This was the homily I prepared for Sunday July 31.
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Luke 12:13-21
Someone in the crowd said to Jesus, "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.
(The New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA)
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Jesus’ parable about a rich man, a well-to-do farmer who has experienced an huge bumper crop of grain, that exceeded the capacity of his current grain bins and who is laying in bed thinking to himself about how he can maximize this harvest to his benefit is a bit odd.
Let’s be honest, could anyone of us sitting here in today’s world blame him for thinking this way? It’s his grain. He planted it. He sowed it and he reaped what he sowed. Isn’t he entitled to enjoy the fruits of his labor, the blessing of such a great harvest? Why not build better grain bins? Why not enjoy the thought of being able to sit back, eat, drink, and be merry?
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Was Jesus just having a bad day? What got Jesus so riled up that he shouts, “Take care! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed because one’s life does not consist in the abundance of possession!”
One could say that Jesus was having a bad day, which started back in Luke 11, the chapter that preceded today’s reading, where after healing a man of demon possession was accused of casting out demons by the prince of demons, Beelzebub. Then Jesus was being chastised for not properly washing up before dining by the Pharisee who invited him to dine. Finally, there is this man who wants Jesus to tell his brother to share the inheritance that was left to his brother, as if Jesus’ primary role was to fix the mundane issues of the world we created.
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Yes. Jesus was having a bad day but not as bad as the day the people who were being trite, who were caught up in their self-righteousness, their sense of self importance; who failed to see the goodness of God working through Jesus for them and who couldn’t see God’s love within their own souls; in that, they were caught up in what Jesus described as every form of greed in which the small self of egoism shaped their limited perspective of life’s meaning and purpose.
To address this limited perspective and to get them and us out of our mundane comfort zone, Jesus invited them - invites us - into this parable in which he reveals the inner thoughts, the inner dialogue between this rich man and his own soul on the very night this man’s souls, his very life would be required by God.
In Genesis 2, the soul is described as the totality of our being, shaped by God’s own hands and breathed to life in order to bear the image of God within the world of God’ creating. The problem that Jesus is addressing in this parable is the failure to recognize what we just recited in the Jubilate; “Know this: The Lord himself is God; he himself has made and we are his….”
The man in the parable had forgotten who made him, whose he was. He fell victim to that deceptive idea of the self-made person, the person who has pulled oneself up by one’s bootstraps, who owes no one anything, even God. This becomes apparent when he says to his soul, as if he alone owned it, “`Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.”
It was at that point in the parable that God speaks to the man directly, “You fool! This very night your life is being demanded of you. And the things you have prepared, whose will they be?”
Jesus ends this parable by saying, “So it is with those who store up treasures for themselves but are not rich toward God.” Through the use of the stark imagery of this parable Jesus is stressing the need to take care of our souls by keeping in mind who made us, whose we are, and that our life’s purpose is not to make the most of our lives by through the acquisition of things, but to present in our lives the righteous image of God.
Unfortunately, the lectionary left out of today’s reading Jesus’ explanation of the parable and gives us a clue how to be mindful in caring for our souls which I will paraphrase:
After this parable, Jesus said to his disciples, “Don’t worry about your life, what you will eat, or what you will wear. Life is more than eating well and looking good. Look at the birds: they don’t sow or reap, they don’t have storage bins. God feeds them. If God feeds them, God will feed you.
There really is enough for everyone if we stop being anxious about things that really don’t matter.
Do you think worrying about acquiring more than you need will add a single hour to your life?
If being anxious about such things won’t add an hour to your life, why bother with such things?
Look at the wildflowers that grow in the pastures. If God clothes the grasslands with such beauty, God will clothe you because you are a child of God, made in the image of God,
Trust God! Stop worrying about what you think you need to acquire in order to live a good life in the here and now. God knows what you need. Rather, seek God in your life; find the image of God within your soul. Be the child of God that you are and you will find that your soul’s truest and deepest desires will be met.” (Compare original text in Luke 12: 22-31)
To which I can only say - Amen.
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Until next time, stay faithful.
Norm
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