Beware of greed. Be poor in spirit
In practice, greed is treated as if it were the most virtuous of all virtues.
We face a danger that tends to remain hidden. We are losing sight of the virtue of poverty. Didn’t Jesus tell us: “Blessed are the poor in spirit”? Didn’t he give us good example by living that way himself? Are we making any effort to imitate that example? Are we making an effort to be poor in spirit?
It is difficult to understand how we are supposed to embrace poverty living in the middle of the modern world.
The vast majority of Christians will never be monks or nuns. They must have money to pay for food, shelter, hospital visits and school fees—not to mention funerals, weddings and tithes in church on Sunday.
Even so, with all the importance that money has for survival, we must nevertheless be on guard against greed. Beware of spending money just to impress others, or simply to feel wealthy. Someone put it this way: “We live in a world where many people are buying things they don’t need using money they don’t have.”
The danger is that greed has ceased to be a vice. No Christian is so ignorant as to say that greed is a virtue. But look around you. In practice, greed is treated as if it were the most virtuous of all virtues.
People don’t call it greed. They confuse it with success—and they envy those who are supremely successful. They give greed a nice name, but what they’re really talking about is greed.
They forget one thing; Jesus did not die a success, he died on a cross. Jesus did not ask the apostles to be successful; he asked them to follow him.
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