THE GRASP OF GREED
“WHAT
WILL YE GIVE ME?”
A Sermon by
Dr. Walter A. Maier
One of the Twelve, called Judas Iscariot, went unto
the chief priests and said unto them, What will ye give me, and I will
deliver him unto you? And they covenanted with him for thirty pieces of
silver. — Matt. 26:14-15.
If it were possible
to analyze the causes for the great tragedies in human history, we
should find indeed that one of the most devastating forces in our human
make-up is the insatiable greed for gold. Think of Genghiz Khan, the
gold-crazed Mongol emperor and conqueror of Asia, who in twenty-two
years of bloody massacres slaughtered more than 15,000,000 human
beings, stripped city after city of its treasures, and left a howling
wilderness in the wake of his ravaging hordes. Think of Pizarro, the
deceitful butcher, who, in the name of religion and with the cross of
Christ on his standards, made the streets of the Andes country run red
with the life-blood of native Peruvians. One day he seized the reigning
Inca, struck down four thousand princes in cold blood, took possession
of their treasures, and demanded a large room filled with gold as the
ransom for the Peruvian monarch; and when this extortion price was
paid, he perfidiously proceeded to have the unfortunate Inca burned to
a horrible death.
THE
GRASP OF GREEDY JUDAS.
Think of all this
and of other crimson carnages in history that have been instigated by
greed-inflamed degenerates; but remember that more staggering than all
of these, more depraved than any exhibition of human depravity, is the
sin of covetousness and greed that produced the super-tragedy of all
history, the sale of Jesus Christ, the Son of God and the Savior of
mankind, by Judas Iscariot for thirty pieces of silver.
He was no ordinary
criminal, this smirking traitor who delivered our Lord into the hands
of the hostile clergy. He was one of the Twelve, one of that wondrously
blessed company which for three years had been privileged to walk with
Jesus and to receive the precious pearls of instruction that fell from
His divine lips. Nor was he an ordinary disciple; for we may believe,
as his name indicates, that he was a Judean, a fellow-countryman of our
Lord, and not a Galilean, like the rest of the Twelve. Besides, he was
the treasurer of what treasury there was in that happy communal life of
Christ and His disciples. We should consequently suppose that Judas
would be the last to violate the trust that had been placed in him and
to betray the Lord of lords, of whose love and power he had been a
direct and frequent witness. But the contact with money shriveled his
greedy soul; he became so inflamed by the fire of avarice that he
stretched out his hand and stole; and when the gentle Savior raised His
voice in warning, Judas, with visions of big and easy money, ran to the
high priest with this question of betrayal on his lips, “What will ye
give me and I will deliver Him unto you?”
And what did they
give him after their formal bargaining for innocent blood? Thirty
paltry pieces of silver, about $19.50 in our money. Thirty pieces of
cold silver! Why, the traffickers in human flesh at the slave-markets
would curse and haggle for more than that as the price for the meanest
slave that the Nabataean kidnapers might drag across the desert! Thirty
pieces of traitor’s money, — only enough to buy the field of blood in a
deserted corner outside the city walls where the unclaimed dead might
be buried! Thirty pieces of silver, — which sent the Savior to the
cross and hurled Judas into hell!
THE
TRAGIC PERPETUATION OF THIS GRASPING GREED.
Judas, for whom it
had been better had he never been born, died in the agony of
horror-stricken despair as his body dangled at the end of a suicide’s
noose. But the spirit of Judas lives on, and his question, “What will
ye give me?” is the great impulse behind much of the tragedy in our
modern life. I believe that people of today, probably more than those
of any other previous generation in our country, need to be on vigilant
guard against the encroachments of this money-worshiping,
“get-what-you-can” spirit. They are surrounded on all sides by men
whose right vision has been blinded by the glitter of gold, whose
everlasting question is, “What will ye give me?” “What is there in it
for me?” Oh, we speak deploringly of the heathen in India and of their
prostration before the dumb idols of their own benighted manufacture.
We are depressed when we think of the crude and brutal fetishes which
pagan unbelief has raised up as its gods. But all this, even in its
most sordid and abject forms, is not as appalling and as damnable as
when in our own country and in our twentieth and enlightened century
men and women, young and old, who lay claim to intelligence and, in
some instances, to a knowledge of the Word of God, will prostrate
themselves before the dumb and grinning idol that is labeled “Mammon,”
and in an endless chorus chant the litany of their worship, “What will
ye give me?” “What can I get out of it?”
