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Luke 12:13-21
The Parable of the Rich Fool
13 Someone in the crowd said to him, “Teacher, tell my brother to divide the inheritance with me.”
14 Jesus replied, “Man, who appointed me a judge or an arbiter between you?” 15 Then he said to them, “Watch out! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; a person’s life does not consist in the abundance of their possessions.”
16 And he told them this parable: “The ground of a certain rich man produced a good crop. 17 He thought to himself, ‘What shall I do? I have no place to store my crops.’
18 “Then he said, ‘This is what I’ll do. I will tear down my barns and build bigger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods. 19 And I’ll say to myself, “You have plenty of good things laid up for many years. Take life easy; eat, drink and be merry.”’
20 “But God said to him, ‘You fool! This very night your life will be demanded from you. Then who will get what you have prepared for yourself?’
21 “This is how it will be with whoever stores up things for themselves but is not rich toward God.”
One aspect of this passage that’s often overlooked is that it begins with man calling out from a crowd of people and asking Jesus to arbitrate in a dispute between the man and his older brother. It seems that the brother was refusing to divide up the inheritance left by their deceased father.
Think about that for a second. We don’t usually think of Jesus as an economist, but some New Testament scholars point out that quite a bit of his teaching dealt with financial issues. So it seems that the man in the story hopes Jesus would serve as a trustworthy mediator in this financial dispute.
But Jesus refuses to be drawn into the matter. Instead, he uses the occasion as a “teachable moment,” and issues a warning to the man and to anybody else who can hear him – and even to us, 2,000 years later. The warning is this: Be on guard against the infection of greed. Amassing wealth and possessions, Jesus says, is not the point of life.
And to illustrate his point, Jesus tells a parable. A certain man is so prosperous that he doesn’t have room to store all his stuff. So he resolves to build new barns. He tells himself that when he’s finished the barns and securely stored his stuff, then he’ll enjoy life. But on that very night, God tells him that his life will be demanded from him, and asks, “Then who will get what you have prepared for yourself?”
On the surface, the meaning of the parable seems pretty plain: that committing your life to amassing stuff is a waste of time. But like many of the parables of Jesus, when you scratch the surface, you find a couple of nuances that communicate even deeper meanings.
One really interesting one emerges from the way the text is usually translated from the original Greek. When God shows up to challenge the man’s foolishness, what God actually says to the man would be better translated as, “This very night they will demand your life from you.” So the question is, Who are ‘they’?
In the original Greek, there are only two plural elements of the story. One is the barns, and that’s probably not what Jesus had in mind. But the other plural element is the man’s goods. So Jesus seems to be saying that the man’s goods have demanded his life from him.
If that’s what Jesus really meant, it really strikes a chord for those of us who live in a materialistic culture, doesn’t it? We might think we own our stuff, but somewhere along the line, our stuff starts to own us. The Christian writer and speaker Tony Campolo wrote in his book Affluenza that studies show that the average American owns 25% more stuff than we can possibly use. So even if we tried to use all the stuff we own, we couldn’t. We store our stuff. We maintain it. We clean it. We insure it. So it seems like a fair question: Who owns who?
Or to put it another way, what is our God? If we can’t serve two masters, and we spend a lot of time and energy (and money) serving our stuff, we can’t also be faithfully serving God.
(And I always feel obligated to say that these are challenging and uncomfortable questions for me. I’m materially blessed, with some really cool toys. So I’m not holding myself up as any kind of example of self-denial.)
The other often-overlooked aspect of this parable is that the man decides to put off enjoying life until he has first taken care of all his possessions. This might be the most foolish thing the rich fool does. None of us is guaranteed a day beyond the one we’re living. So waiting for some point in the future to take joy from the life God has given us might well turn out to be a tragic mistake. Especially if we put off enjoying life for the sake of our material possessions.
The Bible’s consistent teachings about material blessings have three themes. First, that they are given to us by God to be enjoyed and generously shared. Second, that they represent a kind of diagnostic test of our spiritual health. And third, that material wealth is not evil, but rather is dangerous. It has the capacity to seduce us so we love it more than God, other people, and even the promise of eternal life.
This story illustrates those teachings, and also warns us against becoming so materially oriented that we reach the end of our lives and say to ourselves, “You fool! You let those things take away the best years of your life from you!”
Let’s pray. Lord, we thank you for the material blessings you have given us. Guard us from becoming so focused on those blessings that we let them become what our lives are about. Move us to share them abundantly with others, and to take joy in all the things that are more important – our relationships with you and others, and the beauties of your creation around us. Amen.
Have a great weekend!
Henry
(The other readings for today are Psalms 84 and 148; Nahum 2:13 – 3:7; and Revelation 13:1-10. Our readings come from the NIV Bible, as posted on Biblica.org, the website of the International Bible Society.)
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