A sermon for harvest 2024 based on Luke 12:16-21

“The land of a rich man produced abundantly. And he thought to himself, ‘What should I do, for I have no place to store my crops?’ 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. And I will say to my soul, Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.’ 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?’ So it is with those who store up treasures for themselves but are not rich toward God.”

The gospels are written in unbelievably condensed language. This morning’s reading, the Parable of the Rich Fool is told in 125 words. I would guess that if any of us were asked to retell the story as concisely as possible we would use many more.

It is impossible to believe that this is how Jesus actually spoke in public. People who make a considerable effort to hear a public speaker don’t typically want a sequence of super-condensed sound bites. They want to be captivated, inspired and entertained by something more substantial. The gospel writers have captured the essence of the parables as concisely as possible, but if we want to relive the experience of Jesus’ preaching and teaching we have to imagine the bits that the gospel writers leave out.

We also need to remember that the people that Jesus was talking to two thousand years ago when he first told the story lived very different lives to those we live today. They would have recognised things in the stories he was telling that we risk missing. Most of Jesus’ teaching was in Galilee, a largely rural province with poor links to Jerusalem the more cosmopolitan city in the south. The country was poor with many people with little education and dependent on subsistence farming or fishing. They would have recognised and related to quite different things in the stories to those we recognise and relate to today.

The story, for example, is that of a rich man. In our world we tend to idolise the rich. We often assume that with their wealth comes knowledge and wisdom. We might assume that a rich man will be the hero of a story. Poor people, particularly tenant farmers, will often have a different perspective. Throughout history the rich, or at least those who have not inherited their wealth, have often accumulated their wealth through exploitation of the poor. Think of how many of the super-successful businesses of today award great salaries and bonuses to their owners and top-level management but refuse to pay their front-line staff any more than the minimum wage. In unregulated subsistence economies like that of first century Galilee the poor people listening to Jesus would almost certainly have responded to the introduction of the character as a “rich man” with suspicion and contempt. It’s not beyond imagination that they might have responded with pantomime boos and jeers.

There has been a good harvest, presumably because of factors entirely beyond the control of the rich man – rain at the right time to germinate the seeds and sun at the right time to ripen the grain. The crowd would know that a good harvest was a gift from God and had little to do with the merits of the landowner. They would also know that the man had had little involvement in gathering the harvest other than to order his stewards to recruit casual labour from the gig economy at rock bottom wages. The crowd might even understand that the man only owned the land because he had inherited it form his father, and he from his father before that, right back to the time when some ancestral warlord had stolen the land from those who had originally inhabited it.  Despite all this the man has no reservation in asking, “What should I do to for I have no place to store my crops?” with a very clear emphasis on “my”. More boos and jeers from the crowd?

And what of his decision to build bigger barns? Why not just sell the excess grain. The audience knew the answer, there’s a business opportunity isn’t there. If the man has experienced a bumper harvest, then the chances are that other landowners have as well. Grain will be plentiful, and the price will have dropped. Building bigger barns is a mechanism for hoarding the harvest until a future time when grain becomes scarce and the price rises accordingly. The crowd listening know that the building of bigger barns is a mechanism for extorting higher prices for grain from them sometime in the future. They see investment of current wealth as a mechanism for exploiting them to generate yet more wealth in the future. Even more boos and jeers.

The rich man is satisfied and looks forward to the security of consolidated wealth. Imagine what that feels like to subsistence farmers and hired labourers who never know where their next mouthful of food is coming from. There can have been little sympathy for the wealthy man. It there were any wealthy people in the crowd you can imagine them getting a little nervous and sweaty as Jesus progresses with the story. You can imagine why, ultimately and corporately, they decided that Jesus was a dangerous influence who needed to be done away with.

But for the moment Jesus is speaking the language of the crowd and has got them in the palm of his hand. Then the punchline. God takes the life of the rich man. All that wealth squirrelled away, all that prospect of future comfort, all have come to nothing. Did the boos and jeers of the crowd turn to cheers and laughter. Yes, the rich man has got his just desserts.

One problem with this parable is that it is almost entirely negative – it is clearly very critical of how the man did behave but tells us very little about how he should have behaved.  At the heart of the story is the question that the rich man asks himself, “What should I do for I have no place to store my crops”, what should he have done?

This is an example of Jesus genius in responding to a question by telling a story which makes the answer obvious to the audience without needing to give it. He did it with the Parable of the Good Samaritan and his response to the woman caught in adultery. Here he tells a story which makes clear the Christian response to wealth generation without having to state it explicitly. The Christian response to wealth generation is to give thanks for good fortune and to seek to share that good fortune with others.

One thing that puzzles me about the modern church is why we are not more critical of hoarded wealth, why we don’t tell equivalent stories. You can imagine the trouble that the we would get into if it started filling out this story in the way that I’ve imagined Jesus filling it out. We’d be told to keep our thoughts away from politics and to get back to praying silently on our knees where we belong. Perhaps one issue is that, in a complex world, the injustices of how society is structured are much more difficult to discern than in the earlier, simpler world in which Jesus taught. Or maybe it is because those with wealth are controlling how we perceive the world.

We are currently fed a story that our economy is failing, that as a nation we have no money to spare and that we need to cut back on provision of services to the disadvantaged and vulnerable because we have no way of funding them. We are taught that the only way that we can find such resources is by growing the economy. This is simply not true. We are the sixth wealthiest nation in the world in terms of our gross domestic product. According to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development GDP is “the standard measure of the value added created through the production of goods and services in a country”. Accountants and economists might argue about the details, but you can think of this of the money that we earn as a country each year. If you divide this by the number of people in the country you obtain an estimate of how much income every person would receive if that money was shared equally among the population. According to the International Monetary Fund this is projected to be just under £40,000 per person (US$51,000) for 2024. This is the whole population, so every family of two adults and two children could receive £160,000 each year. The key issue here is that this would be the case if the country’s annual income were shared equally among the population – it isn’t.

How would the national dialogue on how we manage the country’s resources and share its wealth be different if we told the truth with the same clarity that Jesus told the truth? How would it change, if gloomy predictions of how slowly the economy is growing where replaced with celebratory statements of how much wealth we already generate. Harvest is a time to give thanks for what we have received and to then think about how we share it. This harvest, let all Christians in the UK strip away the gloom of how slowly the nation’s income is growing and give thanks for the abundant wealth which we already receive. But let’s go further than giving thanks, let’s take the next step and ask how that wealth should be shared.