27 - Chapter 27
CHAPTER XXVII THE RICH FOOL
DIVES and Lazarus taught us that a citizen of the Kingdom cannot see a neighbour starve while he himself has plenty; from the Good Samaritan we learned that every needy person whom we encounter, or whom we ought to encounter, is a call for help that extends far beyond the region of finance. The Rich Fool is more fundamental still, and invites us to consider the relation between a man and his possessions. A number of the parables are concerned with dilemmas and their solution. In the Darnel among the Wheat, the farmer’s men wondered whether they could uproot the darnel without hurting the wheat. The Midnight Petitioner was at a loss how to provide a meal for his unexpected guest; the Importunate Widow how to get justice against her oppressor. The gardener’s problem was to get another chance for his Unfruitful Fig-tree. The Unjust Steward had to consider ways and means of getting a livelihood when he lost his appointment. The Rich Landlord’s Dilemma was of a different kind. His trouble was an embarrassment of riches, a problem with which the scientific progress of our day has made us painfully familiar. Our fields bring forth so plentifully that some of our farmers find it profitable to use their grain as fuel. Our mills and factories bring forth so plentifully that we cannot sell our product; so we dismiss our workmen and leave them to starve or to be supported by the State. As in our own case, the rich landlord’s problem was one not of production but of distribution, how to dispose of his bumper harvest. This landlord was a man with definite ideals.
Like the heroes of other parables, he held a consultation with himself, with the result that we have come to expect. One point on which he was quite clear was that the only person who was to benefit from his fine harvest was himself.
Joseph stored up the surplus of the good years to feed the people of his own country and other countries in later years. This man stored up the surplus of the good year to feed himself in later years. The first result of his prosperity was a work of destruction. The barns that had served his father, and served himself in simpler days, had to come down. Business men have sometimes to “ scrap “ their machinery and tools, their buildings and means of transport, as a sacrifice to the more efficient methods of a new age; but this farmer had no new methods in view. The new barns that were to replace the old were no better than their predecessors, only bigger; for this man was a believer in SIZE; he would be at home among those in our age who believe that an increase in size is a sign of progress and well-being. This farmer had other ideals even more modern. He wanted to insure his future.
’ Faith in God ’ ’ he seems to say ’ is all very well; but a well-filled barn, a large holding in gilt-edged securities, is much better.” He was of those who regard work as a disagreeable necessity. He will retire at the first possible moment; not to devote himself to the pursuit of knowledge, the cultivation of those sides of his nature which the farmer is apt to neglect, or to the public welfare in any shape or form.
He wants good meals and plenty of time to eat them, and to “have a good time.”
Throughout he proceeds on the assumption that his surplus crops are his to dispose of as he wills. He would have been helpless without his farm-labourers, the men from whom he bought and to whom he sold, the men who made his tools, the officials who guarded his property, the men who taught him his trade and ten thousand others. The law said the surplus was his and for him that was final. In the end he became generous in spite of himself; the contents of his over-flowing barns went to feed the others he had forgotten. In the rich fool’s philosophy, the centre of the universe is himself and the central reality of himself is his body. When his body is provided for, no other provision is necessary.
He had insured against every contingency in life save one, the only one that would certainly happen. He had used the goodness of God to try to dispense with God. “ Suddenly,” says Jesus, ’ God entered his life.” There are people who tell us that they are not religious, and who seem to think that their decision to dispense with God has settled some question. But the man who steps over a cliff will be killed whether he believes in the law of gravity or not; and God will have something to say to us whether we have anything to say to God or not.
We may be sure that Jesus was not using the thought of death to frighten people into a sensible way of life. As in Dives and Lazarus, Death is here the great Revealer, the Remembrancer that leads the blind to discover truths which those who have eyes can see without waiting for death. The seeing know that their big barns are no part of themselves; only when death came did the rich landlord find it out.
It needs an effort beyond that of which most of us are capable to see a man apart from the house he lives in, the money he possesses, the clothes he wears, the office he fills, the social station he occupies. How many of us would frankly confess that we cannot look on a millionaire who has lost all his money with quite the same eyes with which we regard him in the hey-day of his prosperity? A man and his possessions have a curious way of becoming almost inextricably intertwined. If this is true in our thought of other men, it is hardly less true in our thought of ourselves. The rich man did not discover, till death brought it home to him, that one’s real self is the part of one that abides, that death itself cannot destroy. The parable was given to teach us to distinguish between what we have and what we are, to show us where our anxieties and our preparations for the future should chiefly centre, to help us to concentrate on the abiding reality of the self whose needs can be met only by the abiding reality of God. This is one of the parables given in a suggestive historical context. A man wanted Jesus to interfere in a case of a disputed inheritance.
Jesus apparently made no inquiry into the justice or injustice of the man’s case; he made no suggestion that injustice should always be patiently borne. But he knew the family feuds, the heart-burnings, the hatred and malice that are so often engendered by such disputes. He recognized that the mainspring of these ugly things is the desire to increase our material possessions. It seemed therefore appropriate to tell the story of the man who did not discover till he was about to die that his wealth was one of the accidents of his life, that he could not take it with him into another world, and that in the meantime he was neglecting the cultivation of his real self.
Jesus speaks of wealth always in one of three ways. It is a burden to be got rid of, a temptation to be avoided, or a source of help for the poor. As a means of enriching the life of him who owns it, he never once speaks of it. This is one of the subjects on which it is easy to say pious things that mean nothing. Life is infinitely richer, in some respects, than it was nineteen hundred years ago. The world is full of sources of enjoyment, most of which cost money, not all of which are degrading, and some of which are ennobling. If our wealth is no part of us, this is equally true of our poverty.
Yet there is no reason to think that, if our Lord were living under modern conditions, his teaching on wealth would be greatly different from what it was. Many of the forms of wealth which provide life with most real enrichment have become public property and are within the reach of all: our parks, our art galleries and museums, and our libraries. Other sources of refined enjoyment may be, and doubtless will be, treated in the same way. In the case of music, the process has already more than begun. Apart from these it is quite certain that the enjoyment most men get from the wealth they acquire, even when it is only moderate in amount, inadequately repays the toil, the anxiety and often the. lack of moral scruple that have gone to the gathering and preserving of it. The amount of money spent by the rich on foolish display or costly social rivalry, and by the poor on luxuries which have no effect or a deleterious effect on the standard of their lives, is a forceful reminder that the world has not grown beyond the need for the teaching of the Rich Fool. The many-sidedness of his teaching is illustrated by the words of Jesus which in Luke succeed this parable as its moral, the words concerning excessive anxiety about food and clothing. In Matthew (Mat 6:25-33) they are a warning to the poor, in Luke a warning to the rich: both warnings are needed. Great wealth and great poverty, the former more than the latter, have an all but compelling power to make material interests supreme in our lives. Within these two extremes the wise man is he who realizes that a man’s life is more than his food, his body more than its raiment, that he is more than what he owns the man who is the master and not the servant of his material surroundings.