Tomorrow’s gospel reading from Luke is an exploration of the dangers of wealth and it ends with the nourishing little phrase “rich towards God”. How can we live lives that are rich towards God?
Jesus tells the story of a farmer who is already wealthy, and has a bumper crop one year. He has so much grain to store that his barn isn’t big enough. He decides to knock down the barn and build a bigger one, and then he will be fully happy – he can eat, drink and relax because he will have enough stored to last him for a long time. “You fool!”, God bellows. “Tonight you are going to die, and what good will all this hoarding do you then?”
The kind of financial security enjoyed by the farmer sounds very attractive to me, and perhaps to many of us. Yet Jesus warns us, over and over, that being rich is life-threatening. Wealth isolates us from those around us and distracts us from the truth: that we are completely dependant upon God for everything.
Poverty, too, is distracting. When Jesus talks about “the poor”, he is not referring to a marginalised group separate to the rest of us; rather, he is addressing his main audience. It is likely that most of those listening to Jesus were extremely poor, and probably accustomed to constantly being hungry. What would this story sound like to someone whose main worry was where the next meal was coming from? I can scarcely imagine.
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Swiss theologian Luzia Sutter Rehmann has written an eye-opening book called “Rage in the Belly” in which she argues that hunger is the primary reality underpinning the New Testament. Reading the gospels from the standpoint of extreme hunger brings a whole new dimension to over-familiar texts.
I have been reading GK Chesterton’s “St Francis of Assisi”. St Francis lived a life incomparably rich towards God from within a state of utter poverty – reckless, joyous poverty requiring absolute dependence upon divine provision – with hunger itself welcomed as an opportunity to participate in the sufferings of Christ. Francis was a great saint, unlike the rest of us – we who are tiny little saints if we can call ourselves saints at all – but his holy vitality still lifts our heads centuries later.
Another person whose life was lived richly towards God was the missionary doctor Paul Brand. Brand spent most of his life in India, pioneering hand surgery for leprosy patients. Towards the end of his life he lived in Louisiana, and I have read that he was uncomfortable eating in restaurants because he felt overwhelmed by the scandalous waste of food incurred every day. There is something beautiful and terrible about this radical solidarity with the poor. I find it too challenging to dwell on for long.
Paul Brand lived a life that was rich towards God. He wrote: “Because of where I practised medicine, I never made much money. But as I look back over a lifetime of surgery, the host of friends who were once patients bring me more joy than wealth could ever bring.”
So how can we live more richly towards God? If we enjoy running water in our homes, we can support Water Aid. If we have more than one toilet, we can sponsor a toilet in a country where many have none – www.toilettwinning.org. If we have money “resting” in our account, we can provide long-term low-interest loans to those who can otherwise not afford to buy a home. We can put a secret envelope containing cash through the letterbox of someone we know who is in need.
But the foundation of all giving is thanksgiving. Living a life that is rich towards God is living in the freedom of knowing that all things already belong to God: “For all things come from you, and of your own, we give you”. In the end we will all die and what we have accumulated will mean nothing. The only thing that will endure is the love that we have given and received and shared.