Then he said to them, "Watch out! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; life does not consist in an abundance of possessions."
Luke 12:15
He Wouldn't Settle It
Somebody in the crowd interrupts Jesus to say, "Teacher, tell my brother to divide the inheritance with me." That's a real dispute in a real family, and the man asking clearly believes he's in the right about it.
Jesus won't do it. He answers, "Who appointed me a judge or an arbiter between you?" and then he turns away from the man and starts speaking to everybody standing there.
Jesus neither takes the case nor pretends that the money isn't important. He looks past the argument to whatever is driving it, and then he warns the whole crowd instead of the brother, because he can already see that it isn't one man's problem.
"Be on your guard against all kinds of greed," he says. Jesus doesn't name a particular kind and go after that one, and he doesn't leave any of us thinking any version of it is still fine.
Then comes the line that explains why he's warning them. "Life does not consist in an abundance of possessions." Consist is a word about what something is made of and what it's built out of, so Jesus is telling the crowd what the ingredients of a human life actually are, and possessions aren't on the list no matter how many of them we manage to gather.
What a Life Is Made Of
Jesus tells the crowd what a life is made of, and living by it is the hard part, because greed almost never introduces itself as greed.
Greed sounds like a sensible plan for next year. It sounds like a comparison you didn't mean to make while you were standing in somebody else's driveway. It sounds like the sentence that begins "once we finally have," which some of us have been saying for four years now about four different purchases.
As A.J. Swoboda wrote in The Gift of Thorns, when you begin believing you're missing out, look down, because there's some snake at your feet. The serpent works by convincing us that we lack something, and it's the oldest trick he has.
Jesus calls that dangerous, and he isn't doing it to make anybody feel guilty about their house. He's doing it because a life gets built out of something whether we choose the materials or not, and he's telling us what it's actually built out of.
The ingredients are scattered all through this chapter and the ones on either side of it. Being known by God, who counts the hairs on your head. Being with people and forgiving them. Being generous to the poor. Being ready when the master comes home. That's what a life is made of, and every one of those is still available to you in a month when the money is tight.
Solomon got at the same idea from the other side in The Good Life Comes In Low, where riches and honor and life arrive for the person who stopped chasing them.
So take an honest look at where your next raise is already spoken for in your head, and then give some of it away before it ever arrives. Generosity is one of the antidotes to greed's venom, and it often means more to the person doing it than it does to anyone else.
Prayer
Father, thank you that you know what our lives are made of, and that you told us plainly instead of letting us find out too late. Guard us from every kind of greed, especially the kinds that look responsible to the people around us. Help us to hold what we own loosely and to be generous with it while we have it. Teach us to count what really makes a life, and to want that more than we want the rest. We pray all this in Jesus' name. Amen.