Jesus said to his disciples: “Do not be afraid any longer, little flock, for your Father is pleased to give you the kingdom. Sell your belongings and give alms. Provide money bags for yourselves that do not wear out, an inexhaustible treasure in heaven that no thief can reach nor moth destroy. For where your treasure is, there also will your heart be.” (Luke 12.32-34)
In Mark Twain’s masterful book, Tom Sawyer, he tells of the time that young Tom decides to go treasure hunting. Twain explains it in this way: “There comes a time in every rightly constructed boy’s life when he has a raging desire to go somewhere and dig for hidden treasure. This desire suddenly came upon Tom one day. He sallied out to find Joe Harper, but failed of success. Next he sought Ben Rogers; he had gone fishing. Presently he stumbled upon Huck Finn the Red-Handed. Huck would answer.”
Twain writes, “Tom took him to a private place and opened the matter to him confidentially. Huck was willing. Huck was always willing to take a hand in any enterprise that offered entertainment and required no capital, for he had a troublesome superabundance of that sort of time which is not money. ‘Where’ll we dig?’ said Huck. ‘Oh, most anywhere.’”
As the story moves along, Tom and Huck dig underneath a tree at night, but find nothing. But they aren’t deterred. When Huck asks Tom what he will do with the treasure when they find it, Tom explains that he will get married, which Huck considers an absurd use of the money, telling Tom that he would spend it all on pie and soda.
What the pair learns, much to their surprise, is that their search for treasure causes more trouble than good, their efforts to find the treasure in a cave turning them into witnesses of a murder, putting a mark on their backs and resulting in Tom and Becky’s becoming lost in the cave, near the brink of death when finally discovered by the townspeople. Although the treasure is found, Tom comes to see that it was not without cost.
Today, Rabbi Jesus wants to talk about treasure also, apparently familiar, as Tom was, with every person’s desire to find it. Not surprisingly, considering Luke’s point of view, the evangelist proposes that his listeners search for a different kind of treasure, or as Rabbi Jesus says, “Provide money bags for yourselves that do not wear out, an inexhaustible treasure in heaven that no thief can reach nor moth destroy.”
Obviously, as these words indicate, The Teacher is not interested in gold coins or dollar bills or, for that matter, material wealth of any sort. Luke, even more so than his fellow gospel writers, is adamant about the foolishness of going after earthly treasure, instead putting before us the favorable position of the poor in the eyes of the Galilean Teacher.
For instance, Luke, in his beatitudes, writes, “Blessed are you who are poor, for the kingdom of God is yours,” whereas Matthew waters it down by writing, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” Even a casual reading of the two texts reveals a fundamental difference, with Luke describing those who are physically poor, without money or means, destitute and deprived of earthly treasure.
As we saw last week, Luke alone of the evangelists tells the story of the rich farmer who wants to build bigger barns in which to put his bounty, a decision that results in the Most High God calling the man a fool, the only instance in the gospels of God indicting a man’s actions with that single appellation, a summary judgment if there ever was one in scripture.
Soon enough, we will find Luke telling another story of a rich man, this one who sits at his table every day eating fine foods, while a poor man named Lazarus sits at the stoop of the door begging for scraps, but receives nothing from the rich man who is oblivious to the odor and impoverishment of the pauper who starves before his very eyes. Again, a severe judgment is heaped upon the rich man who finds himself in torment in the hereafter while Lazarus now dines at the table of Abraham.
Other examples abound in the Lucan text, as we will see in future days, reminding us that Luke urges his listeners to abandon and forswear earthly treasure, his favor consistently falling upon the poor, from the low-wage shepherds at the start of his story to the penniless widow near the end of his story who deposits her last two cents in the Temple treasury, winning Rabbi Jesus’ praise while the wealthy receive no such pat on the back.
Poised and primed for hunting down treasure as much or more so than Tom Sawyer, we find ourselves in an awkward position, our training and natural tendency to seek out treasure chests, whether filled with coins or with cultural merit badges, while Rabbi Jesus, as portrayed by Luke, would have us “sell our belongings and give alms,” in this way accumulating a heavenly treasure, even if our pant pockets are empty and our money bags are light as a feather. Rabbi Jesus, it seems, measures success by a different metric.
If, then, we are going to give Luke’s text more than a cursory glance or glare, depending on our attitude towards his teaching, we have to spend some time determining and deciding upon which path we are walking and upon which path we ultimately want to take–the path that leads to material wealth or the path that leads us to spiritual well-being, implicitly understood as seeking, not riches on earth, but treasure in heaven.
It is as clear-cut a decision as the story told by Robert Levine in one of his books in which he tells the story of an old rabbi who spent many hours working in the ghetto of the city, offering whatever help and means he could to the homeless and to the hounded, to the outcast and the oppressed, seeking to alleviate their misery and misfortune as much as possible.
One day a member of the rabbi’s congregation, a wealthy diamond merchant, challenged the rabbi, asking him why he wasted so much of his time with lowlifes and crazies and street people. The rabbi in turn asked the merchant if he had ever unknowingly thrown out a million dollar diamond in the rough. “Never!” the merchant answered emphatically, incensed that the rabbi would even suggest such an absurd idea, telling the rabbi, “An expert would know the worth of whatever he held in his hand.”
Looking at the merchant, the rabbi then said, “I’ll let you in on a secret. I’m also an expert on diamonds. I walk the streets every day and all I see are the most precious diamonds walking past me. Some of them you have to pick up from the gutter and polish a bit. But once you do, how they shine! So, you see,” the rabbi said, “the most important thing you have to know in life is that everyone, everyone, is a diamond in the rough.”
Again, the story provides us with a contrast, putting before us a choice to expend ourselves on getting diamonds, metaphorically representing mansions or pensions or other piled up possessions, or in using our time to help the poor and the oppressed, the disposable and the dispossessed around us who are penniless and pitiful in their plight and poverty.
Intoxicated and ingrained by our culture to possess more and more, not unlike geese who are overfed so that their livers are fattened in order to become the dinner delicacy pate de foie gras, we find it difficult and distressing to heed Rabbi Jesus’ words to sell most everything and to give alms, convincing ourselves that he didn’t really mean what he said, choosing instead to collude with con men who want us to believe our worth is found in our wallets and our value is found in our stock portfolios.
For those who have succumbed to society’s imperative to stuff ourselves with stuff, It is a difficult climb out of this so-called affluence, fearful and fretful as we are without our safety net and our security blankets, sure that we’ll end up on the streets if we share too much or give away too much, even as our closets fill up and our storage units multiply.
If Luke cannot shake us out of our insecurities as he tells of Rabbi Jesus’ preferential option for the poor, then perhaps nothing will. As we take a moment to consider again the Galilean’s call to concern ourselves with treasure in heaven and not to become obsessed with our retirement plans on earth, we face the inexorable truth that, when our days are done, we take nothing with us except the good we have done. We leave everything else behind, except the clothes on our back that go with us in the coffin. And even these disintegrate and disappear with time.
The Roman philosopher Seneca, a contemporary of Rabbi Jesus, once said, “It is not the man who has too little, but the man who craves more, who is poor. He and the Galilean preacher were on the same page when it comes to our insatiable desire to have more. In the end, it seems there is only one way to change our mindset that has us want more, have more, hold onto more stuff. It is this–we have to want the ways of God even more.
–Jeremy Myers
Sunday Brunch 