Desiring eternal goods

Ecclesiastes 1:2, 12-14, 2:18-23

1:2  Vanity of vanities, says the Teacher, vanity of vanities! All is vanity.

12 I, the Teacher, was king over Israel in Jerusalem 13 I applied my mind to seek and to search out by wisdom all that is done under heaven; it is an unhappy business that God has given to humans to be busy with. 14 I saw all the deeds that are done under the sun, and see, all is vanity and a chasing after wind.

2:18 I hated all my toil in which I had toiled under the sun, seeing that I must leave it to my successor, 19 and who knows whether he will be wise or foolish? Yet he will be master of all for which I toiled and used my wisdom under the sun. This also is vanity. 20 So I turned and gave my heart up to despair concerning all the toil of my labors under the sun, 21 because sometimes one who has toiled with wisdom and knowledge and skill must leave all to be enjoyed by another who did not toil for it. This also is vanity and a great evil. 22  What do mortals get from all the toil and strain with which they toil under the sun?

23 For all their days are full of pain, and their work is a vexation; even at night their minds do not rest. This also is vanity.

Luke 12:13-21

13 Someone in the crowd said to him, “Teacher, tell my brother to divide the family inheritance with me.” 14 But he said to him, “Friend, who set me to be a judge or arbitrator over you?” 15 And he said to them, “Take care! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed, for one’s life does not consist in the abundance of possessions.” 16 Then he told them a parable: “The land of a rich man produced abundantly. 17 And he thought to himself, ‘What should I do, for I have no place to store my crops?’ 18 Then he said, ‘I will do this: I will pull down my barns and build larger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods. 19 And I will say to my soul, Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.’ 20 But God said to him, ‘You fool! This very night your life is being demanded of you. And the things you have prepared, whose will they be?’ 21 So it is with those who store up treasures for themselves but are not rich toward God.”

I don’t know how many sermons I’ve heard where the preacher declares that a big house or a nice car or whatever isn’t going to provide true satisfaction, that only God can.  If you could somehow rank the most common tropes (perhaps AI can help with that) I’m confident that this one would be near the top of the list.  This is precisely the sort of thing you except to hear at church, and though it sounds challenging - and perhaps to some it is - for most of us these words go down fairly easy.  We might even find them comforting, reassuring ourselves that we are walking the straight and narrow because we are not the sort of people who prioritize possessions.   There’s no more conventional piece of wisdom than, “money can’t buy you happiness” - and you won’t find many eager to disagree - but the evidence suggests that few of us completely believe this.  

Someone in the crowd said to Jesus, “Teacher, tell my brother to divide the family inheritance with me.”  Presumably this was a younger brother who would’ve customarily received less than the firstborn and thus he’s seeking to receive the same share - no more, no less - than his older brother.  This strikes us an entirely reasonable request; the younger brother merely desires what is fair.  And though this would’ve been contrary to the customs of the time and place, we might expect that Jesus - not one to shy away from challenging the status quo - might take up the younger brother’s cause.  And surely the brother came to Jesus with his demand for just that reason.  

But Jesus refuses to do as the younger brother requests, for at least a couple of reasons.  First of all, Jesus clearly does not want to be in the position of settling familial disputes, and - perhaps more to the point - Jesus refuses to be enlisted in our causes.  There have always been people who wanted to say - or who have gone ahead and said - “Hey look! Jesus is on my side”, but if that’s your game then it’s safe to assume that Jesus isn’t playing along.  We should never be asserting that Jesus is on our side; rather we should be people who try to be faithful to Jesus.  

On top of that, Jesus shows little sympathy for this particular cause.  The brother wants only his half, which, again, seems fair enough, but then Jesus immediately starts talking about greed.  The man wants more than custom would dictate he’s entitled to, and Jesus apparently sees this less as a moment for economic justice and more as moment to warn against desiring more than what’s coming your way.  You get the sense that, even if Jesus thought that inheritances should be divided evenly, he still thinks that worrying about about your share betrays misguided priorities.   

