There’s and old saying that goes, “A fool and his money are soon parted.” If Jesus were to re-write the saying it might read, “A fool and his money are never parted.”
In today’s gospel, a rich landowner pulls down his barns and builds bigger barns in which to store wealth for his future. “You fool!” God says, “this very night your life is being demanded of you, and the things you have prepared, whose will they be?” Yes, it’s another of those lessons that target the rich. That’s all right then because none of us are particularly rich and so surely this lesson doesn’t apply to us. Or does it?
We’ve all worried about money at some time or another. We worry about university fees, the cost of getting married and the cost of keeping a roof over our heads. We worry about paying our bills and providing for our children. We worry about providing for our old age and the cost of keeping Great Aunt Ethel in a nursing home. We even worry about the cost of dying. Today Jesus warns us that in worrying about money we allow money and material wealth to exert some kind of hold over us. Everything we own possesses a little part of us. If we have a house we are slave to a mortgage. If we own a car we are slaves to maintaining it. Once we have finally struggled our way towards a healthy bank balance we suddenly become afraid to spend it, let alone share it with the needy. Without knowing it, we can become penny pinching and greedy. We don’t need to be particularly rich to become as foolish as the landowner in today’s parable.
Today’s gospel isn’t a good excuse to rush out and blow the children’ school uniform budget on a palette of beer in a ‘let’s live for today for tomorrow we die’ mentality, but it is a good excuse for liberating ourselves from life’s financial burdens and living for a better reason.
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