Base text of a Sermon for Pentecost 8. Year C. Luke 12.13-21
Our Gospel today is sharing some very common, yet still impactful wisdom. Wisdom we often sum up by the phrase ‘you can’t take it with you’.
And if that was all Jesus was trying to convey, we could leave it there, finish the sermon, end the service early and move onto our celebrations.
However, there is something more going on here. Jesus is leading us into a deeper understanding, an understanding that as we grasp and realize it more and more will change our life and our relationships.
In way of context, the Gospel according to Luke clearly depicts God on the side of the poor and wealth as something not to be prized or sought after.
And we, being raised in a culture and a church that has promoted, even if at times promoted with visible hypocrisy, these values, all this seems to make sense. We can’t take it with us, right?
But the ancient Jewish culture valued things differently. Two signs of God’s blessing were plenty of children and plenty of wealth. Being rich and having a large family to carry on your name meant that you had received God’s favour.
It is therefore significant that our passage begins with someone wanting to divide the family inheritance. While this could on occasion happen, it was frowned upon because it split families, it alienated brother from brother and caused dissension in the blessing – children – provided by God.
So, Jesus refuses the request – refuses to be an “arbitrator” – and in the original Greek this is also often translated as ‘divider’. He refuses to be an agent of division, of separation, refuses to participate in an act that may lessen the blessing of God, children, because of inheritance, the acquisition of possessions.
And then we come to the parable, and here we need to quickly look at the Greek. English has only one word for life, but in New Testament Greek there are three. All can refer to life as a whole, but each of the three also has a particular meaning.
There is Bios, from where we get the word biological, referring to the physical, bodily life of a person.
Another word for both life and soul and, is the word Psyche, from where we get the word psychology, the personal soul or spiritual life.
The final Greek word is Zoe. This is life which is physical, which is spiritual but also, and most importantly, it is the life eternal.
When Luke writes that “one’s life does not consist in the abundance of possessions”, he uses the word Zoe. Our regular human life, but more particularly, our eternal life does not consist in the abundance of possessions, anything we may “own”.
At the very heart of our parable are the concepts of possessions, that which can be possessed, possession, the act of possessing, and possessor, the one who possesses.
The rich man assumes he possesses many possessions, assumes what he has belongs to him, is personally owned by him. But our text tells a different story …
“The land of a rich man produced abundantly.
The land does not ultimately belong to any person, any nation, any society or any people. The land, the beautiful, richly diverse and creative land is created by God, infused by God, shows forth the divine and remains always God’s.
But more than this, the specific Greek word chosen by Luke is not land in the generic sense, like a parcel of land listed on a real estate website. It refers to land, soil, a place, which though uncultivated, grows fruit-bearing bushes.
Uncultivated. The land ‘owned’ by the rich man is not cared for, not tended, not cultivated and nurtured – it simply overflows with the fertility of God. It overspills with abundance – which the rich man claims as his own, claims to possess, claims to have the right to store and sell for his own personal benefit and profit.
We can see reflections of this appropriation, this tendency to assume the right of possession within our economic and social systems. Exploitative capitalism posits the rights of the super-rich to benefit from possession of the Land, possession of the means of production, and more recently attempted possession of even the base level DNA of plants and livestock. Similarly, today worldwide there an estimated 50 million people, all made in the image of god, who are victims of the modern slave trade, 50 million people, including at least 40 000 here in Australia, who are seen as possessions by those who seek to possess.
All this horror and pain stems ultimately from our desire to possess. And in our parable Jesus highlights this desire at its nadir.
“I will say to my soul, Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years”
To my soul. To MY soul … the man, his own ego identity, who he thinks himself to be is claiming possession of his soul. The Greek word used here is psyche, which can be, and is later in our passage, translated as life … The rich man is claiming to own, to be in charge of, to possess his own life. He is claiming life, the ultimate gift from God as his own possession.
And we all unthinkingly do this – we all, everyday think of our lives as our own, we all assume our self is our ultimate possession. We all assume our inner life, our true self is the one thing that is really ours. But even this interior sense of who we are, our psyche, our self, our life, even this is not really our personal possession. As God says to the rich man:
“This very night your life is being demanded – required back - of you”
Like the rich man we will all die, we will all lose our self, our psyche, lose our life when God requires it back.
And what awaits is the gift of the life eternal, the Zoe-life made real by the death and resurrection of Christ. But we cannot, we must not, Jesus warns us, assume that we ourselves can possess this Zoe-life, because we ourselves, our psyche must and will die. Our psyche-life, our interior personal spiritual life can never be our Zoe eternal life.
Just over a year ago my mother died with her psyche-self and life, 82 years old suffering from long-term Alzheimer’s. Her Zoe-life eternal identity is not her psyche life when she died, in pain and without full cognition. Nor is her Zoe life identical to her mature and fruitful psyche life at 50, when she was alive and joyous in her care for injured birds. Because this life of hers, which she, like all of us at times, assumed was HER life, was never really possessed by her, but was a gift from God, who one day drew it back.
Our eternal life, our life beyond the world we know, beyond ourselves as we know them, cannot consist of any possession, because in the life eternal there can be no possessions, not even of our own life.
There is only Gift.
In the name of Christ, Amen.