Stepping Back – Luke 12:13-21

A text – Luke 12:13-21

¹³ Someone in the crowd said to him, “Teacher, tell my brother to divide the family inheritance with me.” ¹⁴ But he said to him, “Friend, who set me to be a judge or arbitrator over you?” ¹⁵ And he said to them, “Take care! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed, for one’s life does not consist in the abundance of possessions.” ¹⁶ Then he told them a parable: “The land of a rich man produced abundantly. ¹⁷ And he thought to himself, ‘What should I do, for I have no place to store my crops?’ ¹⁸ Then he said, ‘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. ¹⁹ And I will say to my soul, Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.’ ²⁰ But 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?’ ²¹ So it is with those who store up treasures for themselves but are not rich toward God.”

A reflection:

Have you ever wondered why Jesus taught so often in parables that even his disciples had trouble applying to the questions he was getting? Well, you are not alone. I have wondered this, too, especially when the parables have been so often interpreted in many different ways to mean many different things. First, I believe parables keep Jesus from getting too specific; humans would turn a heaven-sent answer into a forever law we would always be trying to obey no matter how inhumane the resulting obedience would become. If he had answered directly, he would have created merely a new set of laws and turned us Christians into Pharisees dedicated to upholding each one and punishing everyone else who didn’t follow them to the letter. Notice at the start of today’s Gospel text, he’s being asked to weigh in on a family dispute. That is not why Jesus lived on Earth with us.

Second, Jesus takes an ordinary situation or question or even dispute, steps back from it to see the deeper problem in which the dispute lies, and addresses that deeper problem from just one point of view: how do we love God with all our heart and our neighbor as ourselves as we consider this dispute/situation/question. Jesus in his earthly ministry gets to speak in earthly language God’s words, warnings, and delight in human beings. Jesus gets to talk with us as part of the Triune God, our Creator, Savior, and Sanctifier. Jesus is always pointing us to our relationship with God and our relationships with one another.

When people try to understand the parables of Jesus, I believe they have to visualize Jesus refusing to arbitrate a single situation and rather stepping back to highlight the bigger matter at stake in the question, and then visualize him painting a picture of who God is and a picture of who we are. Sometimes the parables show us something good to aspire to. Sometimes they show us something fearsome to avoid. But they are like a wise parent, placing our wandering attention on God and God’s desires for us. In this text, he seems to be saying that riches are fine as long as we are living daily in relationship to God and our neighbor, not just building more places to store our riches. After all, he is saying, riches are temporary even if we wish they weren’t. Instead, our deeper, permanent wealth is in God’s love, and leaving the particular disputes aside and concentrating on what really matters is what we are called to do.

A prayer:

Lord God, thank you for loving us. Thank you for giving us Jesus, who taught not by taking a side on a fleeting question but by trying to teach us the bigger picture so that we could see God’s point of view about so many things. Help us to remember to step back when we are ensnared by the little details and look at our greater calling from God. Amen.