One of the more agreeable aspects of my job in the summer is visiting some of the country estates and farms which we look after. This year I happen to have seen two new grain stores. Both are vast, about the size of this church and capable of storing about ten thousand tonnes of grain, a quantity beyond the dreams of the rich man in Jesus’ parable, enough to feed more than a hundred thousand people for a year. The purpose of these barns is not exactly to hoard grain, although it could be seen that way; there is undoubtedly an element of thinking of the rich man in today’s parable: “Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.” But rather more of prudence and good sense, for which there is good biblical precedent in Joseph’s advice to Pharaoh – to store the product of the seven fat years in readiness for the seven lean. So shouldn’t we think Jesus is, as so often, being a little hard on the rich man? In his way he’s not doing anything very different from what my farmers and we all do – or are obliged to do – in saving for a pension, for example. It seems more like prudence than folly.
The story is an instance of a theme which runs through the Gospels (and most religion). How are we to reconcile the earthy reality of our lives, with our recognition, and longing for the divine? For somewhere where the injustice of this world is put right. We want to feel that there must be something more important, more real, more valuable and permanent than the ephemeral world we inhabit swinging from seemingly pointless pleasure and excess to, for most of our fellow creatures, equally pointless pain and dearth.
One radical answer may be found, superficially at least, in Jesus’ teaching on money and material possessions; “Render under Caesar that which is Caesar’s and unto God that which is God’s” and in the call to abandon family and possessions. In other words, to reject this world and pin your hopes on another, ethereal existence, and one that is perhaps beyond this life. There is a strong strain of Christianity which has taken this literally, for a while, anyway; true asceticism, penury and removal from the world never seems to last very long.
For most Christians, however, and I think much more central to Christianity, the answer lies in the incarnation; we believe in a God who is intimately engaged with the world that he created, to the point of revealing himself as a human being and suffering the ultimate price of being mortal, but at the same time demonstrating his divinity by some very physical miracles, some of which in a strange way echo the pointlessness of excess; there was far too much wine for the guests to drink at Cana in Galilee; there were twelve baskets of scraps left after feeding five thousand; how were most of the 153 fish going to be prevented from rotting?
Maybe I am looking too literally at these signs of the abundance of God’s love, but perhaps too they are in their way saying something similar to the point of the little parable about the rich man and his new barns. That even in the Kingdom, normal rules will apply, because there is a temptation to treat the promise of the Kingdom as something otherworldly. And of course, any talk of striving for the Kingdom here and now is plainly idealistic; the excessive abundance, even the capriciousness of Jesus’ healing miracles (Why only those then and there that get healed?) are perhaps reminders that we must be realistic as well as idealistic; the kingdom is to be built with materials and means that we have and not by magic.
While I think the task is clear, there remains a tension, even a friction in how we deal with the material world, and especially how we should treat wealth. The clue may be in God’s words in the parable: “You fool. This very night your life is being demanded of you; and the things that you have prepared whose will they be? So it is with those who store up treasures for themselves but are not rich towards God.” It is the selfishness, or at least the narrow minded self-centredness, of the rich man that is the problem. He has not connected his own existence with that of his neighbours in time or space.
This too seems to be the point of the apparently rather depressing passage from Ecclesiastes; the world is vain because man’s efforts are likely to be fruitless; his achievements may be enjoyed by those unworthy of them; “Who know whether (those that come after me) will be wise or foolish?” And “Sometimes one who has toiled with wisdom and knowledge and skill must leave all to be enjoyed by those who did not toil for it.” The essence of this vanity is that man’s efforts are concentrated on his own enjoyment; his achievements are insular and ephemeral and ultimately pointless unless they are put in the proper context of creation, that is as part of the ongoing and universal force of God’s creative love.
St Paul is making a similar point when he speaks of the Christian as being clothed in a new self, “renewed in knowledge according to the image our creator.” Paul is not so concerned with wealth, or achievements as the enslavement to earthly desires and bodily passions. As he urges us to be dead to that life of enslavement, we shall find a new freedom in being who we are meant to be. It is in identifying our physical existence with our creator, by becoming Christ-like, that our work, our possessions, our relations and our whole existence will no longer be folly, or vanity but begin to have meaning.
But it won’t be somewhere else; it will be in this world and will be subject to all the messiness and mistakes that entails, as while we may be capable of being Christ-like and capable of being part of his creative and loving force, it will still be human minds and hands that we have as tools. We shouldn’t be dismayed at that; I have suggested Jesus’ miracles although magical were nevertheless fixed in a physical world, the laws of which were only momentarily suspended. We can work with those laws, and our success in building the Kingdom will depend on the extent to which we identify our work with that of Creator; if we are self centred, greedy or narrow minded then our efforts will be folly and we will indeed have filled our barns with wheat to no lasting or meaningful purpose. Amen.