Is He Talking About Me?

“Then someone called from the crowd, ‘Teacher, please tell my brother to divide our father’s estate with me.’ Jesus replied, ‘friend, who made me a judge over you to decide such things as that?’ Then he said, ‘beware! Guard against every kind of greed. Life is not measured by how much you own.’ Then he told them a story: ‘A rich man had a fertile farm that produced fine crops. He said to himself, ‘what should I do? I don’t have room for all my crops.’ Then he said, ‘I know! I’ll tear down my barns and build bigger ones. Then I’ll have room enough to store all my wheat and other goods. And I’ll sit back and say to myself, ‘my friend, you have enough stored away for years to come. Now take it easy! Eat, drink, and be merry!’ ‘But God said to him, ‘You fool! You will die this very night. Then who will get everything you worked for?’ ‘Yes, a person is a fool to store up earthly wealth but not have a rich relationship with God.’” (Luke 12:13-21) (Also read Hosea 11:1-11; Psalm 107:1-9, 43; Colossians 3:1-11)

Tom Wolfe’s novel Bonfire of the Vanities tells the story of the spectacular crash of the Wall Street investment manager Sherman McCoy; not a real person, but certainly as real as the “lives of the rich and famous” kinds of stuff in the magazines in the grocery stores. (Not that you or I buy those or read them, but we can’t help seeing the pictures, right?) McCoy makes tons of money and he loves the rush that comes with putting a small fortune on the line to make a bigger one. He has a nice sports car, his daughter goes to the best private school, his apartment is featured in Architectural Digest; that sort of thing. He’s married, but he has a mistress. He only wears expensive clothing. He calls himself and his partners “Masters of the Universe.” We hate him right from the start of the book and we know he’s going to crash and we won’t be sorry to see him laid low.

I.) Yeshua must mean somebody else. Masters of the Universe indeed! Ignorant rich boy; money isn’t everything. You can’t buy happiness. The best things in life aren’t sold in the mall. Everybody knows this; everybody has known it for a long, long time. Listen to the ancients: “[S]exual promiscuity and love of money . . . do not permit a man to show mercy to his neighbour. They deprive his soul of all goodness and oppress him with hardships and grief; they take away sleep from him and utterly waste his flesh. They blind his soul and he goes about in the day as though it were night” (Testament of Judah 18:2-6). “One becomes rich through diligence and self-denial and the reward allotted to him is this: when he says, ‘I have found rest and how I shall feast on my goods!’ he does not know how long it will be until he leaves them to others and dies” (Sirach 11:18-19). So when Yeshua says “Watch and guard yourself against all forms of greed, because one’s life does not come from increasing one’s possessions,” everybody in Yeshua’s day and ours says, “Yeah, yeah, I know, I’ve heard it all before; but that’s not about me; it’s about rich guys like Sherman McCoy who think they’re Masters of the Universe. I’m not controlled by greed. I don’t drive a Porsche; I don’t do holidays in the Bahamas. Money isn’t my god; Yeshua is talking about somebody else.”

II.) Yeshua’s story implicates me. The guy who asked; no, demanded; that Yeshua tell his brother to divide an inheritance with him probably wasn’t a rich man, either. We have no other details about this man and his situation. Maybe his brother was cheating him or maybe not; but if he’s asking for Yeshua to help him, he surely doesn’t have powerful friends or lawyers who can take care of this for him. The guy who wants Yeshua’s help isn’t a ruler, isn’t a tax collector, isn’t a centurion; he’s an average bloke in the crowd, someone like us, who wants help getting what he thinks of as justice. He wants the share of his father’s property that rightfully belongs to him; that’s all. But Yeshua wants no part of it. “Who set me to be a judge or divider over you two?” Yeshua’s job is not to slice the pie. His job is to warn you that pie is dangerous and that you should step away from it slowly, as if it were a poisonous snake you just found on the path. So he tells a little story about a rich man whose windfall made him even richer. “The territory of a certain rich man brought in a bumper crop,” the story begins. Instead of “farm” or “field,” Yeshua calls the rich man’s space his “territory,” giving us the impression that it’s really large; he owns half the county, let’s say. And he has a great year; just enough rain and sun, no damaging storms, everything just perfect and his crops come in really big.

This is not a bad man, in other words. He hasn’t stolen anything; he hasn’t seized anyone’s property. His overflowing granaries come from honest labour, not from predatory lending. It was illegal, according to the Bible, for one Jew to charge another interest on a loan, but people sometimes did it anyway and got rich at it. There’s no hint of stuff like that in this parable. To make the point a little pointier, this parable does not condemn how the rich man made his money; we have to assume that whatever he’s made, he and his society would have considered it rightfully his. The story doesn’t address the question of whether he tithed his income, but let’s assume he does. The story also doesn’t say whether he allowed the poor to glean; to come into his fields after his harvesters have gone through and take what was left, but let’s assume he does. Let’s assume, in other words, that this rich man was not Sherman McCoy; that the rich man in the story doesn’t cheat his employees, doesn’t cheat on his wife and doesn’t cheat the temple out of its lawful tithe. Let’s read him to be a conventionally religious guy, giving the typical amount to charity, doing what the law required with respect to the poor. He’s like us, in other words. Why then does YAHVEH come down so hard on him?

III.) Does Yeshua really mean this? All the man says is this: “What am I going to do? I don’t have a place to store my fruits. I shall do this; I will tear down my barns and build them bigger and there I will lay up all my grain and good stuff and I will say to myself, Self, you’ve got lots of good stuff laid up for many years. Relax, eat, drink and celebrate!” What’s wrong with that? What the man says is really close to a text in Ecclesiastes: “Go eat your bread with enjoyment and drink your wine with a merry heart... enjoy life with your wife whom you love, all the days of your vain life, because that is your portion in life” (Ecclesiastes 9:7, 9). Again, to make the point sharper is Yeshua suggesting that it’s wrong, if you find yourself with some extra cash, to spend it on making your life more pleasant? Yes, I’m afraid he is. The rich man “stores up treasure for himself,” the parable suggests, because he assumes that life is about enjoying one’s stuff. He believes that the extra-bountiful harvest rightfully belongs to him and that it’s fine for him to use it on his own pleasures. None of that Sherman McCoy stuff; no mistresses, nothing immoral or illegal; but if he wants a second home or a snazzier car, why not? The farm is his, the crops are his; YAHVEH blessed him with the increase, right? So long as he’s grateful, isn’t it OK for him to indulge himself a bit? Here’s the hard truth: if we would be content to live on less and to give away more, then fewer people would starve or die from treatable diseases. We know that life is more than stuff and that true contentment comes by serving YAHVEH by serving others. But it’s so hard to live that way when everything around you says, “Buy it. Eat it. Enjoy it. You deserve it!” Put your things and your heart, where YAHVEH’s heart is; with the poor; and find life. That’s the gospel!