Do you know the first words of Jesus Christ that were recorded in the Bible? His mother asked Him why He had not told her where He had been for three days, and the twelve-year-old Son of God responded, “How is it that you sought Me? Did you not know that I must be about My Father’s business?” (Luke 2:49)
As you know, two of the Ten Commandments deal with covetousness: “Thou shall not covet thy neighbor’s wife,” and “Thou shall not covet thy neighbor’s goods.” Covetousness is defined as an inordinately strong desire for possessing someone or something. In his book Victory Over Vice, Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen said:
For years we have been hearing about how the obesity epidemic in America is primarily caused by trans fats, fast food, and drinks that contain large amounts of sugar. We are treated as though we are mindless sheep who have no will-power and are under the spell of an evil force that influences us to continually consume what will ultimately fatten us up and kill us.
Hell came into existence because of the pride and envy of Lucifer and his followers. Lucifer envied God’s perfection and authority over him. He also envied the happiness of our first parents and did everything in his power to alienate them from God.
We were all born with a strong tendency toward pride, the mother of all sins. Because of our fallen human nature, we were also born with a tendency toward each of the other root passions of lust, anger, avarice, envy, gluttony, and sloth; furthermore, as a result of the individual unique traits that each of us were born with, combined with the environment we grew up in and our life experiences, we each entered adolescence, and later adulthood, with a predominant tendency toward one of the other six root passions.
In her book The Way of Perfection, St. Teresa of Avila wrote, “…but it remains for us to become detached from our own selves and it is a hard thing to withdraw from ourselves and oppose ourselves, because we are very close to ourselves and love ourselves very dearly…It is here that true humility can enter.”
Of the seven root passions or sins – pride, lust, anger, avarice, envy, gluttony, and sloth – the most deadly is pride. It was an appeal to pride that persuaded Eve to defy her Creator: “…you shall be as Gods, knowing good and evil.” (Genesis 3:6)
Eve responded, “Of the fruit of the trees that are in paradise we do eat: But of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of paradise, God hath commanded us that we should not eat; and that we should not touch it, lest perhaps we die.” Genesis 3:2-3. Every time a sin is committed, something within us dies. The result of sin is always death. This has been true from the beginning of time.
Last weekend at the Kapow Comic Convention in London, a representative of DC Comics announced that one of its previously “straight” superheroes was going to come out as being gay. When ABC News later asked Courtney Simmons, DC’s Senior Vice President of Publicity, about the announcement, she confirmed that “one of the major iconic DC characters will reveal that he is gay in a storyline in June.” In a separate interview, Bobby Wayne, the senior Vice President for Sales, said that the company “had evolved,” a reference to President Obama’s recent endorsement of same-sex “marriage.”