Looking for happiness in the wrong places – 2.8.2013

Someone in the crowd said to him, “Teacher, tell my brother to divide the family inheritance with me.”  But he said to him, “Friend, who set me to be a judge or arbitrator over you?” And he said to them, “Take care! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; for one’s life does not consist in the abundance of possessions.”  Then he told them a parable: “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: 13-21]

Firstly, Jesus refuses to arbitrate in a family dispute about property inheritance.  And wisely, one might think, although the person in the crowd who asked the question might have felt somewhat knocked back.  Jesus uses the occasion to give a warning about greed -- one’s life does not consist in the abundance of possessions.  There are plenty of people who assume that is precisely what life is about.

One of my unfulfilled ambitions is to read the parable which follows, at the annual church parade of the Chamber of Commerce.   It is about a man who identifies with his accumulated possessions.  He has achieved his dream.  He actually says to his soul, relax, eat, drink, be merry.  His soul, he thinks, is satisfied, satiated, by the abundance of good things, no doubt all in impeccable style – and by, of course, his remembrance of the poor and his giving to good causes.  He is a living role model of success.  But, says Jesus, he is actually a fool.  All that can be taken away, in an instant, in a dozen different ways.  What is left then – if his health has collapsed, marriage and family life in disarray, if his public reputation is demolished in a court action, if someone accuses him of something disreputable, if war, pestilence or earthquake, tempest or disease, destroys all he loves and depends on? 

Looking for happiness in the wrong places, one writer calls it.  Certainly, bitter and often wretched disputes about property and inheritance tend to unveil people’s real values, where their heart is, as it were.   But as we are well aware, we do have property, some at least of which we are glad to have; we do have obligations and matters which occupy us and fill our minds at times.   In the gift of silence and stillness, when we consciously set all this aside for the purpose of attentiveness, mindfulness, as God is attentive and mindful to us, the Spirit of God works subtle changes at the point where we might have become dependent on lesser things.  This gentle work undermines our fear of life and the future – as also, I think, the burden of injury from the past.  We are consenting to a process of becoming rich toward God, as Jesus puts it.