On storing treasure

Did you spot the strange feature of this parable of Jesus about the rich farmer? I can’t say with absolute certainty that it is a feature unique to this parable. I haven’t done an exhaustive search. But I have skimmed through many of the well known Jesus’ stories: the prodigal son, the good Samaritan, the sower and the soil, the pearl of great price, the lost coin, the wise and foolish bridesmaids, the unjust judge, the unmerciful servant, the sleepy neighbor with the insistent chap next door, and so on. And none of them has this feature.

Perhaps you got it! The strange thing about this parable is that God makes a direct appearance in it. Almost all the parables of Jesus refer indirectly to God, of course. They portray characteristics of God: God forgives and welcomes, like a father who welcomes a wayward child who rushes off to the far country, but now returns; God answers prayer, like a friend next door who gets up to the persistent knocking of her neighbour; God casts the seed of the word on all sorts of human soils, like a farmer sowing a crop of wheat; God rescues us in need, like a stranger with a donkey attending a roadside robbery and bashing; God appears in our lives at unexpected times and unanticipated ways, like a late arriving bridegroom who suddenly turns up at the reception, and so on. A lot of Jesus’ teaching about God is delivered to us in these vivid pictures. But indirectly. They are human stories meant to illuminate Godly truths.

Not so in this story. Here God has a direct part to play. The story is of a rich farmer who was pretty good at his job. He worked his land so that it produced an abundant series of crops; so much so that his silos and barns were bursting. So he decided to pull the lot down and rebuild on a grander scale. Then, satisfied with his endeavours, he settled back and uttered those famous words which have entered our stock of common phrases: ‘Soul … eat, drink, and be merry.’ In all the other parables another person in the story might make an evaluation at this point. Or Jesus himself, or the Gospel writer, might make a comment from outside the story, applying it in a specific way. But here, out of the blue, God makes an entrance. God speaks into the story.

That’s a bit of a shock. We parable listeners don’t see it coming. But what is even more of a shock is what God says. But before we get to that, notice first what God does not say. God does not say to the rich farmer, ‘you crook’. Given the nature of the story, which is about economic profit, we might easily suppose that this agro-businessman cut a few corners, fiddled the books to avoid tax, employed workers at under award wages, stole building materials from a trusted supplier, and so on. But there isn’t the slightest indication in the story that the man acted illegally in any way.

And God does not say to the rich farmer, ‘you cad’. It wouldn’t be hard to imagine that on his way to wealth and fortune, this man might have behaved in a way that flouted moral obligations. He could have cut his siblings out of a just share in the family inheritance, or he might have mixed poor quality grain with good in selling to certain customers, or perhaps he withheld supplies to needy folk in order to jack up prices to more prosperous clients. But, again, there is not the slightest indication in the story that he was immoral in any of his dealings.

And God does not say to him, ‘you sinner’. I must say in my youth that is how I instinctively read the parable. I thought it was a story about sin, about doing the wrong thing before God. But if we read it carefully, there is not the slightest indication of such a theological judgment in the story. The man does not withhold a religious pledge from the temple, he does not neglect any sacred duty, and not one of the ten commandments is violated in his actions. According to God’s assessment in the story, the man is not a crook, a cad, or a sinner.

What God says to him is: ‘You fool!’ You fool. Now that—at least to me—is unexpected. If he’s not a crook, or a cad, or a sinner, and he’s done really well at his chosen profession, why on earth does God call him a fool? What is a fool? Well, of course that depends heavily on the circumstances. But we can say in general terms that a fool is a person who acts in a way that undermines his or her own best interests. If my family has a strong history of heart disease, I am a bit of a fool if I pursue a steady diet of high cholesterol foods. My actions undermine my own long term best interests; assuming, of course, that I am interested in staying alive.

This leads to a further refinement of our understanding of the fool. It is possible to act against our own best interests, but not know we are doing that. A hundred years ago the connection between cholesterol and heart disease wasn’t known. People may well have indulged in high fat diets which were in fact (as we understand the facts now) against their own best health interests. Looking back, we might call their actions unfortunate, but we would hardly label them foolish. A foolish action is one that is engaged in knowing that it is, or is likely to be, counterproductive or self-contradictory. Or, if we want to go a bit further, we might say a person is a fool if they engage in self-defeating actions unwittingly, but in circumstances where they should know better. A 19^th century person indulging a high fat diet cannot be judged a fool on cholesterol grounds, because the knowledge was unavailable. But a 21^st century person doing the same out of ignorance, might well be judged foolish, for failing to inform themselves of important and easily available information on health and diet.

