes with God for our loyalty. “Ye cannot serve God and mammon,” he said (Matthew 6:24). He told a rich man to sell everything for the poor, said a camel passes through a needle’s eye more easily than a rich man enters God’s kingdom, and praised a widow’s two mites above rich men’s gifts.

The line “money is the root of all evil” is not his. Paul wrote it, and what he wrote was “the love of money” (1 Timothy 6:10). Jesus’ own sharpest words are about what money does to the people who have it, and Mark shows us how he looked at one of them. When a rich man came running to ask about eternal life, “Jesus beholding him loved him,” and only then told him to sell what he had (Mark 10:21).

What did Jesus say about money in the Bible?

His sayings are quoted from the King James Version. Where several Gospels record a saying, the first passage listed is the one quoted.

Why did Jesus tell the rich young ruler to sell everything?

A man came running, knelt before Jesus and asked, “Good Master, what shall I do that I may inherit eternal life?” (Mark 10:17). Jesus pointed him to the commandments, and the man said he had kept them from his youth. Mark adds a detail the others leave out: “Then Jesus beholding him loved him, and said unto him, One thing thou lackest: go thy way, sell whatsoever thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come, take up the cross, and follow me” (Mark 10:21). The man “went away grieved: for he had great possessions” (Mark 10:22).

Jesus said this to one man, and the Gospels show him meeting other rich people differently. Zacchaeus, “the chief among the publicans, and he was rich”, promised half his goods to the poor and fourfold repayment to anyone he had cheated, and Jesus answered, “This day is salvation come to this house” (Luke 19:2–9). Joseph of Arimathea, who laid Jesus’ body in his own new tomb, was “a rich man” and “Jesus’ disciple” (Matthew 27:57–60). Yet Jesus also turned to the crowds following him and said, “whosoever he be of you that forsaketh not all that he hath, he cannot be my disciple” (Luke 14:25–33).

What does the eye of a needle mean?

After the rich man left, Jesus told his astonished disciples, “Children, how hard is it for them that trust in riches to enter into the kingdom of God!” Then came the picture: “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God” (Mark 10:23–25). The disciples were “astonished out of measure, saying among themselves, Who then can be saved?” Jesus answered, “With men it is impossible, but not with God: for with God all things are possible” (Mark 10:26–27).

The picture is of something impossible. The Talmud uses the same kind of picture for something no one imagines: in a dream, it says, “one is neither shown a golden palm tree nor an elephant going through the eye of a needle” (Berakhot 55b). A story told in many sermons makes the needle’s eye a small gate in Jerusalem’s wall that a camel could pass only on its knees, unloaded. Trevin Wax, writing for The Gospel Coalition, lists it among preachers’ urban legends and says plainly, “there is no evidence for such a gate.”

Why was Jesus so hard on the rich?

His sharpest words about money are about what it does to the people who have it. In the parable of the sower, “the deceitfulness of riches” chokes the word so that it “becometh unfruitful” (Mark 4:19). In the parable of the rich fool, a rich man with a large harvest plans bigger barns and tells his soul, “take thine ease, eat, drink, and be merry.” God answers, “Thou fool, this night thy soul shall be required of thee”, and Jesus ends the story: “So is he that layeth up treasure for himself, and is not rich toward God” (Luke 12:16–21).

In another parable a rich man “clothed in purple and fine linen” feasted every day while a beggar named Lazarus lay hungry at his gate (Luke 16:19–21). After death their places are reversed, and Abraham tells the rich man, “Son, remember that thou in thy lifetime receivedst thy good things, and likewise Lazarus evil things” (Luke 16:25). Luke sets a blessing and a woe side by side in the same way: “Blessed be ye poor: for yours is the kingdom of God” and “woe unto you that are rich! for ye have received your consolation” (Luke 6:20, 24).

His hearers had reason to be startled, because their Scriptures also tied riches to blessing: “The blessing of the LORD, it maketh rich, and he addeth no sorrow with it” (Proverbs 10:22). Whether owning wealth is itself wrong is a separate question, taken up in is it a sin to be rich?

