“Teacher, tell my brother to share the inheritance with me.”
What this individual wanted was wealth. Perhaps he felt that it would only be fair for his brother to share. In any event the solution he sought was the superficial reallocation of resources. Jesus would respond by going deeper and addressing the greed that might well have been in both brothers, the one with the riches of this inheritance, and the one without them.
“Take care to guard against all greed,
for though one may be rich,
one’s life does not consist of possessions.”
Now, suddenly, this individual felt like one of two men whose fight Moses tried to moderate, who said to Moses, "Who made you ruler and judge over us?" (see Exodus 2:14). This man wasn't hoping, as Jesus implicitly acknowledged, to receive this sort of help addressed to his heart, or to in any way restore his relationship with his brother, just as those two Hebrews did not desire to be reconciled. Greed had overridden the proper priority of family in his heart, as though his life consisted of possessions more than family, such that if he lacked them nothing else mattered.
And he said, ‘This is what I shall do:
I shall tear down my barns and build larger ones.
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!”’
Such is the power of wealth, and the influence it has on our minds, that it can convince us that if we have enough of we can enjoy uninterrupted happiness indefinitely, utterly insulated from any adverse circumstances. But the power of wealth is an illusion, and the way it tempts us to think of life in this world as absolute is a lie. It leads to an amnesia that makes us to forget that nothing here below is permanent, and a sad state of affairs by which we try to provide richly for what amounts to a single day or hour or moment, while ignoring the eternity that will follow inexorably.
‘You fool, this night your life will be demanded of you;
and the things you have prepared, to whom will they belong?’
May we learn that treasure stored up on earth cannot provide happiness and instead tends toward a dangerous illusion that makes us ill-prepared to face eternity. Instead of storing up treasure here below let us learn to become rich in what matters to God, finding treasure in heaven, by giving away some of our treasure, and holding only loosely to what we do keep for our use, knowing that it is temporary.
Above all, let us remember the primacy of the riches of the grace we have in Christ, the only wealth that can endure for eternity. Rather than storing up worldly riches so that we can sit back, rest, eat, drink and be merry, we can even now begin to enjoy heavenly ones, since God has "seated us with him [Jesus] in the heavens". These riches are immeasurable, and yet they are pure gift. When we realize that they are ours we will be empowered to dispose well of the things in this life, and, as a consequence, to do the "good works that God has prepared in advance, that we should live in them."
Give thanks to him; bless his name, for he is good:
the LORD, whose kindness endures forever,
and his faithfulness, to all generations.
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