What is wrong with this picture? Imagine that you are in the audience that long-ago day in Judea, listening to Jesus preach. There are thousands in the crowd, but you got there early. In fact, you waited all night to get a good seat. Jesus’ reputation has grown all over Palestine, and people have come from miles away to hang on his every word, maybe to learn about God, maybe to get healed, maybe just to go home and brag to their neighbors that they had seen the famous rabbi. What does he talk about?
In this chapter, Jesus gives his listeners a number of very serious warnings. There is a warning against hypocrisy. There is a warning against giving in to fear. There is a warning against blasphemy. Jesus is trying to focus his hearers’ attention on what is really important, what is really important to God and therefore what should be really important to them. And even though Jesus is undoubtedly the greatest preacher the world has ever known - better than Billy Graham or Chuck Swindoll or James Montgomery Boyce or Tony Campolo - there are people in his audience who can’t hear a word he is saying because they’re so caught up in their own stuff. Even though what Jesus is saying is God’s word to them, they don’t want to hear what God has to say. They haven’t come to hear God, they have come to get a problem fixed.
Now, there’s nothing wrong with coming to Jesus, coming to God, with your problems. As a matter of fact, we’re told to do just that: “Cast all your anxiety on him,” says Peter to the church some decades later, “because he cares for you.” [1 Pe 5:7] The trouble with this particular fellow was that he wanted the wrong thing. He had the wrong priorities. And he had the wrong idea about what God’s interest in all of this was.
And so when he shouts out, “Teacher, get my brother to divide my inheritance with me,” Jesus is not pleased. Now, rabbis were often asked to mediate legal disputes. And this fellow may have had a valid claim; his brother might in fact have been playing legal games to avoid settling the estate. We don’t know. But Jesus responds, “Friend, who set me to be a judge or arbitrator over you?” [v. 14] Well, if anyone is suited to be a judge or arbitrator, it’s Jesus. And not only is he going to be our judge on the last day, in fact he makes judgments all the time even in his first tour of duty on earth. In fact, just a couple of weeks before, Jesus was asked to take sides in a different kind of family disagreement. Remember Martha complaining about Mary leaving her to do all the work? And wanting Jesus to get Mary to behave in the “right” way? In that case, Jesus made a judgment that Mary had made the right choice. Now it’s a dispute between two brothers, but this time it’s about money. What’s the difference between these two cases? Why does Jesus appear to be inconsistent?
You won’t be surprised to hear that I don’t think Jesus is being inconsistent. Jesus is saying to this petitioner exactly what he said to Martha - just using slightly different words. He’s saying, “You’ve got your priorities upside down. Don’t worry about things, or about time, or about whether or not life is fair. I’m not here to make sure that everything is fair, I’m not here to monitor the laws of inheritance or to establish fair labor standards, I’m here to bring you back to God.”
But instead of answering him directly, Jesus tells a story. We may think it’s about rich people in general, people like Bill Gates or Warren Buffett, or maybe about dishonest rich people like Bernie Madoff or all the politicians who got rich in office. But that’s not what it’s about. If it were, we could simply ignore the message because none of us are in that boat, are we? We’re all decent hard-working folks who if we happen to have a little set aside for a rainy day or our retirement, why that’s only prudent, isn’t it?
But the main issue in this parable is not wealth. It’s not really about how much you have. Rather, it’s your attitude to wealth. The man in Jesus’ story happens to have a fruitful harvest, and he has to decide what to do with the overflow. He did not acquire his harvest immorally; we have no reason to believe that he exploited his laborers or cheated the merchants or anything of that sort. He simply had a good year. He’s an ant, not a grasshopper, by both habit and inclination, and so as he gazes around on all the season’s bounty, he prudently considers what should be done with the surplus.
The problem arises in how the farmer thinks about what has become his. He became a fool when he forgot who had provided the harvest, and why. In the movie Shenandoah, James Stewart plays a Virginia farmer during the Civil War years. He begins every meal with the same prayer: “Lord, I planted the seeds, I plowed the ground, I gathered in the harvest. If I hadn’t of put the food on the table it wouldn’t be here. But we thank you anyway.” He forgot who provided the land, the sun, the rain, and the skill and wisdom it takes to make a living from the earth.
