Barn Building and the Generosity of Resurrection Life (Week 36, Apr 30)
Reading
Luke 12:13–21
Silent Reflection
Remarks
“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?’ ”
Luke 12:20 (NIV)
I always picture it as a scene out of Monty Python. Here is Jesus where “a crowd of many thousands had gathered, so that they were trampling one another,” teaching his disciples, when a guy with a very British accent starts hopping up and down to get over the heads of the people in front of him and shouts “Oy! Jesus! Tell my brutha to deevide the inheritance wif me!” He’s probably thinking, “It’s only fair! I’m only asking for what’s lawfully mine.” (It seems that MINE is one of the first words we learn and one of the last habits we let go of.)
This guy asking for the inheritance probably imagines he’s only asking for a division of stuff, but Jesus turns his own phrase back at him to show that this is actually about something more than money and heirlooms. Jesus says, “Man, who made me a judge or divider over you two?” Some popular translations render this as ‘arbitrator’ or ‘arbiter,’ but that sort of overly legal language obscures the point Jesus is trying to make. He’s not merely saying he won’t arbitrate a legal dispute over an estate. When he objects to being a “divider over you two,” he’s saying he won’t get in the middle of the estate business because he knows what it’s really about: a personal rift between these two brothers. I hear Jesus saying something along the lines of, “You think this is about your inheritance, but I see that this is about something deeper (and darker) between the two of you. I want no part of it.”
Jesus is ultimately a reconciler; he’s not about to let himself be forced into being the exact opposite (a divider) by rendering a verdict on this estate case.
Have you ever noticed that strange sleight of hand money can pull where it moves from being a mediator of a transaction to mediating a relationship? And depending on what we do with it, it can either sever or it can connect. Maybe it really was only fair that this brother receive his share of the inheritance. But when everything becomes about fairness and making sure ledgers are balanced no matter what it means for relationships, it comes to be as if every relationship has a dollar sign floating above it in your imagination as you constantly wonder if the scales are balanced. Does this person still owe me for that meal I spotted them for? Does that person still owe for the birthday gift we said we were going in on together?
Jesus then tells the kid, “Watch out for greed! Life isn’t in the things you have”—because today’s insistence on fairness is tomorrow’s smoldering greed.
At the root of paranoid obsession over fairness and subsequent insatiable greed is a belief that what you are earning with your labor and storing away in your 401(k) isn’t just your stuff but your very life. This deception starts early. I have seen in my own boys how from a young age it feels so strongly that Fortnite and Lego and allowance and buying something at the store is life itself. Am I really any different with my ski trips and new furniture?
Jesus says that’s not where or what life is. So then where is it? What is it? The life we each and all want: a life of peace, joy, love, goodness, fullness—where do we find it?
To guide us through these questions, Jesus tells this story of a certain rich man whose ground produced a good crop and now must figure out what to do with the yield, which is more than he can keep. The man decides to build bigger barns to store it all and retire early.
The one thing for us to notice is that our man is the only person in this story, something Kenneth Bailey points out in his book Through Peasant Eyes. He is comically alone, such that when he comes to the crucial decision of what to do with this surplus, the only person he has to consult is himself. In Jesus’s culture, this is the kind of decision that you would very much expect to be deliberated intensely with family and friends. This should be a noisy, chattering scene, but our man is left to talk to himself.
With no one to help him, he decides to help no one. What if, though, when he asked himself, “What shall I do? For I have nowhere to hold this blessing”—what if at that point he decided to answer differently? Augustine said about this parable, “The bellies of the poor were safer storehouses than his barns.” What if our man had chosen that path?
At the end, Jesus leaves him (and us) with a question from God. Now that your soul is required from you, all this stuff that you’ve built up—whose will it be? It’s as much a question for us as it is for him.
How might this story have ended differently if the man had asked that question of himself before his life was over? What if upon seeing his surplus he had said, “Whose will it be?” instead of “What shall I do with it?” What if we ourselves were to ask that each day of our lives?
Silent Reflection
Response
Is there a situation in your life where fairness is damaging a relationship?
If not an abundance of possessions, what does life consist in?
Your stuff—whose will it be? Your life?