GREED: EVERYTHING WE OWN, OWNS US

FEBRUARY 9, 2008

As we begin our Lenten journey of penance and spiritual renewal, let us examine each week some of the root causes of our moral transgressions. These are traditionally called the seven capital sins: pride, anger, lust, greed, gluttony, envy, and sloth. Let us first examine greed.

African hunters have learned to capture monkeys by exploiting their greed. The hunters cut a coconut in two and scrape out the insides, leaving the shell. Then they cut a hole in the center of one half just big enough for a monkey to put its hand through. Next, they put an orange in the coconut, join the two halves together, and hang it on a tree.

Eventually a monkey smells the orange and looks for it until it finds it inside the coconut. The monkey slips its hand in through the hole, grasps the orange, and tries to extract it, but can’t, because the orange is larger than the hole. Completely absorbed in its struggle to extract the orange, the monkey becomes oblivious of everything else, including the hunters who now emerge from hiding to throw their nets over it. Even if the monkey sees the hunters, it invariably clings to the orange until its freedom is lost.

This story conveys a stark message: Anyone who clings too tightly to ambition or greed of any kind can lose his freedom. In fact, to be consumed by the pursuit of worldly goods is already to live in a state of bondage. It is not that the pursuit of worldly goods is in itself wrong. No, God created the world to be a garden of delights for us and it is certainly right and proper to pursue the necessities of life.

The problem is the inordinate desire for worldly goods. It is the problem of never being content and always wanting more. It is placing our hopes for happiness on maximizing our acquisition of what the world has to offer.

The Lord repeatedly warns his followers about the danger of greed and ambition. On one occasion, a man asks him to force his brother to give him his share of an inheritance. Knowing how greed can divide and destroy families, Jesus teaches: “Take care to guard against all greed, for though one may be rich, one’s life does not consist of possessions.” Then he tells the parable of the rich man who spends his life’s energy increasing his wealth, and then comments that God says, “You fool, this night your life will be demanded of you; and the things you have prepared, to whom will they belong?” (Lk 12:15, 20).
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In his Sermon on the Mount, Jesus warns, “Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and decay destroy, and thieves break in and steal. But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor decay destroys, nor thieves break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there also will your heart be” (Mt 6:19-21). Then he adds, “No one can serve two masters. He will either hate one and love the other, or be devoted to one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and mammon” (Mt 6:24).

Greed is one of the seven deadly sins because it can destroy our soul. We were created to give and receive love. We can love money, but money can’t love us. If we give our heart over to the love of money, we will die a slow spiritual death from starvation of the soul, which hungers to be loved.

Greed has become respectable in today’s world. The greedy person is praised for being “ambitious and enterprising”. The wealthy are tempted to expect to be treated as royalty. Yet, Scripture associates the greedy with adulterers, thieves, drunkards, and slanderers and says greed is grounds for being excluded from the kingdom of God (1 Corinthians. 6:9-10). Elsewhere in Scripture greed is identified as a form of idolatry, one of the worldly desires we must "put to death" (Colossians 3:5).

The right to the pursuit of happiness has sometimes been turned into the claim of a right to happiness, and therefore a right to having everything we imagine might make us happy. But can wealth really make anyone happy? Who is happier, the person with ten children or the one with ten million dollars? The person with ten million dollars is not satisfied, and spends himself trying to make ten million more, while the person with ten children multiplies his love and happiness by a factor of ten, and considers himself rich beyond imagining.

One would think that in a nation as wealthy as the United States, with one of the highest standards of living in the world, people would be more content with the abundance they have than the peoples of other nations who have so much less, but the opposite often seems to be true. Many Americans live beneath a mountain of credit card debt, and the appetite for more consumer goods and entertainments seems insatiable.

The lesson of the captured monkey is clear: stop grasping at what you don’t need, lest you lose your freedom. Put your trust in God to bring you happiness, not in mammon.

+Bishop Raymundo J. Peña

last updated 19-Sep-2008 13:30 sitemap