When you have more than you need, build a longer table, not a higher fence…
This is, in essence, the message of Jesus’s teaching in today’s Gospel reading. Store up treasure in hdeaven, not here on earth. Be rich towards God, not rich in possessions. There is more to life than simply being able to rest on our laurels, eating, drinking, and making merry. And keeping our possessions to ourselves, guarding them in barns or behind fences, makes no sense when we remember that human lives are short and the future unknowable.
This is, you might think, a strange passage to be set for a Harvest Festival, when we remember and celebrate specifically the fact that ‘all is safely gathered in’ – in barns, presumably – ‘ere the winter storms begin’. But it is not the building of barns in itself that Jesus finds so objectionable, nor the gathering in of the good gifts that God gives us at Harvest time. No, the clue to the meaning of Jesus’s parable is in the second half of the reading, where Jesus turns to his disciples to explain that barns are not the problem, but, rather, the fences that we put up in our own hearts.
One of the really interesting things about this passage is the way that it associates greed with worry. Nowadays, we tend to see worry, anxiety, as something psychological, whereas we see greed as something much more physical. (‘Another helping of Ryan’s delicious crumble after my Harvest Lunch? Don’t mind if I do…’) But in fact, Jesus makes the point very clearly that greed and worry are connected, because they both involve self-reliance, rather than a reliance on God. They both involve putting ourselves at the centre of everything, assuming that our lives, our futures, our well-being, our sense of fulfilment depend wholly on us…
An extreme version of this perspective is voiced by the character of Gordon Gekko in the 1987 film, Wall Street, when he notoriously asserts that ‘greed […] is good’. The film, of course, shows the dangers, as well as the attractions, of that very ‘Eighties’ love of excess… and Gekko’s speech, as it goes on, helps us to understand the connection that Jesus is making here between greed, worry and – ultimately – selfish egoism.
‘Greed is good’, Gekko asserts, ‘Greed is right. Greed works. […] Greed, in all its forms – greed for life, for money, for love, for knowledge – has marked the upward surge of [hu]mankind’. And of course he’s right on one level: the human desire to know has led to many of those things that we see as our greatest achievements: the exploration of unknown lands, the industrial revolution, space travel and much more… But we also know that, as these achievements brought prosperity to some, they also brought displacement, slavery, oppression, poverty and illness to others and climate disaster to our world.
From this perspective, it’s clear that greed for knowledge brings with it a self-reliance that easily – perhaps inevitably – tips over into self-centredness. We human beings find it so easy to rely entirely on our own knowledge, to think that we know best, to sideline God or to bypass God altogether in our great self-confidence, our belief in what Gekko calls the ‘upward surge’ of humankind. And it might be tempting to see this particularly as a feature of modern, western, capitalist societies – the kind that Wall Street examines with a mixture of admiration and horror.
But, if we read our Bibles, we will know that this is a story as old as time. It is, in fact, the story of God’s relationship with humanity from the very beginning. When Adam and Eve eat the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge, it is because they have been promised that it will make them ‘like gods’, that they will no longer need to be reliant on God to provide for them, that their own knowledge will be all they need. Greed – greed for knowledge much more than for delicious fruit – makes us think that, like Adam and Eve, we can be ‘like gods’. And that is a very dangerous thing.
Greed makes gods of our own desires, our own knowledge, our own achievements, our belief that we can manage our own ‘upward surge’ in our own strength. Greed ultimately teaches us not only to sideline God, but also to sideline one-another… As I have suggested, the ‘upward surge’ of human progress always has casualties: indigenous peoples, exploited workers, the very planet which is our home. And the context in which Jesus has this conversation with his disciples makes this very clear. Greed is about putting ourselves first, but it is not a purely personal sin – it has consequences – serious ones – for others too.
Jesus tells the story of the rich man and the bigger barn in response to a question. Two brothers, locked in a dispute over money, have come to him for advice. ‘Teacher’, one of them says, ‘tell my brother to divide the family inheritance with me’. But Jesus refuses. ‘Who set me to be a judge or arbitrator over you?’, he asks. It’s a strange question, because surely the Gospels tell us that God has sent Jesus precisely to be a judge: sheep and goats, wheat and chaff, and all that… But his point is that God has not sent him to be a judge on matters of earthly possessions, and nor has God sent him to make judgements that will divide brother against brother, privileging one over another.
This context also helps us to make sense of the apparent contrast between our Gospel reading, with its injunction against building bigger barns, and our first reading, from the book of Deuteronomy, in which Moses, on the threshold of the Promised Land assures God’s people that, if only they keep God’s commandments, God will bless them richly, so that they ‘abound in prosperity’, and specifically that God will ‘command the blessing upon [them] in [their] barns’.
The key difference between the prosperity that Moses envisions here and that enjoyed by the rich man in Jesus’s story is that the prosperity of the Promised Land is a prosperity to be shared by the whole people of God. The ‘you’ in our first reading is plural. The whole community is to benefit from and rejoice in God’s abundance and generosity, poured out for all. The rich man in the story, in contrast, thinks only of himself, speaks only of my crops, my barns, my grain, my goods…’. There is no community in this story; the land-owner’s joy at his abundant harvest is not shared with a wife or children or brothers or with his broader community, but only internally in conversation with his own soul, his own inner voice.
Jesus’s story is a great illustration of the way that greed makes us self-centred. It makes us builders of barns designed to keep others – yes, even our own brothers – on the outside, as if our ‘upward surge’ depended on their downfall. Maybe in the world of economics that is true, but in the topsy-turvy kingdom of God the opposite is the case. ‘Do not keep striving for what you are to eat and what you are to drink, and do not keep worrying. For it is the nations of the world that strive after all these things, and your Father knows that you need them. Instead, strive for his kingdom, and all these things will be given to you as well’.
To strive for the kingdom of God means to reject the human desire to build barns to keep others out. It means building longer tables – yes, tables like the ones at which we will sit to share our Harvest lunch – rather than higher fences. It means, at the most fundamental level, looking at those around us and seeing them as our sisters and brothers, over and above our fear that they might encroach on the harvest that we see as rightfully ours.
And this is not just a parable about food and barns. It’s a parable about every single thing we do that threatens to divide brother against brother, sister against sister. It’s a parable that is hugely relevant for today’s society – and, yes, sadly also for today’s church, when we are so quick to put up fences and lock those things which are precious to us in barns so that no-one can question them, let alone threaten them. In this context, ‘don’t worry’ can sound like a platitude. But when Jesus says it, is anything but. On the contrary, it’s a challenge: a challenge to live differently, to let go of ego, to trust in the God who provides for us, and to love our neighbours as ourselves. This, then, is Jesus’s Harvest message to us today: don’t worry; live, love, share the good gifts sent from heaven above. And dare to build longer tables, not higher fences.