What is this mammon of iniquity of which, or with which (for that is the true sense of the words), we are to make friends for ourselves? It is the money or other property that God has given us to use in this world. We have only to read a few verses more to see that this is what it means; for when our Lord said immediately afterwards, "You cannot serve God and Mammon," the evangelist tells us that "the Pharisees, who were covetous, laughed at him."
It is called the mammon of iniquity or injustice, because it is the cause of almost all the injustice in the world.
We have, then, to make friends for ourselves with the money or other temporal means which God has entrusted to us.
This is what the steward of whom the Gospel tells us did. He was entrusted by his master with the management of an estate. He was to take care of it in his master's interest, not in his own, for it did not belong to him; as we are here to use our property in God's interest, for he is our Master, and what we have really belongs to him and not to ourselves.
The steward was not faithful to his master; he wasted his goods; so he was discharged from his office and had to give an account of his stewardship, as we also shall have to give an account of ours to our Master when we are discharged from it—that is, when we come to die. Then he began to think how he could make use of the means that had been committed to him to provide for himself in the new state of life upon which he had to enter. He had not much time to make his arrangements, but he hit upon a very good plan. In that we do not resemble him, for with all our lifetime to make our arrangements in, and the certainty that we shall have some time to be discharged from our stewardship, and give an account of it before the judgment-seat of God, we too often make none at all. As our Lord says: "The children of this world are wiser in their generation than the children of light."
The steward, I say, hit on a good plan; and that was to obtain the favor of his master's debtors by taking something off the bills which they had to pay, that they might in return contribute something to his support and save him from the necessity of working or begging for the remainder of his life. In this way he made friends for himself with the money which had been committed to him, in order that these friends might receive him into their dwellings when he was turned out of his own.
This is the part of his conduct which we have to imitate. We have to imitate the steward by making friends with the means which our Lord has given us—friends who will be of service to us in the new life upon which we have so soon to enter, the life which comes after death.
But who are these friends to be? Generally people try to buy the favor of the rich and the great. But these are not the friends who are going to be of use to us in the next world.