Spirituality of the Readings
Is Greed a Virtue?
In Sunday’s Gospel Jesus compares the good shepherd to a mere hired hand. The hired one cares about his salary and maybe when he gets off work. A good shepherd cares about his sheep.
There is nothing wrong with working for hire and doing your job even if you do not like it. I imagine that a lot of us are like that about our jobs, out of necessity.
Look at it this way.* Imagine that there are “handles” on things, poetically speaking. Everything I own—honors that come to me, possessions, etc.—all of this has “handles” that someone could grab in order to wrestle it away. Home, car, looks, reputation, career, money saved up for the children’s education, respect from others, pleasure, youth, you name it.
We grab the handles tight. We want to keep what we have.
Who can blame us? But an ominous power comes into play at that point. The forces of greed and evil tell our hearts that everything in the whole world is there just to be grabbed for myself and kept. “Greed is a virtue,” these forces say, in fact it is the only true virtue. The first decades of this century present an economic crisis that seemed a perfect result of this way of thinking.
But there is an alternate way of life. It has to do with love, the kind of love that the good shepherd shows us. It says, “the real value in life is to receive, not to grab and possess.” All that you have and all that you are is a gift from God. You can open your hands and let God pour into them whatever you really need. And if you keep your hands open, you can easily let what you have pass on to others, those who are without.
Two ways of life, then: on one side, “Grab and Keep.” On the other, “Receive and Let Go.” The hired hand says the first, the good shepherd the second.
Do you understand, thus far? Good, because the story continues.
There comes an epic battle between these two ways of life. It is waged on the cross. Evil applies its weapons: it seizes and tears away from Jesus everything with “handles” on it—friends, followers, career, respect, relation to God, ordinary comfort, slaking of thirst, the ability to breathe, and then life itself.
It takes everything. Evil wins.
Except ...
... there is a fatal flaw in the grab-and-keep philosophy. Since this viewpoint thinks that everything whatsoever has handles on it, there is an important reality that it cannot recognize at all.
Love.
Love lets go, receiving humbly, giving humbly. The devil has no way to perceive love since there are no handles on unselfishness. The devil has to misinterpret what he sees, as just another form of self-interest.
So he burrows down to the innermost sanctum of Jesus’ soul, greedy to seize the ultimate prize itself, the reality of God. Salivating for it, ravenous, unable to hold back, he throws open the tabernacle doors of Jesus’ soul.
He finds that this sacred space is empty. Completely empty! Present are the quiet stillness of receiving gratefully and lightly letting go, but they are without handles. The devil gives up and goes on his way, confident that everything is now his.
But it isn't.
Love wins because it has given everything away.
Shall we try it this Easter season?
With help from the Good Shepherd?
John Foley, SJ
**From Saint Louis University