Proper 13, Year C
Luke 12:13-21
Episcopal Church of the Holy Cross
August 4, 2019
Jonathan Hanneman
“This very night your life is being demanded of you. And the things you have prepared, whose will they be?”
– Luke 12:20c
For the last few weeks we’ve had what appear to be pretty straightforward moral lessons from each of our Gospel readings: the Good Samaritan—be kind; Mary and Martha—don’t complain; the neighbor with the midnight guest—be persistent. Along those lines, we could easily summarize the parable of the rich farmer as “don’t be greedy.” But if those are all the things we really need to know from the Bible, I would have preferred it if God gave us a list of rules instead of all these stories—not to mention having to deal with the whole complexity of the inspiration of the Holy Spirit working through Scripture. True, stories may help us remember lessons better than lists, but they take up a lot of time doing so and often leave way too much room for disagreement and misinterpretation.
For example, while the main lesson of this Gospel appears to be about a particular evil—Jesus explicitly says, “Be on your guard against all kinds of greed”—it wouldn’t be hard to come to a conclusion that would send any financial planners in the room into palpitations. Since it looks like God kills the farmer for amassing a great retirement, you could easily argue that the passage is saying “don’t make any provision for the future—just trust God.” The verses following our passage—“consider the lilies of the field” and the like—even appear to emphasize that point. Yet the Bible elsewhere talks about the wisdom of preparing for difficult times, so don’t rush out of here and liquidate all your investments just yet.
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As I was studying this Gospel, I came across two interesting things in the way the parable is worded. The first has to do with the “goods” the farmer is planning to store in his new barns. We read,
“I will do this: I will pull down my barns and build larger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods. And I will say to my soul, ‘Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.’”
The Greek word behind “goods” here is agatha. Other versions of the Bible sometimes translate it as “good things.” However, in nearly every other use of agatha or its related forms, which collectively appear more than one hundred times in the New Testament, the word isn’t just a descriptor of a commodity, like the English words “goods” or “good things” suggest. It nearly always carries a moral implication of “good” or “goodness.” In fact, in the Gospel of John, the exact same form of the word is translated simply as “good”—as in “those who have done good [rise] to the resurrection of life.”[1] The same is true in Romans, where it appears as “And why not say (as some people slander us by saying that we say), ‘Let us do evil so that good may come.’”[2] So it wouldn’t necessarily push our text too much to read it as,
“I will do this: I will pull down my barns and build larger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goodness. And I will say to my soul, ‘Soul, you have ample goodness laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.’”
I’ve been thinking about this a lot, and although I suspect the phrasing is important, it’s still a tricky concept for me. In English, we don’t really think about storing up “goodness.” I know how to store physical objects, but packing away moral concepts is a little beyond me. My best understandings come down to two options.
First is that the “goodness” is something of a moral synonym for the “grain.” Ancient Greco-Roman society was far more communal than our modern individualistic patterns of living and thinking. We consider groups to be made up of individual people who function according to their own purpose that may or may not benefit any group to which they subscribe as a member. Individuals choose whether or not to support groups. Ancient society thought of groups as their primary identity, defining the purpose and function of the persons within them. The group one belonged to determined the purpose and value of the individual. Because of this interdependence, those with plenty were expected to share with others of the group who were in need, either directly or through community festivals. You can see this kind of thinking at play among the first believers in the book of Acts.[3] Jesus may be emphasizing that the farmer’s self-focus and resource guarding—note all the appearances of “I,” “I,” “I” and “my,” “my,” “my”—is blocking the moral good of the community. By hoarding the grain, the farmer is also hiding all the “goodness” God has provided that rightly belongs to the people who surround him.
My other thought is that the “goodness” may be more akin to “good deeds” (which is another way the NRSV translates agatha) than to physical objects. In Christian history this may be like the Medieval European philosophy of “storing up merit” or even buying and selling indulgences. Perhaps the farmer already has shared the bounty with his community, fulfilling all societal obligations, yet he still has a huge amount of grain left over. In that case, he may be thinking that he’s amassed all the goodness or merit that he’ll ever need, so rather than helping others when new situations arise, he can just coast, looking out only for himself the rest of his life. It would be like us giving a charitable donation in the morning, but when someone else needs a different kind of help that afternoon, we pass by, saying to ourselves, “I’ve already done my good deed for the day.” In such instances, we actually are turning goodness into a commodity, something to treat as a scarce resource rather than as the outgrowth of the abundant, ever-renewing kindness of God. The Hebrew prophets warn against that kind of thinking, saying that in God’s eyes, evil actions in the present wipe out any good deeds from the past while a life of repentant goodness in the present overwrites a history of evil.[4] God doesn’t necessarily consider your nature to be what you have done so much as what you are doing.
Like I said, “storing up goodness” is hard to understand in English-language thought. There are undoubtedly more and better explanations than these. I’d be happy to hear from you if you have additional ideas so we can all grow together.
The second unusual phrasing from the passage appears when God speaks:
“You fool! This very night your life is being demanded of you. And the things you have prepared, whose will they be?”
First off, God isn’t necessarily calling the man a “fool” so much as declaring that his actions are “senseless” or “pointless.” But the interesting part is who—or what—is demanding the farmer’s life. We assume that because God is speaking, God is taking action here. However, the Greek phrasing suggests God is simply stating the situation to the man. The farmer may or may not be about to die. We assume that he is, but the text doesn’t actually say it. Whether or not the man’s death is impending, God is warning him that if he doesn’t turn fast, the “things [he has] prepared” are about to consume his soul!
Just as we’ve seen in previous weeks, Jesus may not be wanting us to apply a simple moral from his parable.He’s trying to help us dig deeper than the surface lesson.We saw that the story of the Good Samaritan calls us not only to “be kind” but to follow Jesus into the role and position of the powerless.The tale of Mary and Martha taught us more than “don’t complain.”It showed us the importance of mindfulness, of focusing on accomplishing the good work God has set in front of us.Likewise, the parable of the rich farmer isn’t simply saying, “don’t be greedy.”Jesus appears to be pointing us beyond the greed to the root behind it—a selfish form of attachment.“What are the things you own to you?” he seems to ask.“Are they possessions or possessors?Your heart truly lies with your deepest desires.Will you follow your desire for God into the pathways of life, or will you let your desire for your things pull you into a living hell?”
[1] John 5:29 (NRSV)
[2] Romans 3:8 (NRSV)
[3] Acts 4:32-37
[4] Ezekiel 3:17-21; 18:20-28