This love of money,
which God’s Word calls “the root of all evil,” has been the destructive
impulse in our political life, where officials occupying positions of
honor and trust succumb to the spirit of bribery and dishonesty; where
judges and jurists, to whom God and man look for the impartial
execution of justice and for the conscientious enforcement of the laws
of the land, ask, “What will ye give me?” and put a price upon their
decisions; where police officials and servants of the public, the
guardians of law and order, have become so corrupt that gangsters and
racketeers, rumrunners and beer barons, flourish insolently under
their protection.
The greedy love of
money is the root of our business and economic evils. Let people talk
about the laws of supply and demand, overproduction and restricted
production, human labor and machine labor, exports and imports, — the
really basic human factor in the depression and retardation of
industrial happiness is the avaricious reaching after gold. Here is an
employer who selfishly builds up his fortune through the sweat and
blood of his workmen, through the exploitation of women and children;
and here is an employee who greedily opposes the interests of his
employer, steals time, and destroys property. Here are the vultures in
human form who promote fraudulent investments by which the meager funds
of the widow and the orphan are deliberately stolen. Here are the
thousands of embezzlers and forgers, profiteers and extortioners,
burglars and robbers, because of whom the people of the United States
every day lose almost $25,000,000, or more than a million dollars every
hour that we live!
The relentless
pursuit of the allegedly almighty dollar is likewise the root of many
of the unhappy conditions in the Church today. When churches openly
cater to the wealthy, forgetting the special emphasis that our Lord and
His Word lay upon the poor and the afflicted; when the vast millions of
some of America’s leading men of wealth are solicited and accepted to
support the modernistic form of unbelief that has no room for the
Christ of the Bible; when churches teach in theory and maintain in
practice that you can buy the priceless gift of the forgiveness of sins
for cold cash, purchase the power of prayer, and sell the grace of God;
when churches try to secure their funds, not from the free and loving
gifts of church-members, but by wheedling or coercing infidels and
scoffers to make unwilling and extortionate contributions or by taking
recourse to roulette wheels, games of chance, and forms of gambling,
all condemned by the law of the land; when they do this in the holy
name of the Lord of love, you can see that the question of Judas, “What
will ye give me?” is not at all remote from some of our modern churches.
But the menace of
money madness has also invaded the sanctity of our homes. If you could
take out of our present-day family life all the quarrels that center
around finances, all the blighting influences that have been provoked
by the inordinate love of money, you could establish an era of
unparalleled happiness and harmony. But these are the conditions that
we actually meet: Here is a father who takes a gifted son out of school
and puts him to work at some menial form of labor, so that he can bring
home a few dollars every week that the family really does not need.
Here is a son who earns a fine salary, but who, forgetting the
practical implications of the divine command, “Honor thy father and thy
mother,” refuses to contribute to the support and the welfare of his
home and his parents and squanders his income for selfish purposes.
Here at the casket of a self-sacrificing mother is a group of
hysterical, high-pitched sons and daughters desecrating her memory by
arguing over her property and threatening to air their contentions at
court. Here —
But let us draw the
curtain over these unpleasant scenes, and let me tell you that in your
life and mine this question, “What will ye give me?” plays a more
shocking role than most of us like to admit. Every human being, by the
endowment of a corrupted nature, is selfish and self-centered. To his
perverted vision, life is truly a survival of the fittest financially,
with every man for himself. “Get what you can” and “never mind how you
get it” is one of the most assertive ideals in our current philosophy
of living.
Now, I do not wish
to stand before this microphone and condemn those who have a rich
supply of this world’s goods. For with the Scriptural endorsement of
Abraham, Joseph, Job, David, Lydia, and others, to whom God extended
particularly generous temporal blessings, there is nothing
reprehensible in wealth itself. Indeed, there are today princes of
finance who are humble and grateful followers of Christ and to whom
the Church, humanly speaking, owes much. The happiness and joy of soul
that is theirs in accepting the privilege of stewardship shows the
blessing that is attached to money acquired and distributed in the
spirit of Christ.
