onthly MeditationMeditation for September 2009
Judith reads:
Our current monthly meditations are based on the parables of Jesus recorded only in St. Luke’s Gospel. The Parable of the Rich Fool is the fourth parable of Jesus that is unique to the Gospel of St. Luke.
Someone in the crowd had asked Jesus to tell his brother to divide his father’s estate with him. Jesus replied that he had not been made a judge over such matters and cautioned the crowd to guard against every kind of greed. Life is not measured, Jesus said, by how much we own. To clarify what he meant by this, Jesus proceeded to tell the parable of the Rich Fool (Luke 12: 16 – 20).
The rich man in the parable had a fertile farm. It produced such fine crops in abundance that he didn’t have enough room to store the large harvest. He asked himself what he should do about this problem.
I imagine that there could have been any number of answers to that question but the answer he decided on was to tear down his old barns and build new and bigger ones. In these new storehouses he would be able to stockpile enough food for many years to come. He could then sit back and take it easy; he could eat, drink, and be merry and have no worries.
The parable concluded, But God said to him, ‘You fool! You will die this very night. Then who will get everything you worked for?’ (New Living Translation.)
These words of summation could easily be misunderstood. Do you think that Jesus was telling the crowd that the man would die because he was rich? I don’t think so. Was the man going to die because of his greed? Again, I don’t think so. I think that Jesus was pointing out that no amount of earthly possessions will do us any good when we die, if we don’t have a spiritual foundation to our lives. We can’t take our earthly riches to heaven.
Jesus says, Yes, a person is a fool to store up earthly wealth but not have a rich relationship with God. Luke 12: 21, N.L.T.
If the rich man had had a spiritual relationship with God, do you suppose his answer to his own question about his earthly wealth would have been different? Perhaps he would still have decided to store his goods in new barns while, at the same time, sharing his wealth with those who were poor; perhaps he would have decided to go on farming his fields in the coming years and set up a means of distributing these earthly goods to those in need.
If you suddenly became very wealthy what would your answer be to the question of what you should do with your riches? Is that answer affected by your spiritual relationship with God? Being wealthy is not a bad thing; but, as Christians, what we do with our wealth is all important.
© Judith Lawrence—September 2009
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