August 1, 2010 | 8:00 a.m.

Questioning the Terms of Judgment

Joyce Shin
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 78:1–8
Luke 12:13–21

“Friend, who set me to be a judge or arbitrator over you?”

Luke 12:14 (NRSV)

Guard me against the arrogance of privilege,
against the indulgence of feeling
that I don’t have enough,
and the poverty of spirit that
refuses to acknowledge what is daily given me.
Keep me truthful in knowing where I spend,
where my values actually are.

Gunilla Norris
From “Paying Bills”

In this story from Luke’s Gospel, Jesus has been speaking intensely to a large crowd of people, and from that crowd a man shouts out to Jesus, “Teacher, tell my brother to divide the family inheritance with me.” The issue has very little to do with what Jesus had been talking to the crowd about, and at first hearing it seems that Jesus is going to dismiss the interruption by saying, “Friend, who set me to be a judge or arbitrator over you?” Instead of a dismissal of the interruption, however, Jesus’ response invites listeners to spend some time thinking in new ways about their attitudes toward property and material possessions.

Perhaps the man in the crowd had detected in Jesus a spirit of fairness that would qualify Jesus to settle the dispute between the man and his brother. From what the man says, however, it is clear that he already has a strong opinion about what the just outcome to the dispute should be, and he expects Jesus to take his side, not his brother’s. “Tell my brother to divide the family inheritance with me,” he says to Jesus.

Not only does Jesus refuse to take the man’s side against his brother, but in this case, he refuses to take any side, saying, “Who set me to be a judge or arbitrator over you?” In this case, on these terms, Jesus will not arbitrate, for he perceives the whole dispute to be a matter of greed. Both sides, he suspects, are motivated by greed. Rather than affirming one kind of greed over another, Jesus challenges the terms of judgment.

“Take care!” Jesus says. “Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; for one’s life does not consist in the abundance of possessions.” Here we see Jesus challenging his listeners to question their measuring and treasuring of material possessions in the first place. To make his argument, Jesus could have explained that the real intent behind the inheritance laws laid down in Deuteronomy (21:15–17) and Numbers (27:1–11 and 36:7–9) was not to arbitrate between two greedy parties, but to protect the vulnerable, or Jesus could have invoked the words of the prophets Isaiah (5:8) or Micah (2:1–2) to convict the man of the sin of greed. But he did not. Instead Jesus offered a parable.

In a commentary on the Gospel of Luke, biblical scholar Fred Craddock points out that Jesus employed parables more than any other pedagogical method (Interpretation, p. 107). In fact, Jesus rarely spoke to crowds without using a parable. A parable was not simply a story that served to illustrate or elaborate a lesson, but it was also designed to tease listeners to think in new, maybe even strange, ways. Rather than invoking the law to tell us what to do or the prophets to tell us what to think, Jesus uses parables to engage people in thinking for themselves.

In this parable, Jesus speaks about a man who, having become wealthy, comes up with a plan to conserve and care for his wealth. Imagining how his wealth will be ensured, the man is satisfied and says, “Oh my soul, you will have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.” Who among us does not wish for the assurance that at some point in life we too might have enough fortune to relax, eat, drink, and be merry? In the parable, the rich man has not done anything wrong. He is not wicked or unjust. He has not mistreated anyone or committed a crime. He is careful and conservative. And yet the parable is clearly critical of the wealthy man.

In this parable, the rich man is called a fool, and he is portrayed as such. He is portrayed as one who lives for himself, plans for himself, talks to himself, and congratulates himself. A fool, I suppose, is someone who fails to recognize when he is being ignorant. In this case, the rich man obviously thinks that he has ensured for himself all he needs to be happy, all he needs to live a good life. “Soul,” he says, “you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.”

“Eat, drink, and be merry.” This is a familiar proverbial expression of hedonism, an ancient school of thought and way of life based on a doctrine that pleasure or happiness is the sole or chief good in life. The whole proverb usually went something like “Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die.” Somehow, the last part of the proverb, “for tomorrow we die,” often gets dropped.

