When the “Varsity Blues” scandal came to light in 2019, I wrote about the problem of greed in human life. The Varsity Blues scandal involved wealthy parents of high schoolers who hired a “consultant” to help their children cheat their way into elite colleges. The consultant used bribery and deception to facilitate cheating on college entrance exams and created fake accomplishments for the students, mostly in athletics.
Why would already-wealthy families act unethically and take such a legal risk when their children have so many advantages to begin with? I was not alone in wondering. Some online commentors “joked” that the parents could have simply bought their kids’ way into college the “normal” way, by endowing a building. Or they could have used their wealth to help the kids start a business or make investments with a cushion to fall back on. Why would people already at the top of the economic hierarchy continue to strive after the money, clout and connections of elite college education, when they and their children are already well-positioned to live comfortably, even luxuriously?
I don’t know if the families involved in that scandal reevaluated their priorities once the legal wrangling was over. But the moral questions raised by this scandal—and other instances of greedy behavior—are questions the Christian tradition has been wrestling with for a long time.
Scripture talks about greed
Jesus and his disciples were certainly familiar with what the Hebrew Scriptures teach about wealth and greed. The Book of Leviticus tells landowners, “When you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap to the very edges of your field or gather the gleanings of your harvest; you shall leave them for the poor and for the alien: I am the Lord your God” (Leviticus 23:22). God is commanding the people not to gather for themselves every possible scrap and hoard it. Instead, this passage provides a way people with more resources can make their extras available for people with less.
The Book of Proverbs offers many warnings about the dangers of excessive greed and wealth. Take Proverbs 11:24-28: “Some give freely yet grow all the richer; others withhold what is due and only suffer want. A generous person will be enriched, and one who gives water will get water…. Those who trust in their riches will wither, but the righteous will flourish like green leaves.”
Following this tradition, Jesus himself warns against seeking and hoarding wealth. He tells parables about the man who died immediately after building bigger barns to hoard his grain (Luke 12:16-21) and about Lazarus and the rich man who was tormented in Hades after living luxuriously and refusing to help the poor (Luke 16:19-31).
Jesus seemed to find it especially distasteful when people abused their religious power to indulge their greed. He called out religious leaders who made a show of their piety while “devour[ing] widows’ houses” (Mark 12:40). The famous scene in which Jesus drives money changers from the Temple in Jerusalem with a whip of cords (John 2:13-17) seems to show that abuse of religion for personal gain is the one thing that could really make Jesus angry—Jesus, who displayed calm and peaceableness, even when he was condemned to death!
Greed and our desire for security
We read that Jesus’ disciples “left everything” to follow him (Matthew 19:27). In the early church, people distributed their possessions to the poor and “held in common” everything they had (Acts 4:32-37). As time passed and the church grew, Christian leaders and theologians wrestled with how the teachings and practices of the Hebrew prophets, Jesus and the early disciples should influence the lives of Christians.
Many asked the same questions that come up today in cases like the Varsity Blues scandal: Why is it so difficult to let go of the desire for earthly possessions? Why do people who have more than they could ever need continue to hoard wealth and status?
From the early church until now, theologians have argued that greed comes from people’s desire for security. We naturally hope to keep ourselves and the people we love safe and comfortable, yet we live in an uncertain world. The search for ever more wealth, status and power often seems to come from a hope that, at some point, we’ll finally feel safe—secure in the belief that nothing bad can touch us.
St. Basil of Caesarea, a 4th century priest and theologian, discussed this in his “Sermon to the Rich.”2 Likely delivered at a time of drought and famine, Basil’s sermon focused on the rich young man who asked Jesus how to inherit eternal life. When Jesus told him to give his possessions to the poor, he “went away grieving” (Mark 10:17-22). Basil argued that people try to hoard goods for both present and future purposes. We worry about what we can give to our children, and we hide our money away. In Basil’s time, people buried their gold in the ground, to guard against unexpected needs.
Yet wealth and status fail to provide the certainty we seek. There’s always someone who has more, always some other possession to attain, and always the nagging concern that what we have might be lost.
