I found my first depositor’s bankbook the other day—from an account with the State Bank of South Australia that was opened for me in 1973 when I was an infant. I remember at a very young age one of the joys of my childhood was saving my pocket money. I was given 50c a week which was a lot of money back then! But I very rarely spent any of it. Every school holidays mum and I would go for a trip into the city and I would deposit the money I had saved up in the Co-Op Building Society. By the end of 1979 I had a whopping $88!
My great grandfather, Pa, gave me one of his old tobacco tins to collect my pocket money in. I used to love stacking up the coins in shiny columns, just like my favourite comic book character, Scrooge Mc Duck. I daydreamed about being as rich as he was. I came up with a plan to loan my comic books to dad for a dollar each. I remember my Gran chuckling to dad: “You’d better watch out—he’s a shrewd boy!” Dad was a step ahead, though, and offered me 5 cents instead. Although I was disappointed about missing out on a wad of crisp dollar bills, I figured I should take the 5c—at least I would have another coin to put in the tobacco tin!
Maybe some of that was childish innocence and naivety. Perhaps some of it could even be considered responsible saving and praiseworthy ambition. But it went beyond that. I became fascinated with money, like Scrooge Mc Duck. I would open up the tobacco tin several times a week and count the coins, stacking them in little piles, with the hope that somehow the amount had magically increased since my last audit. At times that tin of money was the only thing I could see. I made sure it was always close to me, even keeping it under my bed. Storing up my riches had become the most important thing in my life.
It’s likely that these kinds of issues are underneath the dispute between the two brothers over their inheritance, in today’s text. One of them approached Jesus and demanded: “Teacher, tell my brother to divide the inheritance with me.”
It was customary in the day for Jewish people to approach rabbis to seek their counsel and teaching. But Jesus gives this man teaching beyond the particular issue he presents with. Jesus’ purpose is not to reconcile individual disputes, but to reconcile people to God. He seeks to shift this man’s focus heavenward: “Watch out! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; a person’s life does not consist in the abundance of their possessions.”
Greed is symptomatic of a deeper spiritual problem: greed is all-consuming and focused on the self—greed is about the self blessing the self, rather than God blessing the self. The real problem with greed is that it draws a person’s focus inward, ultimately to a trust in one’s own ability and work to attain happiness, security, health, and life, which money can never actually provide in any lasting way, because it always comes with a cost.
So Jesus teaches a parable to warn against the idolatry of greed and of the yearning to accumulate wealth and possessions. In the parable, the rich man seems to be a respectable character, who hasn’t exploited others, and whose wealth has come through honest farming. It’s not a sin to be rich. But at the centre of the parable is the issue of priorities of the heart—as the Apostle Paul says in the reading from Colossians 3 today: Set your minds on things above, not on earthly things” (Colossians 3:2).
The rich man’s heart is on earthly things alone. In his worldview, God isn’t even in the picture. Did you hear what Jesus said in the parable—the ground of a certain rich man produced a good crop. No matter how hard we strive and how prudent we are and how efficient we become with the use of better agricultural technology, mere humans cannot unfold a plant from a seed. It is God who is the giver; the provider—and that translates to every area of our existence.
But the rich man doesn’t see this. He’s not preoccupied with the things of God, but preoccupied with himself. He thinks: `What shall I do? I have no place to store my crops…This is what I will do. I will tear down my barns and build bigger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods.” He rests content in his own efforts: “And I will say to myself, “You have plenty of good things laid up for many years. Take life easy; eat, drink and be merry.”
‘You have plenty of good things laid up for you for many years’. The original Greek of the text is literally: “And I will say to my soul, ‘Soul, you have plenty of good things laid up for many years.” Seeking riches are a matter of the soul. It is a spiritual issue—an issue of the heart; of what our treasure really is and what our priorities are.
“Soul, you have plenty of good things laid up for many years.” How can anyone know how long we will live? The rich man had made himself to be God—he had built his empire and had determined he was going to have a long life! God brings sharp correction: “You fool! This very night your life will be demanded from you.”
