Scripture reflection for 18th Sunday in Ordinary Time:
Ecclesiastes 1:2; 2:21-23
Psalm 90:3-4, 5-6, 12-13, 14, 17
Colossians 3:1-5, 9-11
Luke 12:13-21
Is your barn big enough?
This Sunday’s scripture is about wanting more – and how all too often we think we need a bigger barn to hold our treasures. Is there ever enough space? Enough closets and shelves? Enough room for what we accumulate over the course of a lifetime?
It’s an age-old problem. People had to deal with that in Jesus’s day, and it’s still an issue. Storage companies are doing a booming business renting space for people to store college trophies, Christmas decorations and boxes of clothes that will never be worn again.
But what do we really need? What is really necessary? The truth is that our lives are measured most pointedly not by what we get, but by what we give.
Luke’s Gospel this Sunday puts it succinctly: “One’s life,” Jesus told his listeners, “does not consist of possessions.”
The parable that follows tells the story of a rich man who collected everything he wanted, but who neglected what really mattered. And all of this was revealed just hours before he was going to die.
“You fool,” God tells him. “The things you have prepared, to whom will they belong?’” And Jesus concluded with this pointed lesson: “Thus will it be for all who store up treasure for themselves but are not rich in what matters to God.”
If anyone is asking, “Well, what really matters to God?,” Luke’s Gospel has that answer, too. Flip back a few chapters and you will find the parable of the Good Samaritan, where we are taught in the most powerful and humbling way possible that what truly matters in this life boils down to two commandments: loving God and loving our neighbor.
We realize that if we are going to spend our lives pining for a bigger barn, what really needs to be enlarged is the barn of our heart.
How much room do we make there for God? For prayer, for fasting, for gratitude, for humility?
And how much room do we make there for others? For the lonely, the forgotten, the poor, the marginalized?
How much space do we devote to being good Samaritans to a broken, bleeding world?
Do we spend our lives accumulating things for our own happiness, while forgetting those around us who have nothing?
St. Paul has a few thoughts on that. This Sunday, we are confronted once again by Paul’s stark words to the Colossians.
“Think of what is above,” he wrote, “not of what is on earth…Put to death, then, the parts of you that are earthly: immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and the greed that is idolatry.”
We are meant, he writes, to be converted, changed, made new. “You have taken off the old self with its practices and have put on the new self, which is being renewed, for knowledge, in the image of its creator.”
In Luke’s Gospel, after Jesus concluded his parable about the rich man, he offered one more lesson – characteristically, pointing to simple things, the birds of the air and the flowers in the field, to make a larger point. God cares for them, he said. Know that he will also care for you.
In our own time – when so often we live with mistrust and fear and seek to accumulate stuff in the false belief it will keep us safe and happy – we need to take Christ’s words as a comfort and as a compass. This, he is telling us, is the way to live, and the way to eternal life.
Let go. Trust. Have faith. Look beyond the pleasures of this world and live for the next.
With the two great commandments as our guide, we need to look not at what we can get, but at what we can give.
In other words, we need to ask: Is the barn of my heart big enough?
Deacon Greg Kandra is an award-winning author and journalist, and creator of the blog “The Deacon’s Bench.”
