FINDINGS II
Proper
13 - C - August 1, 2010
Ecclesiastes 1:2, 12-14; 2:18-23 and Luke 12:
13-21
Luke 12: 13-21 Someone in the crowd said to Jesus,
"Teacher, tell my brother to divide the family inheritance with me." Jesus
replied, "Who made me judge of this kind of thing? Be careful about greed
because your life does not consist in a lot of possessions." Then Jesus told
them this parable: "A wealthy man's land produced an abundant crop. And he
wondered how he would find a place to store it all. He lit upon the idea of pulling down his old barns to build
larger ones wherein to store all that he had grown. He thought of himself as
most fortunate with nothing to do but relax, eat drink and enjoy himself. 'Soul,'
he said to himself, 'You've got it made.' But God said to him, 'You're a fool,
mister. You will die this very night, and all this you have now will belong to
whom? Not you. You should have been storing up a different kind of treasure.' " (Translated and paraphrased by Harry T. Cook)
 By Harry T. Cook
7/26/10
RUBRIC
One guesses that those who may first have heard this parable
could scarcely grasp the context, because it seems fairly clear that the Jesus
imagined to have told it along with most of his audience would have come from
peasant stock, knowing wealth only in the abstract. If that surmise is true,
then we need to ask what was the idea of trying to teach a lesson about those
with much to those with little. The answer may be that wealth is a relative
matter, that what one does with what one has, however much or little, is of
lesser importance than what one is and does with his finite days.
WORKSHOP
On the occasion depicted in this passage Jesus is mistaken
for a village sage whose job it was to adjudicate disputes -- a kind of
rabbinical, small-claims court judge. The dispute is over a brother's
inheritance and another brother's claim to a share of it. Is the latter a
younger brother, who, like the prodigal of ch. 15, would have been entitled to
a smaller share than an older brother? Has the elder brother claimed the entirety
of the estate? Luke doesn't seem to care, because the point of the story is
that material wealth is in itself irrelevant.
In the Gospel of Thomas (72), Jesus turns to his disciples,
asking them, "I am not a divider, am I?" Probably a rhetorical, palms-up,
shoulders-shrugged question. Just behind Jesus' reluctance to get involved in a
dispute between two brothers is the reluctance to get drawn into a feud about
money. That seemed not to have been a priority for Luke's Jesus.
Luke, the master storyteller, does not allow wealthy
landowner of the parable that follows Jesus' refusal to be "a divider" to think
for one second of distributing some of the crops' over-plus to the poor and
needy, or of sharing it with other landowners whose crops had not been so
plentiful.
Luke wanted to portray him as a fat cat with money in the
bank. Luke even makes him use the word "psuchā" of himself, the New Testament
word "soul," meaning the comprehensive and essential self. But the
self-satisfied landowner was only reacting with part of himself -- the part
that sees only self in the single dimension of a mirror and therefore at only one
moment in the grand sweep of time and circumstance.
Thus it is not soul talking to soul, but one dismembered
part talking to another. In our time, it's called "compartmentalization," as if
such a thing were actually possible apart from neurotic denial. Living life in
small, discrete, disparate parts is not really living.
Somewhat unusual for parables, the divine self is depicted
as speaking (v. 20) -- perhaps an indication of how deeply Luke felt about the
unequal distribution of wealth: "Fool! Tonight they take your soul (whole self)
from you." What an image! In the darkness of a first century night illuminated
only by firelight or moonlight -- if either -- the very essence, the all of the
rich one would be exacted from him, leaving him a husk -- not unlike an empty
barn! Luke depicts the deity speaking directly to the man, "Who will own all
this that you have gone to such ends to amass?" It is a rhetorical question, of
course, to which the answer is, "Anybody but you."
Here the glum wisdom of Ecclesiastes fits: "It is an unhappy
business that God has given to human beings to be busy with . . . I hated my
toil in which I had toiled under the sun, seeing that I must leave it to those
who come after me -- and who knows whether they will be wise or foolish? Yet
they will be master of all for which I toiled . . ."
HOMILETIC COMMENTARY
In the gospel's own counterintuitive way, barns bursting at
the seams, treasuries overflowing with money, safe deposit boxes stuffed with
securities are liabilities, not assets -- unless thought is given to using them
to relieve others' needs.
The homiletic possibilities for this passage and its parable
are rich for the preacher with the courage to confront a congregation with the
clear demands of the gospel where material resources are concerned. This is
true of middle-class congregations in the United States -- even in a time of
economic constriction and uncertainty.
How this lection might be preached in a sub-Saharan mission
is, of course, another thing. But in the venues most readers of this analysis
craft or consume sermons, the implications are obvious. Large treasuries and
fat endowments upon the interest of which congregations are willing to live is
a perversion of the gospel.
The Christian church sometimes resembles a gated-community
within which life goes on in unruffled security, regardless of what is going on
outside the gate. Inside the gate theological orthodoxy and ritual correctness
become paramount issues. And as those are parsed, ample time remains for the
anathematizing of churches and church leaders who dare, for example, to admit
of human equality for gay, lesbian, bi-sexual and transsexual persons.
The loudest praise for one particular parish minister I know
was that "he built up a big savings account for us, and now we have no
worries." Wanna bet?
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