it's a squalid way to live
In his parable today, Jesus imagines a man who manages to make it. Someone who has a harvest to remember. Someone who, instead of squandering his good fortune, makes a plan to invest it.
The fellow in today’s parable realizes the bumper crop for the opportunity that it is. And he takes it, too. He makes arrangements for this windfall to pay dividends for the rest of his life! And he goes to bed that night dreaming of the bright future he’s just made for himself.
As it turns out, though, he buys the farm that night. Instead of settling into a comfortable life, he dies. And all that shrewd financial planning of his turns out to be a whole bunch of nothing.
…From where we sit, this fellow is unlucky or, perhaps, unfortunate. Jesus, though, has another word. As far as Jesus is concerned, the chap in today’s parable didn’t catch a bad break. No, he was downright foolish.
Now we ought to admit that by our standards, this man isn’t a fool at all. In fact, if anything, he’s prudent. He’s, for a brief moment anyway, fortunate even. He manages to make it. He achieves that elusive dream we’re all chasing, that easy life. The comfortable one. The, dare we say it, good life. Jesus, though, insists the man is a fool.
…It turns out, research more or less bears Jesus out on this point, too. The truth is, money can buy a little happiness. But only to a certain point. If you’re poor, a little more money really will go a long way.
Once basic needs have been met, though, the boon that more capital will bring begins to wear off. But not entirely. The disposable income to set a little aside, buy a laborsaving device or two, and have enough for some recreation will continue to increase your happiness. But not as much.
And beyond that, the happiness money can buy totally flattens out! It doesn’t matter if you’re making $50,000 a year or $500,000. Once you’ve crossed a fundamental threshold, and a relatively low one at that, no amount of money can make you any happier whatsoever.
Undoubtedly, there’s plenty of reasons for this. And we’ll leave those to the folks who study that sort of thing. For our purposes, though, Jesus gives us a glimpse at a root cause of this phenomenon.
The man in today’s parable may have been rich by our standards. As far as things go with God, though, he’s pitifully poor! He catches a break, and the first thing he does is start playing God! He speaks to his own soul like a wannabe deity! And if that wasn’t enough, he starts making plans to arrange the future itself to his own liking!
It’s not that this guy never once for a moment thinks about sharing his good fortune. And it’s not that the thought to give thanks for the good harvest that came his way by sheer dumb luck never crosses his mind, either. No, this man’s a fool because he thinks he’s amassed enough to buy out God’s share in the heavenly board room! This man thinks he has enough to be God for himself! And as the Fourteenth Psalm puts it, “Fools say in their heart, ‘there is no God.’”
Money can’t buy you happiness at a certain point because, at a certain point, what you’re trying to buy is something no amount of money can! Like the pledge that you matter. That your life has meaning. That, if life gets the better of you, you won’t be tossed out on the bone-pile. In other words, at a certain point, we’re all trying to acquire what only God can give, a future with hope. (Jer. 29:10-11)
Left to ourselves, we will all make the same foolish investment as the man in today’s parable. That’s why so many of our stabs at stewardship have no teeth to them! We’re all already too busy frantically running around, trying to store up enough to secure our own future. In the end, though, all that ever does is leave us all that much poorer! Doesn’t it?
In the end, it’s not security we’re after. Not really, anyway. What we really want is a little of that “Blessed Assurance.” The surety that someone somewhere out there knows YOU. Cares for you. Has your own best interests at heart. In other words, what we all really want is God.
God. And not in any theoretical or pious way, either. But in a deadly real way. A way that can run to God when there’s nowhere else to go. A way that can dare to hope against hope that those desperate prayers that only come when the sleep won’t aren’t whistling in the dark. But instead that those real prayers are really being heard in the halls of heaven. And until we have that, none of us will ever willingly part with a red cent. Will we?
That’s why it’s pure foolishness for me to stand up here and try to convince you to loosen your grip on whatever little hoard you’ve managed to amass like the Gollum you are. It’s foolish, even though it’s absolutely true your reserves aren’t nearly enough to reserve a spot for you in eternity. It’s foolish, even though it’s perfectly demonstrable that all your hoarding will only lead to a meaningless life capped off by a senseless death.
No, no matter how true, all those admonitions will never cure us of our foolishness. In fact, all those admonitions will only add fuel to the fire of our faithlessness. They will only make us grip our pocketbooks a little tighter than we were before.
No, what we need to have is God. And we’re in such arrears that we need to have more than just God. We need to have a God who has us. And you should know, on account of another death, that’s precisely what you have!
The man in today’s parable may be foolishly trying to procure something that’s desperately beyond his paltry means. But that’s not the full extent of his foolishness. No, the real foolishness is that he’s trying to get what God has already determined to give away freely. And give away freely in another death. The death of the beloved Son of God, Jesus Christ!
At the cross, Jesus gave what we’re all in search of, that ultimate pledge. The pledge to be our God! Be our God, come what may! As Saint Paul dared to put it, “For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” (Rom. 8:38-39)
Yes, this may look like foolishness to those who are perishing. But for those of us who are being saved, it is nothing less than the very power of God! (1 Cor. 1:18). The power of God to save you from yourself. The power of God to save you from your own miserliness. The power of God to make more out of you than you would be on our own. The power of God to get you to let go of all your insufficient attempts to save yourselves. And then find that Jesus has been yours all along! In other words, the power of God to make this “blessed assurance” your very story. And your very song!
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