But the trouble
today is this, that too many “lay up treasures for themselves and are
not rich toward God.” They forget the words of Christ, “Ye cannot serve
God and Mammon.” While most of us restrain our hands from deliberately
stealing our neighbor’s property, the commandments “Thou shalt not
steal,” “Thou shalt not covet,” embrace the thoughts and desires, the
words and wishes, of envy and covetousness and greed; and there is not
a single person in my audience tonight who must not plead guilty to the
accusation of having harbored and nourished such thoughts.
Now, there is no
more timely and direct warning against the selfish desire for wealth
than the remarkable words which St. Paul wrote to Timothy, “They that
will be rich fall into temptation and a snare and into many foolish and
hurtful lusts, which drown men in destruction and perdition. For the
love of money is the root of all evil; which while some coveted after,
they have erred from the faith and pierced themselves through with many
sorrows.” Indeed, “if a man gain the whole world and lose his own
soul,” as Jesus says, there is no profit for him, nothing but
disastrous, damning loss.
THE
DIVINE ANTIDOTE.
Remember, there is
one, and only one, power that can counteract this inborn, greedy love
for money. We can have crime commissions that sit for a hundred years,
police regulations and governmental legislations of the most
comprehensive and severe kind; these and all other human arrangements
will never meet the expectations placed in them. We must have Jesus
Christ, first to forgive the sins of greed and avarice in our
individual lives and then, through His Spirit, to give us that sense of
honesty and truth, that ability to keep things temporal subject to
things spiritual, that confident devotion, which makes us declare with
St. Paul, “I count all things but loss for the excellency of the
knowledge of Jesus Christ, my Lord.”
Your Savior can do
all this and more for you. If there are those listening in tonight
whose consciences are burdened with acts of dishonesty or theft, let
them now, in penitence and contrition, with the avowed intention of
making adequate restitution, come to that Savior whom these Lenten
weeks picture to us nailed on the cross for the sins of the world; and
let them see Him in those hours of agony turn His thorn-crowned head to
one of the thieves crucified with Him, answering his plea for
forgiveness with the promise of glory, “Verily, I say unto thee, Today
shalt thou be with Me in paradise.” Let them gain the assurance that
the blood which dripped from those sacred wounds is the only cleansing
power that can purify their lives, give them the assurance of heaven,
and send them out into life with new determination and new power.
Of all religions of
which men have ever heard the Gospel of your Savior that knocks at your
heart tonight is the only creed that relegates money to the
insignificant place which it rightly deserves, the only religion that
operates “without money and without price.” That love which was freely
extended to all, the love that tells us “it is better to give than to
receive,” the love that came to serve and not to be served, that love
is the great incentive in the lives of the Christian heroes and
martyrs, the pioneers in charity and self-sacrificing service, who have
offered their lives, their energies, their treasures, for Christ’s
service, — not asking the cost, not demanding reward, not insisting
“What will ye give me?” but rather thanking God for the blessed
privilege of serving in the name of Jesus Christ, content with their
food and raiment, satisfied that “we brought nothing into the world,
and it is certain we can carry nothing out.”
Have you found the
secret of profound happiness and contentment? Do you know and believe
and trust the Savior, who so despised the tarnished and corroding
treasures of human existence that, “though He was rich, yet for your
sakes He became poor, that ye, through His poverty, might be rich”;
that Christ who was offered all the gold and the accumulated
possessions of the entire world by Satan in the payment of just one act
of disloyalty, but who uncompromisingly refused? Remember, unfailing
Source of life and hope that He is, He offers to all who believe in Him
and cling to His unfailing promises the treasures of heaven, too divine
to be consumed by moth or rust, too precious to be measured by human
standards, too priceless to be purchased by the best gold of Ophir, —
the gift of His own holy, precious blood, offered to all, free and
without price. Oh, tonight, as you behold Him suffering, wounded,
rejected for your sins, may God give you the grace to stop in the mad
rush of a self-absorbed life, to kneel down before His cross, and to
ask in faith: —
Thy life was given for me,
Thy blood, O Lord, was shed,
That I might ransomed be
And quickened from the dead.
Thy life was given for me:
What have I given for Thee?
Amen.
[From the book, "The lutheran Hour"
1931]