When You’ve Already Paid It Back

Ecclesiastes 1:2, 12-14; 2:18-23; Psalm 49:1-12; Colossians 3:1-11; Luke 12:13-21

Someone in the crowd called out to Jesus: “Teacher, tell my brother to give me my share of the inheritance.” Jesus answered: “My friend, who made me a judge or arbitrator over you?”

Perhaps you know of a family that has torn itself apart in a dispute over inheritance. If you do, it’s easy to understand why Jesus wouldn’t want to get involved in one of those disputes. They can get ugly. No matter what happens, somebody feels wronged. The anger and feelings of betrayal can be profound and last a long time.

We have no idea, of course, who was in the right in this dispute between the unknown person in the crowd following Jesus and his brother. It takes a lot to call out your own brother, your own flesh and blood, in front of a crowd of strangers, especially in Biblical times when family was the only safety net anybody had. Maybe the brother who was holding back on the inheritance was just being greedy. Or maybe the brother who complained to Jesus was being irrational. Maybe both. Who knows? If anybody could figure it out, I’m sure Jesus could. But he wanted nothing to do with it.

Someone in the crowd shouted out to Jesus: “Teacher, tell my brother to give me my share of the inheritance.” And Jesus answered him, “My friend, who made me a judge or arbitrator over you?”

On one level, it is odd, isn’t it, for Jesus to say, “Who am I to judge?” I mean, he’s Jesus. He will ultimately be the judge of everyone. We say it every week in the Creed, don’t we? “He will come again to judge the living and the dead.” He will be the judge of this man, he will be the judge of his brother, he will be your judge and mine on the last day. But that doesn’t mean Jesus wants to be a probate judge in this case.

The other word Jesus uses, “arbitrator,” I think helps us to understand a bit better. The Greek word translated “arbitrator” is meristés, which is from the same root as our English word “merit.” It means “to divide,” as in to divide up the inheritance according to what each one deserves, what each one ought to get. And this is what the man in the crowd is asking Jesus to do. This man is looking for an arbitrator, a divider of the estate, an accountant who figures out who deserves what, and Jesus wants no part of that job.

Jesus is not the kind of judge who is going to carefully figure out what each person deserves and doesn’t deserve and makes sure we all get exactly what we deserve, nothing more and nothing less. And thank God for that. But that is not to say that justice doesn’t matter. Treating people fairly matters. But resolving conflict in a way that preserves relationships, especially among family members, also matters. 

This is something that the anonymous “Teacher” in the first reading today from Ecclesiastes understands very well. We do not know who the “Teacher” is, but he says that he is a king in Israel, and that he has devoted himself to learning wisdom. Some people have thought that the “Teacher” might be King Solomon, the son of King David, who was probably the richest king in all of Israel’s history, and was famous for his wisdom.

But whoever the “Teacher” is, he’s done a lot of judging and arbitrating, and he’s having a bit of a midlife crisis. Does any of this daily work of judging and arbitrating and applying wisdom to resolve the inevitable conflicts among God’s people and dispense justice to the best of the king’s ability – does any of this hard work really matter in the end? Or is it just vanity, chasing after the wind? “When I was king in Jerusalem,” the Teacher says, “I applied my mind to seek and to search out by wisdom all that is done under heaven” – all that is done under heaven, all that is done in this world where God’s will is not yet done as it is in heaven, all the work we human beings have to do “under the sun,” in our daily lives, making sure there’s bread on the table and a roof over our heads.

And the “Teacher” concludes, “It is an unhappy business that God has given human beings to be busy with.” It’s an unhappy business, this arbitration racket. It’s an unhappy business, trying to build something under heaven. You work so hard to do your tasks well, but nobody lives forever, and you have to leave it all to the next generation. Maybe they’ll build on what you have accomplished, and maybe they’ll squander it – and either way there’s nothing you can do about it. You might as well try to chase the wind.

This is why Jesus doesn’t want to get involved in this inheritance dispute. In the gospels people often try to drag Jesus into whatever project or cause is currently the focus of their work under heaven. And every time, Jesus refuses to grant the premise of their request. Jesus always invites people to consider the question in a different way. When people bring Jesus something that is a problem under heaven, Jesus invites them to consider the problem from the perspective of the kingdom of heaven, which is not in the distant future but in fact is close at hand. And this is what Jesus does in this gospel passage too.

Once upon a time, Jesus says, there was a rich man who had an exceptionally bountiful harvest. What he should have done, any rabbi would have told him, is to thank God and throw a party, and share his blessings with his neighbors. Because who knows what next year’s harvest is going to be like, and you can never have enough friends to lean on when times turn hard. Instead the man made plans for how he could ensure that he would save and hoard his blessings so he would never have to fear going without again.

What a fool, Jesus says. How foolish to think that anyone can ever toil under the sun and guarantee success that will last forever. Because even our lives are not ours forever; life is a gift we have on loan for a time, and eventually we have to give it back. From the perspective of heaven, everything is a gift. Everything. And if life itself is a gift we cannot hoard or keep forever for ourselves, so is every other material gift that we have been given. It is how we share those gifts with one another, the relationships that we create, the kinds of people that we become through those relationships, that’s what really matters, that’s what really lasts.

We know this. You know this. The “Teacher” knew this. The man who called out to Jesus from the crowd probably knew this too. Everybody knows “you can’t take it with you,” everybody knows that “the one who dies with the most toys wins” is obviously an impoverished way of looking at life. And yet we are afraid, we find it difficult to trust that if we don’t have enough saved up for a rainy day we’ll be in trouble. The problem is not that we don’t know that one day we will all die, the problem is not that we aren’t aware that material things are less important than people and relationships. The problem is that we don’t trust enough to actually live the way we know we should.

This is the problem Paul is addressing in the second reading today from the letter to the Colossians. “Set your minds on things that are above,” Paul says, “not on things that are on earth” – not on things “under heaven,” as the “Teacher” would have said, for that is truly an unhappy business. How do we do this, you ask? Paul says: “For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.” “You have been raised with Christ, so seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God.”

What I think Paul means is this: In our baptism we give back to God the gift of life that we are going to have to give back to God anyway, and by uniting ourselves with Jesus who did not cling to his life for the sake of us all, we receive from God a life that actually is ours forever. For now that life is hidden with Christ in God, but right now we can begin to let go of all the unhappy business that consumes so much of our days under heaven – if we believe that our truest life is already lived in the kingdom of heaven, we can learn, as Paul says, “to strip off the old self with its practices and clothe ourselves with the new self, which is being renewed in the image of the Creator.”

In another place Paul says – being circumcised or being uncircumcised is nothing, but a new creation is everything. Receiving an inheritance or not receiving an inheritance is nothing, but a new creation is everything. An abundant harvest or a poor harvest is nothing, but a new creation is everything. If we have faith in the new creation that God is accomplishing in the world and that God is accomplishing in us, there is nothing we cannot bear, nothing we cannot share, nothing we cannot receive with gratitude.