What is mammon?

Mammon is an old word for riches. In the New Testament it appears only in Matthew 6:24 and Luke 16:9–13. Its origin is uncertain, the Catholic Encyclopedia of 1910 notes, but Jerome explained it simply: “Riches, that is; for in the heathen tongue of the Syrians riches are called Mammon.”

Luke places the saying at the end of the parable of the unjust steward. A steward about to lose his post cuts the bills of his master’s debtors, so that “they may receive me into their houses” once he is put out. Then “the lord” (his master) “commended the unjust steward, because he had done wisely” (Luke 16:4–8). Jesus draws the lesson: “Make to yourselves friends of the mammon of unrighteousness; that, when ye fail, they may receive you into everlasting habitations.” He then asks, “If therefore ye have not been faithful in the unrighteous mammon, who will commit to your trust the true riches?” (Luke 16:9–11).

Martin Luther made mammon his plainest example of a false god. In his Large Catechism, explaining the First Commandment, he writes that a man who trusts in his wealth “also has a god, Mammon by name, i.e., money and possessions, on which he sets all his heart, and which is also the most common idol on earth.”

What did Jesus mean by “Render unto Caesar”?

The Pharisees, hoping to “entangle him in his talk”, sent their disciples with the Herodians to ask him about the Roman tax: “Is it lawful to give tribute unto Caesar, or not?” Jesus asked to see the coin, and they brought him a penny. “Whose is this image and superscription?” They said Caesar’s. “Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s” (Matthew 22:15–21).

What did Jesus say about giving?

Jesus sat facing the treasury and watched people put money in, “and many that were rich cast in much.” A poor widow put in “two mites, which make a farthing.” He called his disciples over and told them she had given more than all the others: “For all they did cast in of their abundance; but she of her want did cast in all that she had, even all her living” (Mark 12:41–44). He measured the gift by what the giver had left.

He asked that alms be given in secret: “when thou doest alms, let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth: That thine alms may be in secret” (Matthew 6:3–4). He asked for lending that expects nothing back: “lend, hoping for nothing again; and your reward shall be great” (Luke 6:35). In his picture of the last judgment, the King tells those who fed the hungry, welcomed the stranger and visited the prisoner, “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me” (Matthew 25:34–40).

The Gospels record no percentage that he set for giving. When he spoke of the tithe, he rebuked scribes and Pharisees who tithed garden herbs but “omitted the weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy, and faith” (Matthew 23:23). The Old Testament law behind the tithe is gathered in Bible verses about tithing.

What did Jesus not say about money?

He did not say that money is the root of all evil. The words are Paul’s, and they are about love of money: “For the love of money is the root of all evil: which while some coveted after, they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows” (1 Timothy 6:10). The verse before warns that “they that will be rich fall into temptation and a snare” (1 Timothy 6:9). John Wesley, preaching on the parable of the unjust steward, quoted Paul’s verse and added: “The fault does not lie in the money, but in them that use it.”

No Gospel saying compares wealth to salt water either. That image comes from the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer: “Riches, one may say, are like sea-water; the more you drink the thirstier you become; and the same is true of fame.” One saying of Jesus about money is found only outside the Gospels: in Acts, Paul urges his hearers to “remember the words of the Lord Jesus, how he said, It is more blessed to give than to receive” (Acts 20:35).

Did Jesus say the poor will always be with you?

Yes. At a dinner in Bethany a woman broke an alabaster box of costly ointment over his head, and some complained that it “might have been sold for more than three hundred pence, and have been given to the poor.” Jesus defended her: “For ye have the poor with you always, and whensoever ye will ye may do them good: but me ye have not always” (Mark 14:3–7). His words echo the Law of Moses: “For the poor shall never cease out of the land: therefore I command thee, saying, Thou shalt open thine hand wide unto thy brother, to thy poor, and to thy needy, in thy land” (Deuteronomy 15:11). The Catechism of the Catholic Church reads the saying through that verse: “Jesus makes these words his own.”

