Each day, I reflect upon a word or a phrase inspired by the readings of the day. I encourage you to do the same and perhaps incorporate that word or phrase into your daily prayer.
Someone in the crowd said to Jesus, “Teacher, tell my brother to share the inheritance with me.” (Luke 12:13-21)
SOMEONE: Gospel writers often included descriptors that allow us to get a sense of a person’s motive or intent when he or she approached Jesus. They identified the person as a Pharisee, a widow, a Gentile, a tax collector, and so on.
However, on occasion the evangelists wrote generically about nameless people who were present at the time. They wrote, “A man approached Jesus…” or “a crowd gathered around Jesus.”
I like it when that happens. Those nameless people often hold the key that unlocks the message that God has embedded in scripture.
And while I can’t relate to being a Pharisee or a tax collector, I can relate to being an everyday man or part of a crowd. So when the gospel writer gives me the opening, I climb inside the gospel and become that unnamed person. I want to live that experience.
Today we have, Someone in the crowd said to Jesus, “Teacher, tell my brother to share the inheritance with me.”
If I’m that guy – that “someone in the crowd” – what was I doing? I was looking for an outlet for my frustration. I was trying to mask my frustration, but Jesus saw through it. He dismissed my phony request by saying, “Friend, who appointed me as your judge and arbitrator?”
He read between the lines. He understood my frustration and knew even before I did what I really wanted to say.
What I wanted to say was, “It’s just not fair! Why do other people have more stuff, better stuff? Why are there ‘Haves’ and ‘Have-nots?”
Maybe you find yourself asking those same types of questions. Not out loud, of course; we hide our frustration like I did in the gospel. If we do complain out loud, it is behind closed doors with others who share our frustration. Misery loves company so together we gossip. We jealously criticize those around us who have more money, own bigger houses or newer cars, and take exotic vacations.
As that “someone in the crowd,” I wanted Jesus to affirm me. I wanted Him to tell me I was right. Then, after affirming me, I wanted Him to fix it. I wanted Him to arrange for me to get a bigger piece of the pie.
However, Jesus didn’t bite on that either. Instead, He saw my request as a teaching moment. He told a parable that offered a “get over yourself” message. He told of a man who was preoccupied with acquiring wealth, building a bigger barn in order to warehouse his surplus grain and store away more than he could possibly ever use.
The parable ends with God telling the man that he had wasted his time. He was going to die that night and all that grain would do him no good.
God’s message to the man was similar to the familiar phrase, “You can’t take it with you.” We only have so many hours in a day. If the majority of our time is spent on acquiring temporal things, or obsessing over what others have, how much time do we have left for God?
Tell me how a man spends his time, and I’ll tell you what he values.
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