How to make yourself miserable

Someone in the crowd said to him, “Teacher, tell my brother to divide the inheritance with me.”  Jesus replied, “Man, who appointed me a judge or an arbiter between you?” Then he said to them, “Watch out! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; life does not consist in an abundance of possessions.”

And he told them this parable: “The ground of a certain rich man yielded an abundant harvest. He thought to himself, ‘What shall I do? I have no place to store my crops.’  “Then he said, ‘This is what I’ll do. I will tear down my barns and build bigger ones, and there I will store my surplus grain. And I’ll say to myself, “You have plenty of grain laid up for many years. Take life easy; eat, drink and be merry.”’  “But God said to him, ‘You fool! This very night your life will be demanded from you. Then who will get what you have prepared for yourself?’ “This is how it will be with whoever stores up things for themselves but is not rich toward God.” Luke 12:13-21

What words might you use to describe the rich man in Jesus’ story? Greedy? Yes. Short-sighted? Yes. Self-centred? Yes. Foolish? Certainly; that is the word Jesus himself uses, and he pulls no punches: “You fool…!”.

Such words sound a warning to us about the peril of putting all our eggs in an earthly basket, so to speak. This short earthly life is not all that there is, and it is wise to live each and every day in the light of  that fact. Who knows? - this very day our lives may be “demanded from us”! That day will come!

The tenth commandment (Exodus 20:17) tells us not to “covet”, not to lust after what belongs to others. It’s a word very closely related to greed. And it’s a negative command – something not to do. Paul, writing to the Christians of Philippi, puts the same truth more positively. He thanks them for their generosity of spirit towards him, but tells them not to worry too much about him. Why not? Because “I have learned to be content” (Philippians 4:12). That word “learned” is important, for it suggests that it didn’t come quickly or easily.

Contentment, I suspect, almost always needs to be learned, and sometimes we only learn things the hard way – but blessed indeed is the man or woman who has reached that settled state of mind! (I read a book once, dating, I think, from the eighteenth century, called “The rare jewel of Christian contentment”; I remember now nothing of its content, but the title has stuck with me as rather beautiful… and rather sad.)

These warnings against greed and self-absorption are the lessons which jump out at us from this short story. I must have read it hundreds of times, and imagined I had nothing new to learn. But the Bible has a way of yielding up new truths we have previously not noticed, and that happened to me just this week…

I was browsing through a commentary on Luke, and the writer drew attention to a very simple fact it’s easy to miss: the man in the story was lonely. Or, if not actually lonely, certainly solitary. Reading the story again, I was struck with how he seems to exist purely in the bubble of his own little existence.

He’s got a big decision to make: what to do with all the surplus crops his fields have produced. And Jesus says that in order to resolve this question he conducts a discussion in his own mind: “What shall I do...?... I’ll say to myself…” (verses 17-19).

The commentator I was reading describes this as “very sad”, because in the world of Jesus’ day villages were extremely close-knit, almost like extended families, and such decisions would normally be talked over at great length. But the man in the story has no one to talk to – or perhaps simply chooses not to talk to anyone. He reminds me of Charles Dickens’ Ebenezer Scrooge in his story A Christmas Carol: so fixated on his wealth that he has become reduced to a miserable husk of a human being.

Some people, of course, are happy with their solitude. I spoke to a friend recently who had spent Christmas Day on his own – “and that’s how I like it”, he said. Fair enough: I have no reason to doubt what he said, but I wouldn’t know him at all if he didn’t take the time and trouble to mix with others, and good company he is too. But the fact is that we human beings are social creatures: when God says (Genesis 2:18) that “It is not good for the man to be alone” I don’t think he is talking only about wives!

Misers (surprise, surprise) tend to be miserable. Of course, we all like to be comfortable, and little treats and luxuries are nowhere deplored in the Bible, nor is sensible “me-time”. But once we make them the be-all and end-all we are in serious trouble.

As the man in the story demonstrates, we shrivel as people: his internal conversation makes that clear - it’s all about my crops, my barns, my surplus grain. But what about his servants, who no doubt did the donkey-work? What about his family? his neighbours? He thinks he will spend the rest of his life “eating, drinking and being merry”. But does he in fact have anybody to eat, drink and be merry with? Or, has he, like Ebenezer Scrooge, alienated them all?

Augustine, the bishop of Hippo in north Africa (354-430), wrote these splendid words about the rich fool: “He did not realise that the bellies of the poor were much safer storerooms than his barns”.

Worth thinking about! But it must be right to leave the final word with Jesus: “It is more blessed to give than to receive” (Acts 20:35).

Do we believe that? Really believe it?

Dear Father, please forgive my me-centred self-obsession, and please release me from it. Bring me to a point in my life when I can say cheerfully with Paul that I have learned to be content. Amen.