How have Christians read Jesus’ teaching on money?

Christians have long differed over how literally to take the command to sell everything, and over what owning property means for a disciple.

Sell everything: Antony of Egypt

Athanasius’s Life of Antony tells of a young Egyptian, orphaned at about eighteen or twenty, who walked into church as Matthew 19:21 was being read and took it “as though God had put him in mind of the Saints, and the passage had been read on his account.” He gave the villagers the land he had inherited, “three hundred acres, productive and very fair”, sold everything else he owned and gave the money to the poor, keeping a little for his sister. He spent the rest of his life as an ascetic.

Free the heart: Clement of Alexandria

Clement of Alexandria, who headed the city’s catechetical school and died about the year 215, wrote a whole treatise on the rich young ruler, Who Is the Rich Man That Shall Be Saved? He read the command as aimed at the soul. Jesus “does not, as some conceive off-hand, bid him throw away the substance he possessed, and abandon his property; but bids him banish from his soul his notions about wealth”. For Clement wealth is a tool: “Such an instrument is wealth. Are you able to make a right use of it? It is subservient to righteousness.”

Goods meant for everyone: Catholic teaching

The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that “The goods of creation are destined for the whole human race.” It upholds private property but holds that “the universal destination of goods remains primordial” (2402–2403). It quotes John Chrysostom: “Not to enable the poor to share in our goods is to steal from them and deprive them of life. The goods we possess are not ours, but theirs” (2446). And it teaches, with Luke 14:33 in view, that “The precept of detachment from riches is obligatory for entrance into the Kingdom of heaven” (2544).

No blame on riches as such: the Russian Orthodox Church

The Russian Orthodox Church’s Basis of the Social Concept reads the rich young ruler through Mark’s words about those who “trust in riches”, and continues: “However, a rich man can be saved as well”. It states that “In Holy Scriptures there is no censure of richness as such” and that “An owner of a considerable wealth does not sin if he uses it in accordance with the will of God to Whom everything belongs and with the law of love”. With Basil the Great, it asks, “Tell me, what do you have that is yours?”

Gain, save, give: John Wesley

John Wesley, with whom Methodism began, took the unjust steward’s verse, Luke 16:9, as the text of his sermon The Use of Money. He gave three rules: “Gain all you can”, “Save all you can”, and then “give all you can, or, in other words, give all you have to God.” By the last he meant everything left after providing “things needful” for oneself and one’s household: “not a tenth, not a third, not half, but all that is God’s, be it more or less”.

Property with alms: the Anglican and Reformed confessions

The Church of England’s Thirty-nine Articles hold that “The Riches and Goods of Christians are not common, as touching the right, title, and possession of the same”, and add, “Notwithstanding, every man ought, of such things as he possesseth, liberally to give alms to the poor, according to his ability.” The Westminster Confession, a confession held by Presbyterian churches, says that fellowship among believers does not “take away, or infringe the title or propriety which each man hath in his goods and possessions” (propriety here means ownership). In the section before, it binds them to “relieving each other in outward things, according to their several abilities and necessities.”

All things common: the Hutterites

The Hutterites hold their goods in common. “Hutterites live in community, that is they share all of their possessions,” their own site explains; members are paid no wages, and “all necessities of life are provided.” They ground the practice in the church of Acts, where believers “had all things common” and “sold their possessions and goods, and parted them to all men, as every man had need” (Acts 2:44–45).

Christians have answered him in many ways, from Antony giving away all he owned to Wesley’s three rules to the shared purse of a Hutterite community. Under every answer lie the words Jesus spoke to all who would listen: “Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also” (Matthew 6:21).

Related reading

• Did Jesus ask for money? Who supported his ministry
• Are Christians meant to be poor?
• Is it a sin to be rich?
• The parable of the talents and what it means
• Bible verses about wealth
• Bible verses about giving