God calls this rich man a fool not because he is materially rich, but because he is spiritually bankrupt. It is the same language used in Psalm 14: “The fool says in their heart there is no God.” The biblical picture of foolishness is not general silliness, but a rejection of God. The rich man is far away from God. His riches had effectively become a barrier he had erected in his heart before God. He doesn’t know God as his provider, and so he will certainly not know God as his saviour: “This very night your life will be demanded from you.” Then comes this dire warning: “This is how it will be with anyone who stores up things for themselves but is not rich toward God.”
The episode of the brothers’ dispute over their inheritance and the parable of the rich man comes after last week’s Gospel reading where Jesus gives the Lord’s Prayer to teach his disciples how to pray: ‘Give us today our daily bread.’ God wants us to be reliant on him each day. He calls us to the daily act of worship of praying to him for that which is needed each day. This is what Luther explained the petition “Give us our daily bread to mean”—“God gives daily bread, even without our prayer, to all people, though sinful, but we ask in this prayer that He will help us to realise this and to receive our daily bread with thanks.”
Like the man with the dispute over the inheritance, Jesus’ words challenge us to reflect on our priorities too. As Christians who—or what—do you place your trust in? How does the way we live each day reveal who we think is in control of our life? Where do we expect our provision will come from—the Maker of Heaven and Earth, or our own strivings? What are we working towards—an empire on earth, or the Kingdom of Heaven? Is the most important symbol in our eyes the Cross, or a dollar sign? To what ends do we expend our efforts in, each day? How do we hear Jesus’ words: “Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, but store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moths and vermin do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also” (Matthew 6:19-21).
What is it you treasure in the storehouse of your heart?
The life that God has saved you for is a life that goes beyond coming to church for an hour a week, and doing a good deed from time to time. He calls us to a faith that realises that everything we have comes from God in the first place, and we have no right or claim to anything; a faith that isn’t concerned about limiting how much we should give away, but in how much we could be giving away, living in God’s love to bless others, knowing with confident joy that God will always return more to us than what we give.
It’s to be the kind of faith that joins with the Psalmist’s prayer to “Teach us to number our days aright, that we may gain a heart of wisdom.” The life God has saved us for is one in which we share in Jesus’ own life: looking at the world through the eyes of Jesus, thinking with the mind of Jesus, loving with the compassion of Jesus beating in our heart, as he leads us to be generous to others with the little or the large that God has given us. He calls us to follow him as givers in the mission of the Kingdom of God, so that as we give God’s own giving may be known among us and through us to a world darkened in sinful self-focus and self-satisfaction.
The gospel in our Gospel Reading is that the Kingdom of heaven is nothing like the rich man in our text. God does not store up riches in a barn and greedily accumulate them for himself without thought for others. He is a God who freely gives. He opened his heavenly storehouses and lavished his wealth on the world by giving away his most precious treasure—his only Son, who, though he was rich, for our sakes became poor when he gave up his life on the Cross. That was were God redeemed the whole world—spiritually bankrupt and unable to repay its debt—not with silver or gold, but with the holy and precious blood of Jesus. And through Jesus the Father pours out the Holy Spirit to guide us into all truth and bless us that we lack no spiritual gift.
Those rich towards God in the scriptures are those who saw their dependency on God, and their deepest needs met by him alone. They are those God had first given his Spirit to: the widow of Zarephath who trusted God’s promise and gave her last handful of flour to make bread for the prophet Elijah, the blind beggars who knew their spiritual poverty and cried out ‘Lord, Son of David, have mercy on us.’ The tax collector who had full pockets, but an empty heart, crying out ‘Lord, have mercy on me, a sinner.’ The poor woman who gave her last two cents.
These are among the poor and foolish in the world’s eyes because they did not live by the mantra: ‘eat, drink and be merry’. But they are all truly rich toward God by trusting in his promise of life and salvation and setting their minds on things above.
Through faith you join with them in the communion of saints of all times and places as those who are rich towards God. You received these riches when your Heavenly Father opened an account for you at your baptism, in which he deposited faith, forgiveness, peace, life and salvation in Christ. These are true riches. This is real wealth, which God keeps safe for you, so that it will last for all eternity. Amen.
