Catholic Commentary
Duty of Masters Toward Their Servants
1Masters, give to your servants that which is just and equal, knowing that you also have a Master in heaven.
Colossians 4:1 commands slave owners to treat their servants with justice and equity, recognizing that they themselves answer to a Master in heaven. Paul uses the same Greek title (kyrios) for both human masters and Christ, structurally positioning earthly masters as servants accountable to the heavenly Lord.
Paul tells masters they have a Master too — transforming every exercise of power into an act answerable to God.
At the typological level, the master-servant relationship in the Haustafel anticipates and reflects the relationship between Christ and the Church, and ultimately between God and all creation. Every human kyrios is a pale, accountable shadow of the divine Kyrios. The master who renders justice to his servant participates — however partially — in the just governance of God over creation.
The anagogical sense points eschatologically: the heavenly Master before whom all earthly masters stand is the Judge of the living and the dead (cf. 2 Tim 4:1). The exercise of authority is never finally private; it is always conducted in the presence of, and will be measured by, the One in whom "there is no partiality" (Rom 2:11).
Catholic tradition has drawn deep and sustained reflection from this verse across several interlocking doctrines.
Human Dignity and Social Teaching. The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that "every form of social or cultural discrimination in fundamental personal rights on the grounds of sex, race, color, social conditions, language, or religion must be curbed and eradicated as incompatible with God's design" (CCC 1935). Paul's insistence on isotēs — equitability — anticipates this principle: authority structures do not suspend the fundamental dignity of the human person, which is grounded in creation and redemption.
Rerum Novarum and the Labor Tradition. Leo XIII, in Rerum Novarum (1891), quoted the moral logic of this verse when condemning exploitation of workers: "Justice demands that the interests and the well-being of those who work not be surrendered to the caprices of others" (§45). The encyclical explicitly grounds employers' duties in their own accountability before God — precisely Paul's argument. This verse thus stands as a seed-text of Catholic Social Teaching's insistence that capital has duties, not only rights.
John Chrysostom (Homilies on Colossians, Homily 12) drew attention to the stunning equality implied in Paul's formulation: "He who commands thee to give justice to thy slave, himself receives thy service." Chrysostom sees in this verse a leveling of the social hierarchy not through revolution but through the shared creatureliness of all before God.
St. Thomas Aquinas (Summa Theologiae II-II, q. 57, a. 3) grounds the dikaion Paul invokes in natural law: there exists a natural justice between persons that no legal arrangement — including slavery — can entirely extinguish. The master who fails to render it sins against right reason and against God.
The verse also anticipates the Catechism's teaching on the universal destination of goods (CCC 2402–2406): no earthly dominion is absolute; all authority is held in stewardship before the Lord of heaven.
Contemporary Catholics rarely hold literal slaves, but the structure of Paul's argument applies with full force wherever one person exercises authority over another's livelihood, time, and dignity: employers over employees, managers over workers, executives over staff. The verse asks a searching question: Do you treat those under your authority in a way you could defend before the impartial heavenly Kyrios?
Concretely, this means asking whether wages are genuinely just — not merely legal — and whether workplace conditions reflect equity (Paul's isotēs), meaning that the least powerful worker receives the same dignity as the most valued. Catholic Social Teaching's "preferential option for the poor" extends this: justice sometimes demands more attention, not equal attention, to those with less power.
The verse also challenges the privatization of authority: the Catholic employer, manager, parent, or supervisor is never merely executing a personal or corporate will. They are stewards of a divinely ordered trust. The awareness that one has "a Master in heaven" is not a pious afterthought — it is, for Paul, the reason just treatment is non-negotiable. Keeping that accountability before one's conscience is a daily spiritual discipline for anyone in a position of power.
Commentary
Literal and Narrative Sense
Colossians 4:1 is the pivot point closing the Haustafel (household code) that began at 3:18. Paul has addressed wives, husbands, children, fathers, and slaves in succession; now he completes the code by turning to kyrioi — "masters" or "lords." The symmetry is deliberate and theologically charged: the very Greek word used for human masters (kyrios) is the same word Paul uses throughout the letter for the Lord Jesus Christ (cf. 1:3; 2:6; 3:17). Paul's grammar creates an audible irony — those who bear the title kyrios are reminded they have a kyrios of their own.
"Give to your servants that which is just (to dikaion) and equal (hē isotēs)"
The two Greek terms are carefully chosen and must not be collapsed into one idea. To dikaion ("what is just") refers to what is legally and morally owed — the rightful treatment, fair compensation, and basic dignity that justice demands. Hē isotēs ("equality" or "fairness") goes further: it connotes equitability, proportionality, and a certain impartiality of treatment that mirrors how God himself deals with humanity. The pairing suggests that justice sets the floor, while equity raises the standard. Paul is not merely telling masters to avoid cruelty; he is calling them to a positive, generous, and impartial exercise of their authority.
This is a remarkable word to direct at slave-owners in the first-century Roman world, where the slave had no legal standing and the master's word was absolute. Paul does not here explicitly abolish the institution — a topic extensively treated in later tradition — but he radically reframes its moral structure by subjecting the master's will to divine law.
"Knowing that you also have a Master in heaven"
The participial clause (eidotes hoti kai hymeis echete kyrion en ouranō) is the theological ground of the entire command. This mirrors almost verbatim what Paul said to slaves in 3:22–24: they should serve wholeheartedly "knowing that from the Lord you will receive the inheritance as your reward." The parallelism is intentional — master and slave stand in structurally identical relationships to God. Both owe obedience upward. Both will render an account. The heavenly Kyrios is impartial (3:25), and that impartiality applies equally to the one who gives orders as to the one who receives them.
Typological and Spiritual Senses