Even Clement of Alexandria, who lived in the 2nd and 3rd centuries and allowed for an allegorical reading of Jesus’s command to leave all possessions behind, railed against the idea that possessions could bring about a sense of security. According to Clement, we must hold our possessions loosely, and those who have much should give to everyone they can, without judging whether the person “deserves” it.
Luther spoke about greed
Martin Luther also admonished his community not to grasp tightly onto the things of the world and to give generously to those in need.
Like other theologians, Luther thought that greed arises from insecurity—specifically the insecurity that people feel when we lack faith in God’s goodness and love for us. Regarding the parable of Lazarus and the rich man, Luther wrote, “Faith does not seek its enjoyment in worldly goods. But where unbelief is, there man falls upon worldly good, cleaves to it, seeks after it, and has no rest until he finds it.”
Luther might have been referencing the famous line in St. Augustine’s Confessions in which Augustine says to God: “Our hearts are restless till they rest in thee.” Both Augustine and Luther think that fallen human beings live with uncertainty and a desire for stability. If that stability is not found in God, we will seek it in worldly things, including wealth and status.
Like Jesus, Luther was particularly incensed at religious leaders who used their standing to swindle or cajole others out of their wealth. Luther’s rebellion against the Roman Catholic Church began with his protest against church leaders who sold indulgences to enhance the church’s coffers. And Luther rejected the idea that worldly wealth could reflect religious or moral goodness. He rebuked religious leaders who claimed their wealth was a sign of moral superiority.
Luther also cautioned Christians against using care for loved ones as an excuse for greed. Of course, we have a moral responsibility to meet our own and our families’ basic needs. But it’s very easy for what we “need” to expand into luxury. Luther writes: “Greed has here a very beautiful, fine cover for its shame, which is called provision for the body and natural need, under cover of which it accumulates wealth beyond all limits and is never satisfied.”
Theology of the 20th Century
Church theologians who witnessed the inequality and violence of the 20th century spoke of human insecurity in terms of fundamental anxiety. Reinhold Niebuhr explained that human beings are both transcendent and finite. Because we are eternal creatures created by God in God’s image, our consciousness can “rise above” the restrictions of earthly life. Yet our bodies and minds are still restricted by natural limitations. The combination of these two things, Niebuhr wrote, causes insecurity about our place in the universe.
For Niebuhr, human beings are created to trust God, yet we’re notoriously bad at it. And when we don’t fully trust God, we try to soothe our anxiety by dominating others and accumulating wealth and power. Anxiety itself, Niebuhr said, isn’t sinful. However, the measures we take to avoid or overcome anxiety by our own power are inevitably sinful, because they cause harm to our neighbors. When I try to dominate someone else’s life and decision-making, I’m sinning against that neighbor. When I hoard worldly goods, I’m denying others their basic needs.
What is the answer?
As with any sin that’s deeply rooted in our fallen human nature, there is no easy way out of the problem of greed. But saints and theologians from the early church until now elaborate on the solution Jesus himself gave us: trust in God’s goodness and love; be willing to undergo personal hardship, rather than shift burdens onto others; and engage in the spiritual practices of prayer, meditation on Scripture, self-discipline, and building up communities where we can alleviate insecurities by showing God’s steadfast love to each other.
All of this requires God’s grace and living into that grace over a lifetime. But we do have examples of Christians who fully placed their trust in God, from the desert monastics of the first centuries to Saints Francis and Clare, who gave up wealth to found religious orders, and Luther himself. Luther certainly had his faults, but failure of hospitality and generosity to those around him was not one of them.
Today, we see wealth being hoarded in many ways. Any of us can name one or more extremely wealthy people who could use their riches more charitably than they do. Even for those of less-than-extreme wealth, anxiety about the future, while understandable, can lead to withdrawal from others or refusal to use what we have to enhance our community. The problem of greed isn’t going away, but as Christians, we can take heart. Our forebears have shown us that we can give to our neighbors because our hearts rest in God.
Laura Alexander is associate professor of religious studies at the University of Nebraska Omaha. She is author of the textbook Religion and Human Rights: An Introduction (Routledge 2024).
This article appears in the September/October/November 2025 issue of Gather. To read more like it, subscribe to Gather.