Everett Henes: Wisdom from a fool
As a child, I often wondered why it was that the lottery was so appealing to people. I think their advertising campaign said it all. They would show a person somewhere, looking dreamily at something they wanted. Usually, it was something owned by someone else — a big boat or some other desirable thing. The camera would focus on the item, then on the lottery ticket, and then back to the item. The entire time a song played in the background with only one word in the whole song: “maybe.” The commercial would close out with the slogan: “It’s your dream, live it.” It sold millions of lottery tickets because so many people wanted a chance at being wealthy.
Wealth is wrong in and of itself. Abraham was said to be a wealthy man, and many who had wealth supported Jesus’ own ministry. Those commercials, like so much of the advertising that floods our brains, tapped into desire and jealousy. The Bible calls this coveting. Jesus teaches about this in Luke 12:13-21. What we see in this passage is that coveting is a universal sin that transcends time and culture. Like many other sins, coveting comes natural to mankind. But it remains sin. Those who follow after Christ are called to crucify their old natures and that includes our tendency to covet.
In Luke 12 a man who calls out to him from the crowd, “Teacher, tell my brother to divide the inheritance with me.” There was a family dispute and someone felt that they weren’t getting their due. The problem is that family inheritance isn’t a due. Jesus responds, “Take care, and be on your guard against all covetousness, for one's life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions.”
Jesus uses the phrase “all covetousness.” This can also be translated as “covetousness of every kind.” We can tend to think of coveting only in terms of money, but Jesus makes clear it is not only money and it is not even only material possessions. “Covetousness is an unquenchable thirst for getting more and more of something we think we need in order to be truly satisfied.”
Jesus tells a simple parable to teach his lesson: “The land of a rich man produced plentifully, and he thought to himself, 'What shall I do, for I have nowhere to store my crops?' And he said, 'I will do this: I will tear 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.'
One of the things that jump out is the use of the first-person pronoun. Eleven times we hear the words “I” and “my.” There is no other concern even considered. When the land produces plentifully, this man does not stop to give thanks to God. He does not give the appropriate offerings based on the Old Testament laws. He simply takes it as a simple fact that he has been greatly enriched. The only concern that he seems to have is that he does not have enough room to hold all of his crops.
Jesus says in verse 20, But God said to him, 'Fool! This night your soul is required of you, and the things you have prepared, whose will they be?' This is God’s response to the rich man who believed that everything really belonged to him and that he could do with it as he pleased, and he could live his life as though God did not exist.
The truth of the matter for every single one of us is that our lives do not belong to us. This is true of all of creation — how much more those who are disciples of Jesus.
Jesus ends his parable by saying, “So is the one who lays up treasure for himself and is not rich toward God.” We all have the tendency to view things as ‘ours.’ My money, my time, my talents, mine, mine, mine. … We never really outgrow that ‘mine’ stage of childhood, you could say. This is something that most of us will struggle with and need to be reminded of. Our lives do not belong to us. Our talents are not our own. Our resources are not there so that we can live the life we have always thought we wanted. We are called to live to God, to live for God.
— Pastor Everett Henes, the pastor of the Hillsdale Orthodox Presbyterian Church, can be reached at pastorhenes@gmail.com.
This article originally appeared on Sturgis Journal: Everett Henes: Wisdom from a fool