So he tells a parable.  There’s a man who keeps getting richer and richer, so rich that he has no place to store all the stuff he’s accumulated.  So he decides to tear down his barns and build new ones, but in the interim he dies, and all his stuff is lost.  The moral of the story is not that he should’ve built the new barns before tearing down the old ones, though I’m sure there’s someone out there claiming that Jesus here counsels more prudent financial management.  Rather, the point is more or less the same as that made in Ecclesiastes, that when we die we don’t get to take anything with us, that at best it goes to someone else who didn’t work for it, or worse, it is lost altogether.  

Now it’s not as if there are lots of people in the world operating with the false assumption that they do get to transport their stuff to heaven when they die.  No one thinks this.  And yet, it’s also the case the case most of us are indeed to some degree or another concerned, preoccupied, even obsessed with accumulating possessions, of securing the means to a coveted lifestyle.    Here, at least, Jesus is not so much making the case that material things cannot bring happiness, but rather that, viewed from the perspective of heaven, whatever pleasure these things brings is fleeting.  Although it’s probably true that much of what we think will make us happy ends up feeling hollow once attained, Jesus’ point still holds even if we do take great satisfaction in our stuff.  However enjoyable these things, these temporal goods are…. temporary, finite.  They do not endure.  

Some of the most difficult things to grasp are those that seem so simple, so obvious, that you just assume that you’ve understood it.  The point Jesus makes here is one such example.  His point is that we should be concerned, preoccupied, even obsessed with eternal things, with that which endures forever.  This is what it means store up treasures in heaven, or to be rich toward God.  It’s not a complicated concept, but it’s actually super difficult for us to think in an eternal rather than temporal frame.  If we really grasped that we will live forever, that some things we do in this life will have an eternal significance, then surely that would influence the way we live now.  

Jesus prods us to think in terms of the eternal by reminding us that we are going to die.  Again, not exactly a newsflash, but still not something we keep at the forefront of our minds - in fact, it’s a reality that we make great effort to keep hidden from view.  We don’t like thinking about death, and it’s not uncommon for us to pretend, right up until the end, that we’re not going to die.  But we always do.  In order to live truthfully we need to bear this truth in mind.  

There’s the cliche about how no one on their deathbed expresses regret that they didn’t spend more time at work.  The cliche works because it forces us to consider our lives from the end looking back, to imagine as we lay there in our final days, what we will actually matter to us, what we will hold dear.  The point, of course, is that it is these things that should matter most to us now.  Picturing what will bring us satisfaction at the end of life provides a sobering clarity about what our priorities should be.  

The thing, I think it’s safe to say, what that will bring us that satisfaction, that joy, is our relationships, the people that we love and knowing that we loved them and they loved us.  All of our heavenly treasures will be about relationship - our relationship to God, of course, but that relationship is expressed through our relationship to others.  And a remarkable claim of Christian theology is that, while our stuff and many of our accomplishments will be like chaff in the wind, everything we do out love of for others will endure for eternity.  It all makes a difference; we shall receive our reward.  

We might think we are not the sort of materialistic people whom Jesus is addressing in this passage, but then we need to face the fact that we are also the sort of people for whom relationships and friendships and other eternal things easily get squeezed out of life.  We are busy people working often demanding jobs and finding the time to share our life with others can feel difficult, even a burden.  This is not to say that we’ve necessarily got our priorities all out of whack - especially for the parents among us it makes sense that we’re devoting lots of time and energy to our children - but the challenge of this passage is to take a look at our lives and make an honest assessment about we prioritize, about we make sure gets done and what we let fall to the side, what gets the very best of us.  When we daydream about our future, what are the things we imagine?  Do we picture a bigger house or career success?  Of do we imagine being surrounded by a community, our life a blessing to others?  

I suspect that, deep down, we know that something is amiss, yet inertia keeps us moving in the same direction.  It’s hard to imagine how things could be different, how life could be reordered.  We can perhaps imagine things being somehow different in the future, of there coming a day when the time is right to make changes,  but now doesn’t seem like the time.  And yet, another important aspect of Jesus’ parable is to remind us that the future is not granted to us, that we should not put off what should be done now.  Obviously I cannot deny my bias, but I still want to believe that this community might be something worth making a priority, a people for whom we might order and re-order our lives, a place where our life together takes on eternal significance, where together we are rich toward God.