Losing Your Lolly

Alistair Jones O.P.

5 August 2007
Eighteenth Sunday of the Year (C)

fr Alistair Jones preaches on the disabling power of the love of money.

This gospel, like so many others, revolves around money and property. It is not surprising that the subject comes up so often, given how much of a part of life these things are. Often Jesus himself raises the subject of our need and desire for money, but on this occasion he responds to a demand made of him.

The man in the crowd who shouts to Jesus has become embroiled in a family dispute about inheritance. From the little that is said, it sounds like one of those typically acrimonious quarrels among siblings about who will get their parents' money. This man has become pretty absorbed in the dispute -- you notice it is the very first topic he considers worth raising with Jesus.

He may have good reasons for his absorption. Reading between the lines, he is a younger brother and he has got a rough deal. The elder brother would have received most of what was left by the parents - as was the norm in Jewish inheritance law - and now this elder brother is refusing to part even with the much smaller share owing to his sibling. So the man who addresses Jesus has not only missed out on the inheritance of an elder child, he has been cheated out of what is legally his. No wonder he protests.

Jesus takes issue with none of this. In some ways, he sounds sympathetic to this defrauded sibling. He addresses him in familiar terms (he calls him by an expression that could be translated 'friend'). At the same time, the whole question of the inheritance is firmly put to one side; it is resolved neither one way nor another. Instead, Jesus draws attention to something else. Here, as so often in the Gospels, Jesus's responses do not quite fit into the space bracketed out for them by the people who ask the questions. Like any good teacher, Jesus tends to want to move people on.

Here what he addresses is not the particular case, the injustice of the elder brother: instead, he speaks about the effects that certain kinds of preoccupation with money can have on who a person is. Jesus is responding not so much to the complaint of the cheated brother -- or to the thousands of cases like it -- as to what he hears beneath these complaints. What he cares about for the time being is not this case but something more fundamental, which is what our possessiveness does to us.

'Take care and keep yourselves from all greed'. It is not hard to see some of the reasons for this warning. In the case of the defrauded sibling, attachment to the inheritance has already brought division and mistrust between the brothers. Greed has led the older brother to cheat his younger (and so more vulnerable) blood relative. The younger sibling is tormented by the injustice done him. In the light of all this, a warning against 'greed' seems very much to the point. But Jesus gently goes further in revealing the mechanisms that lead people to hoard.

In the parable, the landowner's absorption in 'free enterprise' also has quietly had very destructive effects. So intent is this successful businessman on being comfortable that he loses sight of other more important things. His world is a strangely egotistical one: you notice he speaks only to himself and of himself, neither to God nor to his friends. He tries to carve out a little corner of happiness for himself -- a temptation to all of us -- but that in a way makes him blind. This landowner has put his trust in his financial well-being: by so doing, he has destroyed his capacity for more the fundamental kind of trust which is faith.

He has become so absorbed in his grandiose projects for the preservation of his wealth (tearing down barns and building bigger ones), he has given so much energy to these plans, that he shows no signs at all of having time to recognise the wiser and more benevolent project at work in the universe as a whole. He thinks he is safe and never considers that his only real safety is with the one who loves the whole world infinitely and unpossessively.

What this man has done is the very opposite of what Jesus again and again tries to teach people to do. Instead of trying to create happiness for themselves by storing up their good gifts -- a tempting impossibility - they are to give themselves away. They are to be generous, extraordinarily generous, they are to give away all they can. In that way they are to know and love and become like their Father, who gives endlessly and without demanding anything in return.

fr. Alistair Jones was ordained to the diaconate on 2nd July, and has since been reassigned to the Priory of St Dominic, London.

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© Text 2007 Alistair Jones O.P.
© Web Presentation 2008 The English Province of the Order of Preachers
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