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Greed “So the Lord sent Nathan the prophet to tell David this story: “There were two men in a certain town. One was rich, and one was poor. 2 The rich man owned many sheep and cattle. 3 The poor man owned nothing but a little lamb he had worked hard to buy. He raised that little lamb, and it grew up with his children. It ate from the man’s own plate and drank from his cup. He cuddled it in his arms like a baby daughter. 4 One day a guest arrived at the home of the rich man, but instead of killing a lamb from his own flocks for food, he took the poor man’s lamb and killed it and served it to his guest.” (2 Samuel 12: 1-4) Many of us read the story of David and Bathsheba and cannot conceive that we might become so greedy that we could commit such a heinous crime yet in our daily lives we make choices that have the same consequences. Most of us will not be as bold as to go ahead and commit murder yet the scars we leave on others lives as they become victims of our greed are traumatic, deadly and can have eternal consequences. In a materialistic world it is easy to lose focus on the impact that greed has not only on us but also on others. Greed is the desire to have more; to acquire whatever one can get his/her hands on, to amass without any correlation to one’s own specific needs or those of others. A greedy person is confused about life; a greedy person does not realize that meaning to life and the satisfaction of living a purposeful life has no correlation to material possessions. We go through life stepping over whoever gets on our way as we climb to that summit where we believe all our problems will disappear and we will find fulfillment. The saddest part of reaching the summit is that if we ever get there we find that what we thought was there is not. It is extremely sad how the false assumption that material possessions will fill the emptiness within us drives millions of honest people to make horrific choices. We lie to ourselves and others. We work so hard to accumulate the things which society has convinced us that once we have them we will be happy that we lose focus of what really matters and what truly fills the emptiness within us. We sacrifice our health and abandon our loved ones only to spend all the wealth we acquire to either recoup our health, or save our loved ones from addictions they endure as a result of our abandonment. If we look at David as a murder and correlate this to God’s statement that David was a man after God’s own heart, we realize that not only does God love those whom society has condemned but that there was something unique about David that allowed God to look beyond the criminal. Is it perhaps that David lived a transparent life of repentance and contrition not only before others, but most important before God? As humans in a fallen world we will fall to greed and hurt others as a result of our greed. This is to be understood not to be accepted. When we realize that we have committed an act of greed, we must immediately come clean about it. Lord give me the wisdom to discern when I am about to make a greedy choice. Meditation: Take an inventory of your life as it refers to greed. Jorge L. Valdes, Ph.D.
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