Jesus is saying that anyone like that farmer who forgets where all our stuff comes from is a fool. Anyone who thinks of himself before thinking about God is a fool. Listen to him talk to himself: ‘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.’ [v. 18-19] . He uses the words ‘I” and “my” eleven times in three verses. He doesn’t acknowledge God’s role in all of this, or consider the possibility that God might have something to say to him about what he does with his wealth. He did not remember Hosea’s warning, “it was I who gave her the grain, the wine, and the oil, and who lavished upon her silver and gold that they used for Baal. Therefore I will take back my grain in its time, and my wine in its season; and I will take away my wool and my flax.” [Hosea 2:8-9]
The farmer - the fool - also forgot about his neighbors. It isn’t necessarily a bad thing to build bigger barns. Consider the advice Joseph gave Pharaoh after interpreting his dreams as seven years of famine: "Let Pharaoh proceed to appoint overseers over the land and take one-fifth of the produce of the land of Egypt during the seven plenteous years. Let them gather all the food of these good years that are coming and lay up grain under the authority of Pharaoh for food in the cities and let them keep it. That food shall be a reserve for the land against the seven years of famine that are to befall the land of Egypt, so that the land may not perish through the famine.” [Gen 41:34-6] Clearly, there had to be proper storage for the reserve grain. But that’s not what's on this farmer’s mind. No, he’s just going to “relax, eat, drink, be merry.” [v. 19] He has no thought for anyone but himself.
But that’s not all. Jesus is also saying that anyone who thinks that having lots of stuff can guarantee a secure future is a fool. The farmer thought he had unlimited time. And yet the most dangerous word in the English language is “tomorrow.” There is an old story of three apprentice demons who were to be sent to earth on a mission. They were telling Satan what they proposed to do. One said, “I will tell everyone there is no God.” “It won’t work,” Satan said. “In their hearts they know there is.” The second one said, “I will tell them there is no hell.” “That won’t work either,” Satan said. “Even in this life they have tasted the agony and sorrow of hell.” The third one said, “I will tell them there is no hurry.” “Go,” said Satan. “Tell them that and you will ruin them by the millions.”
I’ve just been up to New York to visit my sister and mother, and as you all probably know they are both agnostic if not actually atheist. And we did talk a little about mortality, and other related topics, because my mother has lost a number of very close friends and relatives over the past year, and her brother and sister-n-law don’t have much time left either. We all think that she’s going to live to a hundred, but as today’s story reminds us you never know... So I often wonder how Mom is handling it, and hope that perhaps God will use these losses to make her consider God... but it doesn’t seem to be happening. Mother is perfectly aware that she’s mortal, and that she could go at any minute, but she isn’t worried about God or judgment at all. She’s planned ahead, like any wise person would, she just hasn’t included God in her plans. And she doesn’t want to consider the possibility that God might have included her in his.
So getting people to pay attention to God’s claim on their lives is a little more difficult than it was just a few short decades ago. And even when they - we - do take God into account, our entitlement mentality tends to look at God like the first man in today’s text: as someone whose job it is to meet our needs, to make sure we get what’s coming to us. There was a wonderful poem in this week’s crop of internet gleanings on the subject of greed:
Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray my Cuisinart to keep.
I pray my stocks are on the rise, and that my analyst is wise.
That all the wine I sip is white, and that my hot tub’s watertight.
That racquetball won’t get too tough, that all my sushi’s fresh enough.
I pray my cordless phone still works, that my career won’t lose its perks.
My microwave won’t radiate, my condo won’t depreciate.
I pray my health club doesn’t close, and that my money market grows.
If I go broke before I wake, I pray my Volvo they won’t take.
[Steve Farrar, Family Survival in the American Jungle]
What does it mean, do you think, to ask for something “in Jesus’ name?” In brief, it means to ask for the right things, to ask what Jesus would ask. But that leads to bit of a dilemma, because we’re supposed to be honest with God in prayer. And if what is really consuming us is anxiety about money or work or health or how other people treat us, that is what we should pray about. I suspect that every single one of us has been like the man at the beginning of our story, asking Jesus to buy into our agenda, into our priorities; asking Jesus to fix someone else’s behavior, asking Jesus to remove a temporary discomfort. And this passage tells us that what Jesus really wants is for us to refocus on what is best, on what will last, on what will truly satisfy. But just because we recognize ourselves in the stories Jesus tells doesn’t mean that we’ve got to get fixed before we can come near. What it does mean is that when we come near to God we need to ask for our desires to be transformed, not just met.
James the brother of Jesus writes to the Jerusalem church about why their prayer life is so flat and fruitless... “You ... covet something and cannot obtain it; so you engage in disputes and conflicts. You do not have, because you do not ask. You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, in order to spend what you get on your pleasures. ... Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God? Therefore whoever wishes to be a friend of the world becomes an enemy of God. ...God yearns jealously for the spirit that he has made to dwell in us”? [Jas 4:2-5]
What God wants for us is that we should desire him above all things. Our lives only start to make sense, the pieces only fall into place when Jesus Christ is at the center.
The world says earn more, get more, build more, keep more. But “the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God" [1 Cor 3:19] and Jesus points out that the real fools are those who forget God, who forget their neighbors, who forget their mortality. “Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth, for you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.” [Col 3:3]
Our lives have already been required of us. What business have we wasting our time building barns? We eat and drink and are truly joyful - not just merry - at the table of the Lord.
