GUIDELINES TO CURB OUR EARTHLY GREED

GUIDELINES TO CURB OUR EARTHLY GREED

A sobering comment on the worthlessness of working unnecessarily for material possessions is the old saying that there are no pockets in a shroud. Every generation learns, often through bitter experience, that life is brief and entrance into heaven cannot be bought with riches. We leave the world the same way we came into it. So what is the point of hoarding when someone else, who may care nothing about us, will inherit and perhaps waste all we have worked to achieve. The rich fool found this out to his cost because death exposed his real poverty. During his life he behaved as if he was going to live forever. He failed to realize that what counts when we die is not wealth but the person we become in the process of living. Greed cut him off from God and other people. It showed the foolishness of thinking that happiness could be attained without taking God and death into reckoning.
In case we are in the process of switching off, because we think that this gospel applies only to the rich, it’s well to remember that Christ preached this gospel to people who were very poor by our standards. This is the story of the person who spends life without reference to God. Christ is really warning us about going it alone and trying to hold our future in our hands-of wasting time, gloating over possessions and setting ourselves down securely in this life’s comforts. This is a caution about greed and the hold which possession exercise over human heart. Greed and meanness are not confined to the wealthy but the most common of human failings and all of us can become victims of them in our struggle to earn our daily bread. The spell disaster for us as and blind us as to where true values lie. The frustrations, disappointments and incomplete joy that the pursuit of material possessions bring are a reminder that happiness does not come from having what we want, but being content with what we have.
We can overcome the temptation of greed by helping those who are less fortunate than ourselves. What is given to others is not lost but is transformed into a treasure for eternity. In the evening of life we will be measured by the good we have done, Rather than wrap money around our hearts, we are urged to give our money to the poor. In the light of what Jesus says, each of us has some hard thinking to do about our attitude towards possessions. God is at the end of the line waiting for us when life is over.