Rich Toward God

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” [Luke 12:15, a portion of the Gospel reading, Luke 12:13-21, for this Sunday, the Eighth Sunday after Pentecost (Revised Common Lectionary, Year C].

It begins with an ordinary moment: someone asks Jesus to settle a family inheritance dispute. To modern ears, this might sound odd—why ask a traveling preacher to arbitrate a legal matter? But in Jesus’ time, it was quite common for Jews to bring their disputes to a trusted rabbi for advice and arbitration. Rabbis were expected to know the law and to offer wisdom in practical matters.

We’ve all seen the kind of conflict this man was facing—siblings squabbling over who gets what, who deserves more, whether the division is fair. It’s the kind of dispute that tears families apart at precisely the moment when grief should be drawing them together.

What’s surprising is Jesus’ response. He refuses to play judge in their legal dispute, but he doesn’t dismiss their concern. Instead, he uses their question as a window into something deeper, something that goes to the heart of what it means to be human. “Take care,” he warns them—and us. “Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; for one’s life does not consist in the abundance of possessions.”

Then he tells them a story about a man who thought it did.

The rich man in Jesus’ parable isn’t a villain. He isn’t cheating or oppressing. He just has a good problem—a bumper crop, more than his barns can hold. So he decides to build bigger ones, plan for the future, and secure his retirement.

But listen carefully to how he talks to himself: “I will say to my soul, ‘Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.’” Notice the grammar—my crops, my barns, my goods, my soul. Everything belongs to him. He is the sole actor in his own drama, the author and protagonist of his own story.

This is where the rich man reveals himself to be what God calls him—a fool. Not because he’s wealthy, not because he plans ahead, but because he has fundamentally misunderstood his relationship to everything he thinks he owns. As one commentator puts it: “The rich man thought he owned time, land, and surplus. He owned none of them.”

His real delusion isn’t about money—it’s about time. “Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years.” But God responds: “You fool! This very night your life is being demanded of you.” The rich man planned as if time belonged to him, as if he could schedule his own mortality, as if his barns could somehow insulate him from the fundamental vulnerability of being human.

We recognize this delusion because we live with it daily. A few years after the 2008 financial crisis, a friend shared an observation that has stayed with me. Most of us, he said, have experienced both poles that Jesus names. We swing from the belief that if we can just earn, make, or buy a little more we will be okay, to the crushing disappointment when the new car, laptop, or promotion fails to transform our circumstances. Yet the false promise that we can meet our deepest needs materially has been embedded so deeply in our culture that our response to disappointment is often to shop some more.

The cycle repeats: earn more, buy more, feel disappointed, shop more. We live as if abundance could somehow solve the problem of being human, as if the right amount of accumulation could insulate us from loss, aging, relationship struggles, or death itself.

This isn’t a modern problem. The rich fool represents something timeless—the temptation to confuse gifts with possessions, to mistake stewardship for ownership, to believe that security comes from what we can grasp rather than from the One who holds us.

The parable becomes particularly challenging for those of us who have been blessed with material stability. How do we distinguish between prudent planning and the kind of false security Jesus warns against? How do we save for retirement, care for our families, and participate responsibly in economic life without falling into the rich fool’s delusion?

These aren’t theoretical questions for me. The tension between prudent planning and misplaced trust plays out in my own life regularly. I’ve made what some would call faithful financial decisions, and others that I’m less sure about. I’ve worked hard for decades, participated fully in the commercial world, saved what I could. There are days when I wonder if I’ve been sufficiently true to this parable’s warnings, times when I catch myself sounding uncomfortably like the rich fool in his internal calculations.

The uncomfortable truth is that most of us live somewhere between wisdom and foolishness when it comes to money and security. We try to be responsible while not becoming captive to our responsibilities. We plan for the future while remembering that we don’t control it. We save and spend and worry and trust, often all in the same week.

Perhaps that’s exactly why Jesus tells this parable—not to those who have clearly chosen wealth over God, but to ordinary people like us who are trying to navigate the complexities of living faithfully in a world that demands economic participation. The rich fool’s error isn’t that he was wealthy, but that he forgot he was human.

The parable’s sting comes not from its condemnation of wealth, but from its reminder of how quickly our assumptions can be shattered. We make our plans—some wise, some foolish, most somewhere in between—but we make them as if time were ours to manage.

I think of families where parents withheld approval, assuming they had years to teach hard lessons. Of conversations we meant to have, trips we planned to take, reconciliations postponed for “someday”—when we would finally feel secure enough, successful enough, ready enough.

The rich fool syndrome isn’t primarily about money. It’s about the illusion that we can control the timing of grace, that we can schedule love, that we can ration out our presence and attention as if they were commodities to be managed rather than gifts to be shared.

“This very night your life is being demanded of you.” The passive voice is telling—demanded by whom? The text doesn’t say, but the implication is clear. Our lives, like our possessions, were never really ours to begin with. They are on loan, held in trust, given as gifts to be stewarded rather than hoarded.

Jesus concludes His parable with a haunting question: “And the things you have prepared, whose will they be?” But then he adds something even more mysterious: “So it is with those who store up treasures for themselves but are not rich toward God.”

Rich toward God. Jesus doesn’t define what this means. I think that’s intentional. He leaves us to wrestle with the question rather than offering us a formula. What would it look like to be “rich toward God” while still living responsibly in the world? How do we hold our possessions—whether abundant or modest—as gifts rather than achievements? How do we plan for the future without forgetting that the future isn’t ours to guarantee?

Maybe being rich toward God means living with the wisdom that the writer of Ecclesiastes knew—that life is like breath or wind, something that cannot be grasped or held onto. Maybe it means holding our plans lightly, our possessions gratefully, our relationships tenderly.

Maybe it means remembering that we are characters in God’s story rather than authors of our own, stewards rather than owners, recipients of grace rather than earners of security.

The rich fool thought he could build bigger barns to house his future. But the future was never his to house. Nor is it ours.

Where in your life do you find yourself speaking the rich fool’s language of ownership? What would it mean today to be rich toward God?