This morning’s Gospel reading is Luke 12:13–21:

Someone in the crowd said to Jesus, “Teacher, tell my brother to share the inheritance with me.” He replied to him, “Friend, who appointed me as your judge and arbitrator?” Then he said to the crowd, “Take care to guard against all greed, for though one may be rich, one’s life does not consist of possessions.”

Then he told them a parable. “There was a rich man whose land produced a bountiful harvest. He asked himself, ‘What shall I do, for I do not have space to store my harvest?’ And he said, ‘This is what I shall do: I shall tear down my barns and build larger ones. There I shall store all my grain and other goods and I shall say to myself, “Now as for you, you have so many good things stored up for many years, rest, eat, drink, be merry!”’ But God said to him, ‘You fool, this night your life will be demanded of you; and the things you have prepared, to whom will they belong?’ Thus will it be for all who store up treasure for themselves but are not rich in what matters to God.”

It took humans a very, very long time to realize the wisdom of the adage, you can’t take it with you. It’s not that people didn’t try. In ancient Egypt, archaeologists and tomb raiders still find vast troves of treasure that got buried with their wealthy owners, who believed that they could tap into their riches on the other side. Some even had their servants buried with them, hardly an exciting post-career prospect for the household.

The same pattern existed before and after that era, and the attractiveness of that belief remains to this day. We tell jokes about taking it with us, and in more serious moments we lament what will happen to our wealth once our heirs get their hands on it. We secretly wish that what we value most was eternal because we spend our lives valuing the material over the eternal.

This lament goes back to the beginnings of humanity, and it’s common enough that we find it in our first reading from Ecclesiastes today. “Vanity of vanities!” exclaims Qoheleth, the pen name of the book’s author. We spend our lives hoarding what we cannot take with us, and then weeping over the impossibility:

Vanity of vanities, says Qoheleth, vanity of vanities! All things are vanity!

Here is one who has labored with wisdom and knowledge and skill, and yet to another who has not labored over it, he must leave property. This also is vanity and a great misfortune. For what profit comes to man from all the toil and anxiety of heart with which he has labored under the sun? All his days sorrow and grief are his occupation; even at night his mind is not at rest. This also is vanity.

The obsession with material accumulation does not bring happiness, Qoheleth declared. The wise man and the fool both come to the same end no matter their toil and their accumulation. In the previous passages, Qoheleth relates how he became embittered by this realization and hated his toil, as its fruits would eventually pass to another. The only real joy, Qoheleth teaches, is in the moment of the toil itself and in whom it serves. If it only serves himself, the joy will be short-lived, but the wise serve God and receives “wisdom and knowledge and joy.” To those who strive for sin, God leaves nothing but the toil and gives the fruits of the toil “to one who pleases God.”

This brings us to today’s Gospel, in which Jesus first declines to act as a mediator in an inheritance dispute. The man may have brought the dispute to Jesus because of His reputation as a teacher, or possibly more specifically because Jesus preached parables relating to inheritance. Jesus used these familiar themes to tell His disciples about the inheritance that awaits us in the Lord, an inheritance of abundance that multiplies with more children rather than divides.

The man, however, has division rather than multiplication on his mind. Jesus then tells a parable not so much about inheritance but of its futility in material terms. The wealthy man in this parable sought salvation from hoarding riches. If only I can gather enough, I’ll never have to work again or worry over my circumstances!

That might be true enough, at least in this world. However, this world isn’t the end of things, as Jesus stresses over and over again. The wealthy man is focused on toil for his own sake, not for the Lord’s sake; if he was concerned about the latter, he would set out to share his wealth, or at least put it to use for shared benefit. He does not trust the Lord; the rich man of this parable only trusts the material wealth he has accumulated.

This is the precise problem wealth presents to salvation. It is too easy to trust wealth, to rely on it to get us out of our toil for the Lord. When we do not have material wealth, we put our trust in the Lord and work in our small and imperfect way for Him. That, as Qoheleth remarks in Ecclesiastes, brings us wisdom and true joy. It’s not that wealth itself disqualifies one for salvation, but its ability to blind us to our need for salvation that is its real danger.

And in the end, it betrays us anyway. You can’t take it with you. I’ve looked up the U-Haul rates, and they don’t have those routes. We end up leaving all the material goods we acquire to others. When the time comes to depart, it’s just us and the Lord; we don’t even take the clothes on our backs. Or our backs, for that matter.

At that time, if we have followed the path of wisdom, that’s when we find our true rest. The wealthy man who hoards material riches for some unspecified period of merry-making never really finds it; he’s too busy trying to protect his wealth, or trying to continue to add to it. The wealth itself becomes his focus, not the rest, and certainly not the peace of Christ. Those who toil for the Lord and trust in His salvation do not have those cares, although they certainly have their share of others. They know, though, that their rest will be complete and joyful in the Lord rather than in the material world which He created and handed over to us.

And that faith and trust we can certainly take with us.

The front-page image is a detail from a 1684 Arabic manuscript of the Gospels, copied in Egypt by Ilyas Basim Khuri Bazzi Rahib (likely a Coptic monk). In the collection of The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, Md. Via Wikimedia Commons.

“Sunday Reflection” is a regular feature, looking at the specific readings used in today’s Mass in Catholic parishes around the world. The reflection represents only my own point of view, intended to help prepare myself for the Lord’s day and perhaps spark a meaningful discussion. Previous Sunday Reflections from the main page can be found here.  For previous Green Room entries, click here.