But God said to (the man), `You fool! This very night your life is being demanded of you. And the things you have prepared, whose will they be?' So it is with those who store up treasures for themselves but are not rich toward God."
It is unsurprising that Jesus is against human greed. Most people are. Despite the ease with which it is condemned, greed is a multi-headed hydra, existing and reemerging in forms and shapes that conceal its essence behind social, political and economic facades that are not always identifiable as simply as the farmer in today’s gospel. One man’s greed is another man’s responsible investment strategy. Rather than considering the evils of greed, I wish to take a few moments this morning to examine what it might mean to be rich toward God, the very thing the greedy farmer was not.
Before we attend to what it means to be rich toward God, it is worth noting two general arguments that have arisen over the ages that question the involvement of God in the kind of everyday social and economic issues that we face as humans. First, there is the concern that religion in its Christian conception divides human loyalties, placing our longings beyond this world and rejecting the view of human nature as most fundamentally grounded in self-interest for material comfort. In the modern era, the goal, this position holds, is not that of redemption and human perfection by an other-worldly entity, but the domain of productive channeling of the enormous energies of self-interest toward the mastery of the natural world of resources and the internal world of desires and needs. While religiously minded people are considered too heavenly minded to have any earthly good, the modern and enlightened person sees fit to make of this world what they can in order to live comfortably and securely with a minimum of distress. To such a person, society does not require agreement in matters of religion or ‘private morals’ when it comes to concerns around wealth or greed; these belong to the sphere of comment and are relegated first to private judgment and then, as their social irrelevance becomes clearer, to the subjective world of ‘values’.
The second argument against bringing God into the mix of human enterprise is one that has haunted modern atheism since Nietzsche. It has to do with how we understand the way God and humanity relate. The concern is not that God is a cruel and dangerous boss who orders us mere mortals around, demanding that we pray and always give to the poor, but that God is boss at all. A kindly and considerate slave master is still a slave master, and for Nietzsche the relationship of God and creature could not be other than one of master and slave. God and therefore God’s involvement in matters like finances is rejected not in the name of human happiness but in the name of human freedom. Better to rid ourselves of a divine taskmaster and get on with becoming better humans, this position holds, then to live with the illusion that God has our best interests in mind when calling for us to help strangers and give our money to charity. God is an excuse for our failure, Nietzsche and his disciples contend; better that we strive and struggle for human excellence on our own terms.
To summarize the two positions: one, God is what we appeal to as a matter of private belief and personal values without the social significance of say, the marketplace or political policy, and two, our freedom as humans consists in rejecting the divine moral arbitrator of religious belief in favor of a more assertive and presumably, more human human existence. Both are part of our social framework and are appealed to in some form whenever religious fervor threatens to cross over into the actual day-to-day living as political, social and economic animals. I am lingering a bit on these points primarily because of their potency in reducing something like today’s parable to a fairy tale rather than a call for living a certain kind of life. If God is a symbol of our moral weakness, or if we desire to share what we have with others because it earns us points in heaven, then being rich towards God is a lovely metaphor, yet it lacks any coherence - let alone power - to help us live and grow as people.
This is unfortunate, for the message of Jesus is one that promotes a vision of human wellbeing against the paucity of life represented in the genteel farmer and his growing crop yield. Yes, the farmer can eat, drink and be merry, and yes, these things are good things worthy of human endeavor; however, the whole episode displays a serious lack. At the end of the day, nothing in the farmer’s life is received or indeed, shared, as the gift it actually is. From his life to the bumper crops, the farmer has thought that to possess and have is equivalent to a full life. To this, Jesus offers a critique: true richness is a life ordered to God as a generous creator.
What this parable shows us is that we do not live by building ever more secure fences of possessions around ourselves, but by giving to others space to live. This is to give life to others. The human animal and human society flourishes, not to the extent that it possesses riches, but to the extent that we give life to each other, to the extent that we imitate the creativity of God. For God's creative act is an act of God's poverty, for God gains nothing by it. God makes without becoming richer. His act of creation is purely and simply for the benefit of his creatures. We are sometimes tempted to ask what motive God had for making the world - meaning 'What did he hope to gain by it?' But, of course, this question is absurd. It is only creation that gains by God's act. It is a purely gratuitous act of love, that characteristic act of love which is the giving of life.
To be ‘rich towards God’ is shorthand for a learning to pattern our lives on the creativity of God. This is not about some blandly generalized benevolence that on occasion and for tax purposes we extend to individuals and institutions in need. It is always a worthwhile act to give, yet there is a tendency in us to see such giving as a transaction alone. What is missing is the risk associated with opening our lives through our giving. The richness Jesus has in mind is the kind of direction our lives display in opening the barriers associated with securing and defending the goods that are common to us as humans – goods as basic as food and as complicated as justice – not simply to share, but to actually participate in as part of what it means for us to thrive as people. Such goods to be participated in are neither mine-rather-than-others’ nor others’-rather-than-mine, but instead are goods that can only be mine insofar as they are also those of others, that are genuinely common goods, as those defined through giving and receiving. This isn’t the stuff of some idealized utopia or some weird 60’s era commune, but a particular direction for living that is attuned to a sustainable economic and political path that reflects the loving abandon God demonstrates in securing us moment by moment as beloved daughters and sons.
We cannot act, as God does, for no benefit to ourselves. But we can live (either more or less) by the free gift we make to others. It is a question of which direction we are aiming for through our ordinary, everyday living. All this can be summarized by saying that as humans, we live by sharing and participating in mutuality with others, in friendship if you will, and that our location to God is learnt partly through such relationships. It’s a bit platitudinous to claim this, I know, but what I want to make clear is that the process of living in friendship, the tasks associated with making life possible for others through holding as common those things implicit to a thriving human life; all of this is patterned on and a reflection of a God who creates freely with gratuitous love and who has befriended us in Jesus. To live as though such love and friendship is true, is to move beyond the position that holds our religious belief as a private affair, and likewise to shatter the idol of the taskmaster god. It is to be rich toward God; to draw on his grace and participate in his joy without bland benevolence or naïve appeals to simply getting along.
As Jesus’s own life demonstrates, to live with such richness is to challenge the ways and means by which we isolate and inflict violence upon one another. For to be rich toward God is to live more deeply into our humanity as we have received it: as a gift from a gracious God. At the end of the day, it is how we live out of such giftedness that shapes our wellbeing. This path of life may not yield bigger and better barns for what we possess and subsequently have to defend; but it will provide a richness in human living that will satisfy us down to the very fiber of our being.
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