Remember Harry Potter? No, not that Potter! Harry F. Potter. He was the president of the Savings and Loan who treated George Bailey so poorly back in Bedford Falls. It's a wonderful life, while Potter is stereotypical greed personified.
Or Mr. Gekko? No, not that Gekko. Gordon Gekko, the king of Wall Street, who once whispered so ominously that “greed is good.”
Or me, right after each new IPhone had been announced, so convinced that this one purchase is all that stands between me and true happiness?
It’s like the old song says, “I want it all…and I want it now!”
That’s how it is with greed, the only sin which merits three sentences in the ten commandments:
“You shall not covet your neighbor’s house. You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, his male or female slave, his ox or donkey. You shall not covet anything that belongs to your neighbor.”
But that does not keep me from being greedy or from being jealous of all that neat stuff my neighbor has. Those of you of a certain age will remember Big Brother, Bob Emory, who used to sing to us at noontime about how “the grass is always greener in the other fellow's yard.”
That’s because, so often when we see that enviable lawn, we are made green with seething envy. It’s unfair! I thought I was supposed to have the best lawn! It’s almost funny the way we stand there stomping our feet, green-eyed with jealousy and greed.
And this rot in our souls erodes our social fabric as well. As Americans, who last year decreased our giving to charity for the first time in over a decade by 3.4 percent. Americans, so caught up in a consumeristic fervor that almost half of us spend more each month than we make, accumulating mountains of stuff, which we then go to the Container Store to get things to put all our stuff in. (By the way, one of my favorite stores is the Container Store).
We live in a society which constantly celebrates that bigger is better and more is best. Where acquisition is the goal of life and where having a lot makes me happy.
All of which exacerbates the distances between us. Did you know, for example, that the three richest people in the world possess more financial assets than the poorest 48 nations combined? And that the top 1% of wage earners in the city of Worcester earn the yearly salary of the other 99% in just three weeks?
Now, admittedly some of these are political realities way above my pay grade. But they also unmask gross inequities in what Pope Francis has called the “economy of exclusion.”
Which is what the ever pessimistic Quoeleth is talking about when he laments that “all things are vanity,” and what Jesus is describing in the sad story of the rich man who built a great big barn to put all his stuff in and then promptly died.
So, what is the antidote to greed? One thing only: the Lord Jesus Christ, hanging upon the cross, clinging to nothing of this world, and letting go of everything for love of us. Total self-emptying kenosis, the very opposite of grasping green-eyed greed.
For it is only by giving our hearts and our lives over to Christ, by inviting him to live within us, that we can begin to find the courage to give and not to grab.
The Little Flower understood it best when she called us to a life of gratitude rather than greed.
“I feel, [she once wrote] that when I am charitable it is Jesus acting in me; the more I am united to Him the more do I love all my Sisters….True Charity consists in bearing with all the defects of our neighbor, in not being surprised at his failings, and in being edified by his least virtues.”
So we who seek to follow Jesus are called, she continues, not only to give to whoever asks, but to let what we think belongs to us to be taken. “I know it seems hard; [she writes] but the yoke of the Lord is sweet and light: and when we accept it we feel its sweetness immediately…For only love can enlarge my heart...
That’s why each time I am greedy, the Lord smiles patiently and shows me the wounds he suffered for my salvation, still bleeding from his hands, his feet and his side…and smiling he says, “You have earned nothing. All is gift…even the air you breathe. It is but by the gratuitous love of God that you live and move and seek my face.”
For greed, dear friends, is but a lie whispered by the devil into innocent hearts, tempting them to seek their own glory, and not the ways of God.
