While Jesus was in the town of Bethany, a man from the crowd asks Jesus to intervene in dispute the man has with his brother over their inheritance. As usual, Jesus sidesteps a direct answer and instead warns the crowd of the perils of greed. “Life,” Jesus contends, “does not consist in the abundance of possessions.” To illustrate his point, Jesus then tells a parable about a rich man who decided to build bigger stage barns to accommodate a bumper crop. With the excess oil, wine, or grain safely stored away, the rich man would live at ease for years to come. The man, however, would not have years at his disposal, for he died that very night. His surplus would become someone else’s bequest.
Here Jesus aims more for persuasion than guilt. To outline a moral vision that connects with the experience of his hearers and demonstrate the real-world fallout of greed. Though Jesus would next turn his attention to his disciples and charge them to no worry about food or clothing, it’s impossible to not hear the reverberations of Jesus’ parable in the ears of the man who asked about the fair division of his inheritance. Indeed, the body of the dead father is probably freshly buried and many in the crowd still mourning. To them, the man of the parable had a name. But to Jesus, the tragedy was not his death, but the greed that followed. Jesus wades into a dispute over inheritance to question the significance of all possessions. Of what use is it to bicker over wealth if its value has an expiration date?
It would be somewhat difficult to categorize Jesus’ teaching to the man and the crowd within the traditional threefold ‘uses’ of the law. Jesus explicitly avoids offering any comment on the maintenance of civil order (the first use). If there is a condemnation (the second use) it is oblique and must be inferred. The death of the rich man is not, for example, employed by Jesus to sound notes of eschatological judgment. Nor does Jesus suggest his teaching is an impossible burden. And if Christians reading Luke’s text could certainly glean moral guidance from Jesus’ teaching (the third use), the immediate hearers of Jesus’ teaching were not, strictly speaking, Christians.
Jesus offers the crowd moral teaching – a law, if you will – but his tact is decidedly different from how law is often thought of. Jesus, to be sure, was perfectly capable of fire and brimstone preaching, but he does not scold his audience or guilt them into despair. In his denunciation of greed, he doesn’t even cite the 10th commandment (“Thou shalt not covet”) in order to buttress his argument with the lightning bolts of Sinai. Jesus opts to show more than tell, to describe rather than proscribe. (Perhaps we might even say he gives a fourth use of the law.) He doesn’t offer offer ‘good advice’ or a helpful corrective, but reveals the folly of sin.
For Jesus, sin is the spiritual emperor that wears no clothes. Its vanities are venerated in the world, and one significant part of Jesus’s mission is to become the child who points out its obvious nakedness. Jesus invites his listeners to identify with the rich man of the parable, to imagine what they would do with a bumper crop and the assurance of provision for years to come. It might appear to be reasonable or prudent to build bigger barns. The more you have the better off you are, right? But the overlap between the death of the rich man and the recent death of the father with bickering children cannot be overlooked. This parable is far from hypothetical and it simultaneously appeal to the crowd’s experience with tragedy and loss. To consider not just their own death, but that of their loved ones. The crowd knew both the dead father and his feuding sons, and probably gossiped about the whole debacle on the way home from synagogue. Where does such a life of greed ultimately lead? A corpse surrounded by nothing but the accumulation of excess. Wealth might offer ease and security, but it cannot provide what it promises. Those who aspire for wealth seek a meaningless, hollow life.
Given how familiar this all sounds, it’s easy to miss the kind of logic used here. Jesus argues against greed by citing its consequences further downstream — an empty promise that leave you worse in the end. He offers a kind of wisdom teaching (similar to Proverbs) that seeks to persuade the hearer of the foolishness of wealth. Or as the apostle Paul would later put it, “the wages of sin is death” (Rom 6:23). Instead of plotting a course from transgression, to guilt, to forgiveness and grace, here Jesus operates according to a paradigm of death and life: what leads to life and what doesn’t. This kind of law preaching shows the emptiness of a life built on shifting sand and the tragic fallout that ensues. One can gain the whole world and still wake up in the middle of the night with an inescapable sinking feeling that it all amounted to nothing in the end.
But before one is left with the impression that Jesus was simply another wise philosopher offering the kind of toothless platitude that make for bad Instagram memes (“You can’t take it with you!”), what sets Jesus apart from the Senecas of his day was how thoroughly he applied his dichotomy between death and life. True life was eternal life on the other side of death and anything less than eternity was ultimately a slow-motion train wreck leading to a twisted heap of metal. True life exceeds what we can earn or make of it, something given by God to those with nothing to offer in return.
People often imagine what Jesus might say were he to come back today and look at the terrible state of the world. That he would show up and be outraged at the mess we’re in, perhaps turning over a few tables in the process. He’d see the rampant gambling, divorce, greed, lust, racism, gluttony, and all the seven deadly sins on full display and start spitting woes of judgment. To be sure, Jesus wouldn’t mince his words. But I also think the kind of law he’d give would be more sorrowful than angry. Yes, there’d be a fair share of righteous judgment, but he’d also be overwhelmed by the tragedy of it all. That the best life we can imagine for ourselves is one of constant entertainment through glowing screens until someone upstairs pulls the plug. Or how quickly we get angry because the sadness is too much for words. Or how our dogged self-sufficiency and loneliness go hand in hand. Jesus would see how miserable we are and preach a different kind of law, asking us to consider how we got here.
But Jesus wouldn’t stop there, of course. Just as he did when he first came, Jesus would offer more than mere words. He wouldn’t briefly commiserate with us and then leave us to pick up the pieces. No, when Jesus returns, he will do more than offer a word of caution to the broken. He’ll lead us to a place where sadness and emptiness and death are no more. With his nail-pierced palms, he’ll take our weary hands and lead us home.
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