The Parable of the Rich Fool

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A man came out of the crowd gathered around Jesus and interrupted Him with a private grievance. "Master, speak to my brother, that he divide the inheritance with me."¹ The request assumed that Jesus stood in the place of a teacher whose ruling could settle such a case, an assumption reasonable enough in a setting where a man learned in the law was often asked to arbitrate a dispute within a family. Jesus refused the office offered to Him. "Man, who made me a judge or a divider over you?"² He had not come to redistribute an estate. He had come to address the condition that made an estate worth quarreling over, and He turned the conversation from the brother who was absent to the crowd that stood in front of Him.

"And he said unto them, Take heed, and beware of covetousness: for a man's life consisteth not in the abundance of the things which he possesseth."³ The warning falls on everyone within hearing, and not on the man who had just spoken alone. Covetousness is a desire for more that no amount of having ever satisfies. Jesus warns against it in advance, before it has done any damage. Paul later gives the desire its proper name: "Mortify therefore your members which are upon the earth; fornication, uncleanness, inordinate affection, evil concupiscence, and covetousness, which is idolatry."⁴ Something has taken the place that belongs to God, and the man carrying it does not know the substitution has been made.

A Warning Before a Story

The law standing behind the brother's dispute was not obscure. The firstborn son received a double portion of an estate, a right the law of Moses had already stated: "he shall acknowledge the son of the hated for the firstborn, by giving him a double portion of all that he hath: for he is the beginning of his strength; the right of the firstborn is his."⁵ Division along those lines was a matter the law had settled in principle, and disagreements over how the principle applied to a particular estate were common enough that a teacher might reasonably be asked to rule on one.

Jesus declined, and the manner of His refusal changes the subject entirely. He does not tell the two brothers who is right. He does not divide the inheritance at all. He steps back from the question the man wanted answered and puts a different question in its place: what a man's life is actually made of. The commandment governing such disputes had already named the desire behind them, forbidding a man to covet his neighbor's house or anything that belongs to his neighbor.⁶ That commandment reaches the heart before any court can be asked to divide an estate, and the crowd needed it addressed directly a great deal more than the two brothers needed a verdict.

The Rich Man’s Plan

"And he spake a parable unto them, saying, The ground of a certain rich man brought forth plentifully."⁷ Nothing in the opening line accuses the man of wrongdoing. The ground was his, the increase was not stolen or manufactured, and abundance is not itself a fault. What follows is not an account of how he came to be rich. It is a record of what he did once he was.

"And he thought within himself, saying, What shall I do, because I have no room where to bestow my fruits? And he said, This will I do: I will pull down my barns, and build greater; and there will I bestow all my fruits and my goods. And I will say to my soul, Soul, thou hast much goods laid up for many years; take thine ease, eat, drink, and be merry."⁸ The entire plan takes place inside his own mind, addressed to no one but himself, and the pronouns tell the story before the plan does. He speaks of his fruits, his barns, his goods, his soul, and he consults no one else at any point in the deliberation. His planning, reaching many years into the future, leaves out God, the poor, and his own household alike. His only conversation is with his own soul, and the counsel he gives it is to rest, eat, drink, and be merry, as though a soul could be satisfied on the same terms as a body.

Storehouses of that kind were an ordinary feature of an agricultural economy, built to hold a surplus against a lean season, and a man who built larger ones was simply doing what a prosperous farmer did in that world. The parable does not fault the barns. It faults a plan built entirely around them, a plan that reached forward many years and never once reached toward God.

The Fool and the Night His Soul Was Required

"But God said unto him, Thou fool, this night thy soul shall be required of thee: then whose shall those things be, which thou hast provided?"⁹ The verdict arrives the same night the plan is made, and it comes from the one judge whose ruling the man had never consulted. The word rendered fool in the wisdom literature of the Old Testament does not describe a man of weak intelligence. It describes a man blind to God, the man of whom the psalmist writes, "The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God."¹⁰ The rich man never said any such thing aloud. He said it in the shape of his plan, a plan that accounted for every contingency except the one that mattered.

"Then whose shall those things be, which thou hast provided?" The question exposes the entire project. He had labored, built, and stored for a future self who would never arrive, and on the night his life was required the goods passed to hands he never named and could not govern from the grave. Life, the parable insists, is not a possession a man manages on his own terms. It is held on terms set by another, called in at the hour that other appoints, and no barn, however large, can buy back a single hour once it is required.

Rich Toward God

"So is he that layeth up treasure for himself, and is not rich toward God."¹¹ The closing sentence names two conditions and sets them against each other. A man may lay up treasure for himself while giving no thought to God at all, and Jesus states plainly that this is folly, whatever the size of the estate involved. To be rich toward God is not a matter of giving away everything a man has. It is a matter of where the treasure is finally kept.

The same teaching appears in the Sermon on the Mount, and it answers the rich man's mistake directly: "Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal: but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal: for where your treasure is, there will your heart be also."¹² The rich man's heart had already gone where his barns were going. Paul gives the same instruction to those who already hold wealth in hand: "Charge them that are rich in this world, that they be not highminded, nor trust in uncertain riches, but in the living God, who giveth us richly all things to enjoy; that they do good, that they be rich in good works, ready to distribute, willing to communicate; laying up in store for themselves a good foundation against the time to come, that they may lay hold on eternal life."¹³ Riches are not condemned in either passage. Trust placed in riches, and a heart that never lays up anything beyond them, is what the parable condemns.

The Time He Did Not Have

James addresses men making the same confident kind of plan the rich man made, and the correction he gives could have been spoken over the rich man's barns before they were ever built. "Go to now, ye that say, To day or to morrow we will go into such a city, and continue there a year, and buy and sell, and get gain: whereas ye know not what shall be on the morrow. For what is your life? It is even a vapour, that appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away."¹⁴ The rich man's plan assumed many years. He was given one night. A vapor does not negotiate over how long it will last, and neither did his soul.

The parable does not condemn the harvest, the barns, or a plan to store what a good year produced. Every farmer must plan beyond a single season, and Scripture nowhere treats foresight as a vice. What the parable condemns is a life built without reference to the God who gave the increase and who alone determines how long the builder will remain to enjoy it. The rich man's error was not that he planned. It was that his planning never once looked upward, and the barns he pulled down and rebuilt became the whole horizon of a life that had, without his noticing, almost none left to run.