“Teacher, tell my brother to share the
inheritance with me”
[Luke 12:13-21].
It's an
old story – a family conflict over inheritance, something we’ve all seen happen
so many times. What better advertisement for Jesus’ famous advice to give
everything away – now!
Perhaps
that someone in the crowd who wanted
Jesus to take his side in his family’s quarrel may well have had a good case.
Who knows? That’s a concern for a lawyer – a role Jesus refused to play. “Friend,” Jesus replied, “who appointed me as your judge and
arbitrator?”
Jesus certainly made judgments about many things. But in this instance he looked beyond the immediate case at hand – to the bigger problem of what
wealth (and our obsessive preoccupation with wealth) does to us. So Jesus
warned: “Take care to guard against all
greed, for though one may be rich, one’s life does not consist of possessions.”
The
problem with that, as we all know of course, is that possessions are important.
Possessin at least some things – sufficient food, some sort of shelter –
having at least some things really is important, if we just want to survive.
And possessing more things, while maybe not so necessary, certainly seems to
make life a lot easier. Jesus didn’t deny that, but, like Qoheleth, the teacher
in the book of Ecclesiastes [Ecclesiastes 1:2; 2:21-23],
Jesus understood how limited – and limiting – wealth’s benefits can actually be. For
time too is limited. When we’ve only a limited amount of time, the length of
which we cannot know for certain, what we actually do with that time, how we choose to
live, the objectives we pursue, the priorities we express in the way we choose
to live, all these become important questions – questions that concern who we
really are, regardless of what or how much we have.
Greed
(which Saint Paul equated with idolatry)
- and its equally corrupting cousin, envy – can totally take over a person,
leading to a seemingly obsessive need to compare oneself with others and a
compulsive desire to acquire and acquire and acquire. There’s always that
bigger house or cooler car or the latest model phone or whatever!
And
yet it’s always a race against time – a race one can only lose.
“You fool,” Jesus says, “the things you have prepared, to whom will they belong?”
Life is
like a race that someone else always wins. Even the inheritors will lose the race in
the end. Either it’s all maybe just one long meaningless
vanity (as Qoheleth warned). Or it has some purpose beyond its apparent end. But, in that case, what we get
to take with us will not be what we have (or, rather, at that
point, what we had), but rather who we are, who we have
become by the way we have chosen to live.
As
Christians, our lives are shaped by the reality of the risen Christ, who is
already (as Saint Paul tells us) seated at
the right hand of God. Shaped by and focused on that reality, we can begin
to look at our lives, already in the here and now, with a perspective that the greedy
man in the parable obviously lacked – not just a resigned fatalistic acceptance
of life’s limits, like what we heard from Qoheleth, but a freedom to face life
and live it fully, based not on what we have, but on who we can become
in Christ.
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