Eighteenth Sunday In Ordinary Time C- Greed

Some Blog writers collect lists of humorous First World Problems, like Losing The TV Remote, Ads On Youtube, Being Hungry But Not For Any Of The Food In Your Fridge, Eating Fruit With Seeds, your walk-in closet is not big enough.

Author Martha J. Beckman tells of scooping out a bowl of ice cream for her granddaughter. Beckman asks, “How much would you like?” The little girl thought for a second, then said, “Give me too much!”

Our Gospel today mentions two people who suffered from “First Word Problems.”

1). “Teacher, tell my brother to share the inheritance with me.”

A sixth-grade teacher posed this question to her math class:

“A wealthy person dies and leaves ten million dollars. One-fifth is to go to his wife, one-fifth is to go to his daughter, one-fifth is to go to his son, one-sixth to his nephew, and the rest to charity. Now, what does each get?

After a long silence in the classroom, one student raised her hand. With complete sincerity in her voice, she answered, “A lawyer!”

Jesus refuses to offer his legal interpretation of Jewish inheritance laws. Instead, he talks about the root cause of greed. If both parties exhibited less covetousness, they would be able to resolve the issue. St. Thomas Aquinas defined greed as an immoderate love of possessing. Our Second Reading applies greed to idolatry. In Colossians 3:5 and in Ephesians 5:5, Greed is called idolatry. In both verses, greed is connected with impurity and using the body for immortality.

Our Second Reading says, “Put to death, then, the parts of you that are earthly: immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and the greed that is idolatry. Stop lying to one another,…” In Latin, the word used for “put to death” is mortifcate. The discipline of self-denial; of saying “no” to natural human tendencies that may lead to sin, like another glass of chardonnay.

In the book, INTERIOR MORTIFICATION, St. Alphonsus Liguori says: “There are two kinds of self-love: the one good, the other hurtful. The former is that which makes us seek eternal life–the end of our creation; the latter inclines us to pursue earthly goods, and to prefer them to our everlasting welfare, and to the holy will of God… Hence, Jesus Christ has said: If any man will come after me, let him deny himself. (Matthew 16: 24). The main purpose of on-going penance and voluntary mortification is to “restrain the inordinate inclinations of self-love.”

Greed also applies to even after someone is well-established in their career, yet they feel insufficiently recognized; or the parent who feels their son or daughter never scores enough goals or points in sports or does not get all straight A’s, or in some universities where the quality of education is downgraded by the bottom line, admittedly due to budget concerns, but where students identified as “consumers.”

Spiritually, greed is a “prosperity gospel” when one is not yet purified of a consumerist mindset, which does not allow us to face our own soul. Idolatry is infidelity—infidelity to the reality of myself as well as to the other, because I am being untrue to the truth of who and what I am, who and what you are, who and what each of us is, and we as both, before God, due to our sins of “too much.”

All is vanity we hear in our First Reading. The Latin vanitas means “emptiness” or “futility” that is used for the Hebrew word for “vapor” and refers to that which is fleeting and perishable (Psalm 62:9; 144:4).

A priest tells about a prayer he heard an old man pray at a worship service in Africa. The old man prayed, “Lord, let us never move into stone houses.” The priest had no idea what the prayer meant, so he found the man later and asked him.

The old man said, “You know Africa. You have seen our country. People here live in huts, and huts have no doors. That is why your family is my family, and my family is your family. But as soon as you move into a stone house, you build a door. On the door you put a lock, and behind your door you begin to accumulate more and more things. Then you have to spend the rest of your life protecting all that you have acquired.

We are the people living in stone houses. And Jesus is challenging us with this teaching.

2. Remedies for Greed.

Hebrews 13:5 says, “Keep your lives free from the love of money and be content with what you have, because God has said, “Never will I leave you; never will I forsake you.”

It’s Okay to be successful. Prosperity means to have no lack, but the man saw his wealth only as an opportunity for pleasure; not as an opportunity for giving. Poverty of spirit is a beatitude of being sensitive to the material needs of others like the poor, orphans, undocumented sojourners in the land, etc.