If we listen carefully to the parable Jesus told, we find that the rich man too left out the last half of the proverb, and therein lies the crux of the problem. Upon hearing the rich man’s outlook on life, God calls out, “You fool! This very night your life is being demanded of you.” So significant is it that our outlook on life not only includes, but is shaped by the profound recognition that life and death ultimately come from God, that God supplies the second half of the parable that the rich man foolishly left out.

God calls the man a fool who thinks that, by securing the material goods he needs to live, he has secured his life. Failing to recognize that life is from God, the man focuses on material possessions as if they are what matter most. Interpreting this parable, we might be tempted to conclude that the problem identified in the parable is a problem of materialism. Relating to the man in the parable, we might conclude that we too hold material possessions as our greatest treasure and as a result we are spiritually impoverished.

Framing the problem this way, however, seems not quite right. Pitting spirituality against materialism and elevating spirituality over materialism seems to counter some of our most treasured religious beliefs. In an article recently published in the Christian Century (www.christiancentury.org, 13 July 2010), author Michael Lindvall writes about being a pastor in New York City, a city often associated with crass materialism. “The truth about New York,” he writes, “is more nuanced.” Nevertheless, as a pastor in a city where, he writes, “acquisitiveness can be very large indeed, I have found myself challenged to think more deeply about ‘stuff’ than ever before.” “What I have come to believe,” he says, “is that materialism is not exactly the problem and that being more spiritual is not exactly the answer.” To make his point, Michael Lindvall writes, “Witness the creation story.” If we do so, we see that God doesn’t hate stuff. God not only created the world, but God called all of creation “good.” Next, Lindvall writes, “Witness the nativity story. Incarnation is not about separating the spiritual from the material; it’s about precisely the opposite.” Jesus is born, lives a physical life, and suffers a most material death. To Lindvall’s list, we can add “the resurrection story,” about which the church has always insisted that not only the soul, but the whole body of Jesus Christ was raised from the dead.

These are the treasured stories that make up our faith, and perhaps one of the reasons why they have been so treasured over the centuries is that each of them insists upon upholding and appreciating the material dimension of our lives. Creation, our experience of the material world, the physical body—God values all of it, and God, we believe, is present in all of it.

Perhaps then we would be making a mistake to interpret the parable of the rich man as though it posed the problem as one of materialism versus spiritualism. As Lindvall puts it, perhaps the problem is not that “we like stuff too much; rather it’s that we don’t like it enough.” We don’t like stuff enough to truly appreciate it; to repair it rather than replace it; to restore rather than to discard it. We don’t even appreciate things enough to build them to last; we often hear people, like the repairman who came to fix my parents’ air conditioner last week, say, “Things just aren’t made to last anymore.” Manufacturers call this “planned obsolescence.”

In so many ways, our practices show that we have become less conserving and more careless of our material possessions than the rich man in the parable. At the root of our material carelessness, however, is the same foolishness in outlook as that expressed by the rich man: as we go through life, we fail to recognize that life and everything in it is from God—created by God, blessed by God, and redeemed by God. Everything that exists is of value because God has deemed it good and because God imbues it with value.

In an essay in a book entitled Having, philosophical theologian David Klemm coins a new term, “material grace,” by which he means any object that is appreciated as having priceless value because through it God’s spiritual presence is experienced. Any ordinary thing can become an object of material grace, because “God is present in all of created reality” (Having, p. 235). The term is new, but the notion behind it is not. This is what the church has confessed each time it has celebrated the sacrament of communion. Breaking bread and wine in communion with one another and in the remembered presence of our Lord, we confess that we are sharing ordinary things that Christ makes special.

To behold the divine in the ordinary things of the world is to have a sacramental view of life. A sacramental outlook on life helps us to resist tendencies to pit spirituality over and against materialism. Instead it anchors our spirituality in the material world so that the more spiritual we are, the more we will come to love the material world, the more we will care for creation, the more we will respect humanity, and the more motivated we will be to help God as God continues to redeem the world.