Take care, and be on your guard against all covetousness, for one's life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions.
Jesus of Nazareth
This is the first of some additional Reflections I’m inserting into the running order I posted on 12 February. This one is about an incident recorded in Luke 12:13-15 that I hadn’t really began to appreciate until a few weeks ago, even though I’ve been thinking about these issues for nearly 20 years! It’s another reminder to me not only that there’s always more, very much more, for us to discover in the Bible but that we can overlook some very obvious things!
The warning at the start of this Reflection is, I think, one that most readers would accept as being right and necessary in a very general sort of way. But when we realise the context in which Jesus gave it, it suddenly becomes unsettling and challenging.
Some Pharisees had accused Jesus of being in league with the devil! Then one of them invited him to dinner. Possibly exhausted, or perhaps because there were so many people around, Jesus reclined at the table without first washing his feet. This astonished the host. Jesus used the opportunity to compare ritual cleanliness with authentic righteousness but this insulted one of the other guests. It seems that Jesus left without eating anything. By this time, a crowd of many thousands had gathered and the situation was getting dangerous: ‘they were trampling one another’! Then, from the crowd, a man shouted, ‘Teacher, tell my brother to divide the inheritance with me’.
The question captured everyone’s attention! Amidst the pandemonium, Jesus had the opportunity to answer. But before we hear his response, we need to pause to consider the man’s problem.
In Israel at the time, a father whose eldest child was a son was expected to leave that son a double portion of his estate: that is, twice as much as each of his younger brothers. In this case, which seems to have involved just two brothers, the elder brother would have received two-thirds of their father’s estate and the younger one third. We don’t have enough information to know whether the man who appealed to Jesus had been disinherited entirely or wanted Jesus to apply a better standard of fairness than the law, giving him half of the estate. Either way, Jesus’ reply was stunning!
‘Man, who made me a judge or arbitrator over you?’ Jesus replied. ‘Take care, and be on your guard against all covetousness, for one's life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions’. Not only was Jesus declaring himself to be above that sort of quarrel, what startles me is how low Jesus set the criteria for covetousness. Very low indeed. Whether the man thought that he wanted justice or fairness, Jesus called it covetousness!
What, then, does Jesus think when we ask him for things? We know that when there is genuine need, we can rely on God to provide it. On this occasion, Jesus went on to repeat what he’d said in the Sermon on the Mount about how God looks after people better than birds and flowers. But what does he think when we want a ‘fair share’ that we don’t actually need or compensation for an injustice that hasn’t disadvantaged us to the point hardship?
As I thought about this incident, I began to see for the first time why St Paul admitted that, living as a wealthy Pharisee, if it were not for the Torah (the Old Testament ‘Law’) he would not have known what sin is and, in particular, the sin of coveting. What about us? Look again at your record of the things you’ve spent your money on in the past four or five weeks. (If this is new to you, see the Reflections posted on 28 March about tracking your spending for a month and the explanations I gave in the following weeks about what to do with the information.) Look at what you’ve put under ‘survival costs’? Are all the things listed there really essential or so very important?
Please know that I’m not trying to criticise your spending choices. I’m not saying that you shouldn’t have spent that money but only asking you to be clear about why you spent it as you did. To what extent are we all conditioned by the consumer society to think that life consists in possessing things? We may not be as extravagant as our neighbours and work colleagues but Paul had to look away from the norms of the circle of Pharisees he lived and worked among, to the standard set by the Scriptures. I expect he reflected on the tragedy of ‘religious’ men like Balaam and Gehazi..
Might we have become acclimatised to lots of things around us and unconsciously rely on them to help us feel secure, relax or happy? According to Jesus, people's lives do not consist in acquiring possessions: they neither define success nor afford status. In fact, quite the opposite is the preferred way for Jesus followers. He said that it's more blessed to give than to receive so that who we are and our level of spirituality is defined not by what we accumulate but what we give. I plan to reflect on this next weekend.
© All Souls Clubhouse Community Centre & Church and Philip Evans 2014.
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