Luke 12.13-21, Colossians 3.1-11
If ever there was a subject guaranteed to raise family tensions, it is the matter of inheritance. Who gets what from mum and dad? Who has been done out of what was rightfully theirs? What happened to that hideous, but very valuable jug…? Even in the best of families it can stir deep feelings. I was once told in hushed and scandalised tones of the story of a stepmother in my own family’s history, whose children snaffled the money that allegedly should have come down our side of the family tree. She died more than a century ago, and I doubt whether there was even much money to be snaffled, as the family weren’t wealthy, but all the same, it just wasn’t right…
Inheritance squabbles are as old as the hills, as we can see in our Gospel reading today. “Someone in the crowd said to Jesus, Teacher, tell my brother to divide the family inheritance with me…”
He doesn’t get the answer he expects - as Jesus points out, he isn’t a family lawyer - but he does get the answer he needs, in the shape of a very pointed parable. Like a lot of Jesus’ parables, it’s meant to be over the top, a bit ridiculous. I’m sure he hammed it up as he told it. But it’s carefully told, and every word counts.
Imagine for a moment that you were acting Jesus’ parable out just as it’s written. How many actors would you need to tell this story of the rich fool? The answer is just one, at least until the very last line, when God puts in an appearance. This rich man seems to live in a world of his own – despite the fact that he obviously didn’t. The land of a rich man produced abundantly, it begins. What? It produced all by itself? I don’t think so. There are surely armies of unseen farm labourers working this land to make those crops appear, perhaps a family too – but this man seems blind to them.
When he realizes he has nowhere to store all this abundance, he says to himself – he talks to himself a lot, because there isn’t anyone else in his world to talk to - he says to himself “I will pull down my barns and build larger ones…” Notice the pronouns - I and the My. Again, we ask, is he going to do this all himself? Is he a demolition engineer and a master builder now as well? Is he going to lug around all the timber, manhandle it into place single-handed? I rather doubt it. But as far as he’s concerned, he’s the centre of the universe. In fact, he is the universe.
He talks to himself again. Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years, relax, eat, drink be merry. But that’s the point when his self-centred, self-obsessed world comes crashing down around his ears. All of a sudden, another voice booms out, another character bursts into the scene. Apparently, it isn’t all about him after all. You fool, says God, this very night your life is being demanded of you. And the things you have prepared, whose will they be? His life isn’t his to do what he wants with – it never has been. It isn’t his to possess and control – it never can be. No man is an island, entire of itself, said the poet John Donne. We exist in relationship, to others, to God, to the world around us. We can’t go it alone.
Jesus talks about the importance of being rich towards God. What does that mean? It has sometimes been said that the beginning of faith is the moment when we are able to say, “there is a God, and it isn’t me”. If we can get that straight, all the rest will follow. There is a God, and it isn’t me. When Jesus talks about being rich towards God, he is pointing to the importance of acknowledging that there is something, someone, beyond ourselves, greater than ourselves.
The squabbling brothers who come to Jesus are destroying something that is of infinitely greater worth, their relationship with one another. One’s life does not consist in the abundance of possessions, he tells them. The value of our lives isn’t rooted in what belongs to us, but in who we belong to – our families and community, our world, and God himself.
Paul writes to the Colossians and tells them “your life is hidden with Christ in God”. We are held in the heart of God, secure and precious to him already. We don’t have to earn his love by our own anxious striving, and we don’t have to worry that others might be more beloved than we are – that’s often at the root of the kind of sibling rivalry that prompted Jesus’ story – because God’s love is infinite, there is room for all of us.
That leads him onto his really revolutionary claim that “there is no longer Greek and Jew, circumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave and free”. He lived in a highly stratified society, where everyone knew their place, but he insisted that we are called into community when we follow Christ, called to look for God at work beyond ourselves as well as within ourselves, to see ourselves as part of something bigger than ourselves, part of the whole of God’s blessed creation, not in a world of our own, like the rich fool of the parable.
This call to community is as vital now as it has ever been.
Knowing it affects us emotionally, spiritually and as a society. Recent studies have revealed alarming rates of loneliness, especially among young people in their late teens and early adulthood but also affecting many others. Now that it is so easy to retreat into virtual, online worlds, we are learning how important it is to make real connections in the flesh and blood world too - it’s one of the great gifts churches can bring, and one reason why it’s important just to show up, to be here.
Knowing that we are part of something bigger also affects our relationship with nature. If we see ourselves as the centre of the universe, we also tend to see the world as just there to provide for us, only valuable if it is valuable to us, and that can lead us to exploit and degrade it and take more than our fair share. If we have to build bigger barns maybe we have more stuff than we need?
And, of course, getting our place in the universe right affects our relationship with God. If we think we are God, self-sufficient all by ourselves, then, like the man in the story, we are going to be disappointed, because however rich, however clever, however powerful we are, none of us can cheat death, that great leveller. And more than that, if we try to live as rugged individuals, we risk missing out on the meaning and the joy God meant us to find in a life lived in him.
So, Christ calls us to care less about belongings and more about belonging, less about what we have in our hands and more about whose hands hold us and whose hands we can hold, less about our treasure, and more about knowing that we and all God’s creation are treasured by him, infinitely and eternally.
We don't know what happened next to the man who came to Jesus asking to sort out his inheritance squabble with his brother but let us hope he realised that he had the riches he really needed, and more to share, and let us hope we realise it too.
Amen
