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18th
Sunday of Ordinary Time, Cycle C
St.
Mark Church, Fallston, 9:00 & 11:00
July
31, 2016
Preventing Need to Turn to Greed
By (Rev. Msgr.) Nicholas P. Amato
The
Executive and the Cleaning Woman
The psychologist Victor
Frankl tells an interesting story about a woman who works for a cleaning
service at the corporate offices of a multimillion dollar firm.
The woman — Alice — wears
blue jeans and a Marlboro cigarette tee shirt. The executive — Matthew
Millionaire — wears a dark blue business suit and white dress shirt with gold
cuff links.
Alice vacuums carpets and
cleans the toilets and bathroom floors. Matthew Millionaire directs his multimillion dollar enterprise.
Alice works evenings. Matthew Millionaire works days and evenings to keep up with the pace of business and the social life that this demands.
Alice works to send her son
to the state college. Matthew Millionaire works to make more money for people who are
already wealthy, including himself.
Alice finds her work bearable
and light, but Matthew Millionaire finds
his work stressful and draining. Every evening they pass each other in the
hallway of the office building and they are puzzled.
Alice wonders: “Why does he look so preoccupied when he
makes so much money and lives so comfortably?” Matthew wonders: “Why is she always cheerful when she has to
do this demeaning work?”
Victor Frnakl says that the
difference between the two of them lies in their goals. The cleaning woman has the
goal of educating her son, while the executive has no goal beyond himself and
profit making.
Need
and Greed
Frankl’s
story and his observations help us to appreciate God’s Word to us today.
In the Gospel parable, Jesus
is not condemning us for working to meet our family’s needs and to maintain a
reasonable lifestyle. But he is saying that greed can be a problem.
Greed means that we feel that
we never have enough and we always want more. The challenge is to tell the
difference between need and greed.
When are our needs satisfied
and where does greed begin? The
Scripture readings offer us two guiding principles to prevent need from
becoming greed.
Looking
Beyond Yourself to Others
First,
we must look beyond ourselves to others.
The rich man in the Gospel is
totally focused on himself. Notice that the words of his conversation are all “I”
and “me” words.
“What shall I do? I will tear down my barns and build larger ones.
All my grain and my goods will go there. Then I can relax and I will have security for the
rest of my life.”
This individual thinks that
satisfaction and happiness are found in himself and in material security. He is
very much like the corporate executive in Frankl’s story.
He totally misses the higher
value of living for someone else and sharing what we have with others, as the
cleaning woman was doing. Because he does not look beyond himself to others, his
need has turned into greed.
Looking
beyond World to God
A second guiding principle to
prevent need from becoming greed comes to us in the reading from St. Paul.
Paul tells us to “Seek the things that are above. Set your
minds on things that are above and not on things that are on earth.”
When we look beyond the
material world, we contact a God who satisfies like nothing else. We touch a
presence that relates to our deepest longing for love, affirmation, and
belonging.
Repeated contacts with this
presence through silence, prayer and reflection, we become increasingly united
to a presence that is our final goal and purpose in life.
As the Gospel puts it, we
will realize that “Our life does not
consist in an abundance of possessions.”
Conclusion
To
conclude, Jesus does not condemn financial security, comforts, or possessions.
He does, however, caution us
(1) To look beyond ourselves to others, and (2) To look beyond this world to
God.
On both counts, doing so will
allow us not to be carried away and allow our need to turn into greed.
“Where are we looking for our deepest satisfaction?” is a question each of us must answer.
