"Teacher, tell my brother to share the inheritance with me."
Rather than get into the details of the dispute Jesus addressed the root cause of the problem. It was a cause of division between these brothers not because of the nuance of specific claims, but rather because greed caused them to focus on riches and possessions rather than one another.
Friend, who appointed me as your judge and arbitrator?
It was as though Jesus was saying that this man was treating him like a normal political appointee rather than recognizing the deeper origin of his authority as judge and arbitrator. If he had recognized precisely who it was that had appointed Jesus for this role he wouldn't have so casually asked him to sanction his greedy desires.
"Take care to guard against all greed,
for though one may be rich,
one's life does not consist of possessions."
The temptation to think of our lives as consisting of possessions must be much greater now than it was then. There is simply so much more that we can possess. And much of it really does provide some measure of security against various possibilities of future danger. If we can offset some risk by having a little we tend to assume that by having enough we can shield ourselves from all risk. We implicitly start spending as though we can buy life without end.
There I shall store all my grain and other goods
and I shall say to myself, "Now as for you,
you have so many good things stored up for many years,
rest, eat, drink, be merry!"'
This rich man assumed that he could alleviate the existential terror of his own mortality by sufficient provisions against possible future famine. He wanted to eat, drink, and be merry, forgetting that fact that it all must end eventually. His pleasures were not the modest pleasures of one who knows life is temporary but rather anxious attempts to anesthetize his mind and conscience. They seemed to have the effect of making him like the man to whom Jesus addressed this parable, isolated within the walls of a self-centered ego.
'You fool, this night your life will be demanded of you;
and the things you have prepared, to whom will they belong?'
This is why we ask God to teach us to number our days aright, that we may gain wisdom of heart. Without heeding Saint Benedict to "Keep death daily before your eyes" we become foolish, and start building houses of sand, while expecting them to last forever.
When we are stripped of this imagined possibility of insulating our future from any interference from unpleasant realities we tend to feel exposed and vulnerable. But the point is not that we should leave ourselves empty in this way, but that we should instead choose to fill our emptiness with "what matters to God". This is only possible when we look at life with the eyes of faith as did our father Abraham.
Abraham did not doubt God's promise in unbelief;
rather, he was empowered by faith and gave glory to God
and was fully convinced that what God had promised
he was also able to do.
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