Money And Human Character

The more dif­fi­cult finan­cial days are ahead. The inves­ti­ga­tions are going to expose more bil­lion dol­lar schemes that have robbed thou­sands or even mil­lions of oth­ers. Deep­en­ing shad­ows of greed may even come to light in the pop­u­lace in gen­eral. After all, can we serve both God and money? Jesus said we could not. Money is a good tool but a poor mas­ter. It is also the great­est test of char­ac­ter. For all of the psy­cho­log­i­cal tests, none match the accu­racy of the per­cep­tions and uses of every­day money.

In a pre­vi­ous gen­er­a­tion, the test was war. It was a gen­er­a­tion of gas ovens and noble mar­tyr­dom. It was a time of com­mon men and women becom­ing heroes in a world gone mad. Meth­ods of human cru­elty still abound. Short of a weapon? Here! Use an air­liner! Evil can indeed be resource­ful, but so can the good in us all. Cru­el­ties open the door for hero­ism. What is humankind? Are we well-dressed mon­sters or walk­ing, talk­ing, images of a lov­ing God?

For every Hitler there are thou­sands of Mother Teresa “saints” at work. The Mother Teresa types do not make the news as much — sel­dom ever in fact. A recent social sci­en­tist once remarked that over the last two cen­turies we have become obsessed with our crim­i­nal class. Take a walk through the pulp fic­tion sec­tions of a book­store and you will see his point. Do we focus on crime to pon­der the poten­tial crim­i­nal in us all?

Per­son­ally, I think it is by default. It is just a way of mak­ing a buck. Scan­dal sells. The worst of human­ity is not the hall­mark of the species. For every con artist there are a hun­dreds of hon­est peo­ple work­ing and pay­ing their bills — or even thou­sands. We may be obsessed with crime, but we are not defined by it. The crime of killing an inno­cent man through cru­ci­fix­ion proved no match for his res­ur­rec­tion. My money is on the self-sacrificing char­ac­ter within us that never dies.