Last night I came across a quote from Evagrius of Pontus about logismoi which I think has some bearing on this discussion. (long rambling post warning)
LOVE of money (avarice) suggests: a long old age; hands powerless to work; hunger and disease yet to come; the bitterness of poverty; and the disgrace of receiving the necessities [of life] from others.
As I read it, this all sounds like what we now consider sound financial planning advice, which shows me how far we have departed from really living the gospel. We are told that we must start saving early for retirement security. We are told that we are failing as human beings if we find it difficult to put food on the table, to pay for medical expenses in the even that someone falls ill, to put a roof over the heads of our children or give them a college education. But we are also told that we should make sure that we are not a burden to our children in our old age.
This is not about "if any would not work, neither should he eat." This is about a system that is set up (and I am not putting the blame on anyone in particular, pretty much our whole society is set up toward this end) to make us labor and toil for things other than the Kingdom of God. From our earliest days we are told to save money, and when our barns are filled that we should tear them down and build greater ones so that in our old age we can take our ease, eat, drink and be merry. We deprive ourselves of the opportunity to be helped by others, we deprive others of our help, we deprive ourselves of the opportunity to learn to live by God's providence and care and not by our own toil, and we deprive ourselves of the chance to lay up treasure in heaven.
Yes, we should work. Yes, we should take care for our families. But we are slaves to greed and avarice and we usually think it's a good thing. I appreciated that Father Stephen did not make a case for Socialism as an economic ideal, but pointed out that Capitalism is not the godly enterprise that it is often presented as. I don't know what a truly Christian economic system would look like in practice (if there even were such a thing), but I would guess that a great many American Christians would reject it if they saw it. I suspect that Ananias and Sapphira probably had their reasons for keeping back some of the money that they should have brought to the Church. They knew what the system was, and in principle they agreed with it or they would have brought nothing. And yet they chose to keep something back for their own use. It was the sin of avarice. They may have felt that they could take better care of themselves and their needs than God and His Church could. They might have felt that their needs were more important than the needs of others, or that some others were not deserving of help. It does not really matter why they did what they did.
Avarice is not always as blatant as selling the Savior for thirty pieces of silver. And yet we know that what we do to the least of our brethren we do to Christ. When we sell out our brethren in order to get ahead ourselves we do that to Christ. When we live a life of constant consumption fueled by slave labor or when we build our retirements on usury that deprives others, we do those things to Christ. And it wouldn't matter whether we did it for thirty pieces of silver or a trillion, it still would not be worth it.
So obviously, we all need to go off the grid and live out in the woods (or the deserts) living only off the sweat of our brows, right? I'm afraid I wouldn't last a week. But I think we need to realize that Capitalism "works" because it is based on the reality that people are greedy and avaricious and that one person's greed can keep another person's in check. It is not a good thing to be praised, but a reality to be accepted. And insofar as it is possible, we need to examine ourselves and strive to cut away the sin of avarice from ourselves and make choices that value others more than ourselves, even when it's difficult for us to do so... especially when it's difficult.
