The land of a rich man produced abundantly.
And he thought to himself, ‘What should
I do, for I have no place to store my crops?’ Then he said, ‘I will do this: I will pull
down my barns and build larger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my
goods. And I will say to my soul, ‘Soul,
you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.’ But God said to him, ‘You fool! This very night your life is being demanded of
you. And the things you have prepared,
whose will they be?’ So it is with those
who store up treasures for themselves but are not rich toward God.” [Luke 12:16-21]
Jesus
told this parable in a culture different from our own. They were farmers and fishermen, and they and
their wives and families were well acquainted with long and hard manual work,
often for little reward. If any man was
rich, he had almost certainly inherited land and resources, and so it is that
Luke sets this parable in the context of a dispute about inheritance – Teacher, tell my brother to divide the
inheritance with me… Jesus refuses
to get involved in that, and he delivers the man a warning about greed. That has always sounded to me like a
put-down. But then, I wasn’t there…
Then Jesus
tells the parable. It is about a rich
man, and we assume that most of his hearers were not rich. So… we are not that audience. We are property owners, more or less secure,
with investments… How do we hear this parable? We are, like most people, perfectly capable of
being greedy, but greed is what we generally try to avoid. Some of us try harder about that than others. We do have possessions and property, and we
enjoy what we have. We believe, in the
main, we use it well. We are generally
hospitable. We never cease to be
grateful that somehow we found ourselves living in this lovely place, in
relative peace and security. We give thanks to God for our food, and the
measure of life, home and shelter, that we enjoy.
Now,
it is possible that all that simply describes a comfortable, complacent culture
– while we know very well that we now have, not far away, people unable to
acquire a home, or get a job; we do now have people sleeping on the street, and
families in cars and garages. None of this
is simple. But Jesus made it quite plain
that in his kingdom the homeless are housed, the naked are clothed, the hungry
are fed, and the prisoners are visited.
In
this parable, plainly, he is speaking to the rich, at any rate the comfortable
and content – he is speaking to the man whose reaction to prosperity was to
build bigger barns to store his goods, and to relax, eat, drink and be merry.
That seems to me a reasonably accurate description of much of our
contemporary kiwi culture. The problem
is not with the possessions. The more we
own, the more we are required to be good stewards of it.
The
problem is where we are looking for happiness.
What do we think life is for? And
the contemplative question is… the more I am relying on possessions and control,
and measuring it all by the levels of power and pleasure, the more I am simply
feeding the ego. And then it’s all about
me. My requirements are usurping
the place that belongs to God.
Jesus
says, You fool…! The extent of your
ownership and control of all this is actually the width of the wall of a blood vessel
on the brain (I am helping Jesus along here perhaps, with a little bit of
imagery…). Loving God, loving my
neighbour, loving life, understanding and accepting our fragility and
mortality… all of this is the opposite of being a fool. It comes with stillness and consent, as God’s
spirit rearranges our priorities.
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