Now back to Jesus’ story. God says to the farmer, ‘you fool’. Clearly it is not a judgment about his farming or business skills. He has those in abundance. God does not comment negatively on what he has. His foolishness has to do with what he has not. It is a foolishness of omission, of neglecting something, not of commission, not of doing something. What is it exactly that is in this man’s long term best interests, but which he has wittingly, or culpably unwittingly, neglected?

We are given a clue in the words God speaks in the story. ‘God said to him, "You fool! This very night your life is being demanded of you. And the things you have prepared, whose will they be?"’ So it has something to do with death and being prepared for it. The man has prepared many things to make his day to day life enjoyable, secure, and rich. But, according to God, he has unwisely neglected to prepare well for his dying. And this is foolish because, though all else may be uncertain in this life, and hence preparing for it may also be uncertain, dying is absolutely certain. We may not turn out in this life to be successful farmers, or business people, or tennis players, or whatever. And our preparations in these areas may be more or less relevant. But we do know that we face death. To fail to prepare for this certainty in life, therefore, is to fail to prepare for one thing that we know we cannot avoid. And that failure is foolishness. I know it’s coming. But I don’t prepare. That’s dumb.

How so? Well, I don’t want to become morbid or melancholy here, but to think about death at all is to find that we almost automatically re-evaluate the relative importance of things we live for. Anyone who has had a serious brush with death, or anyone who has walked through the valley of the shadow of death with someone they love, knows firsthand how death qualifies what we see as important in life and relationships. I remember hearing a Buddhist monk interviewed by Margaret Throsby on her music program. He was a wonderfully lively and engaging person, whose love of life was infectious even over the air ways. At one point he was talking about what is truly important in life, and he said: ‘One thing I know for sure, when I am on my death bed, I am not going to say to my friends gathered around, Oh how I wish I had spent more time in committee meetings!’ It’s a light hearted comment, of course. But it has a serious intention. When we honestly face up to our end, when we reflect on the reality of dying, it throws a clearer light than we can normally muster on the important things in life, and the unimportant. To cultivate the love of friends is ultimately more important to the meaning of my life than sitting in committee meetings, however weighty they may seem at the time.

I think that’s a pretty significant lesson of this parable. Don’t neglect to let the fact of death thrown its penetrating beam across the rest of life in order to help us discern what matters and what does not, lest we end up missing some really significant stuff because we just got distracted along the way. From the outset in my life, I heard a lot about the danger of missing the mark, missing the call of God, by doing the wrong thing, by breaking the law, say, or violating a neighbor, or opposing God. And no doubt I can easily do such things. But Jesus’ story alerts me to a more subtle danger. Not rank lawlessness, or immorality, or sin, but stupidity might be my greatest risk. Not being a crook, or a cad, or a sinner; but just being a fool. I don’t do overtly terrible things with my life. I just fritter it away. I get caught up in the endless demands of the day, and simply forget, simply fail to pay attention, to important things I should attend to, but don’t. And that’s foolish.

Jesus says this man stored up treasure for himself, the barns, the silos, and so on, but was not rich toward God. Some riches we can’t take with us from this life. Those were the ones this man majored on. But some riches, we can. Some values transcend the full stop we know as death, and carry over into the next sentence. The parable hints that these are values that have to do with God. For God’s kingdom is not terminated, likes barns and silos, with death. Paul gives a list of such values in the passage we read from Colossians. They have to do with character and virtue. He uses the image of replacing old clothes (clothes that are wearing out) with new ones (ones that are lasting). The old, the worn out, the passing, in Paul’s terms, are fornication, impurity, passion, evil desire, anger, wrath, malice, slander, lying and abuse. These won’t last. The new, the eternal garments are, compassion, kindness, meekness, patience, forgiveness, love and truthfulness. These do last. To be rich toward God is to cultivate throughout our temporal life, virtues that share in the nature of God’s eternal life. These riches we can take with us when at the last ‘our life is demanded of us’, as the story puts it.

To neglect to do this preparation is not wicked, or immoral, or sinful. It is just foolish. It is not in our best long term, that is, eternal interests. And we know it. Jesus does not say in this story that the rich man will be excluded from heaven; that death will be the end of his being before God. He says only that the major effort this farmer put into life was transient, it will be left behind when he moves through death into the eternal life of God beyond. And the things he might have carried, compassion, kindness, love, truthfulness, will be modestly represented in comparison.

And that’s not a wise investment in the long term market of life, according to this story.