The Parable of the Rich Fool Explained (6 of 26)

The parable starts with Jesus refusing to do something, and the refusal is more interesting than most treatments allow.

A man in the crowd asks him to make his brother divide the inheritance. It is a reasonable request. There is a law about it. And Jesus will not touch it.

Why Does Jesus Refuse to Settle the Inheritance?

Because of what settling it would accomplish.

The man is not asking for arbitration. He is asking Jesus to take his side, and the cry contains no self-examination of any kind. Nothing about what he might have done, nothing about his brother’s position, only a demand for what is owed.

Bailey reads the refusal as deliberate on two grounds.

A ruling would have finalised the break. Two brothers in a broken relationship do not need a verdict; a verdict ends the possibility of anything else. Jesus answers that he was not appointed a judge or divider between them, and the word divider is doing work.

And the demand itself is a symptom. Jesus treats the cry for justice as evidence of a condition rather than as a case to be heard, and he goes after the condition instead. Which is why the answer is a story about a man with no brother in it at all.^[1]

What Story Was Jesus Rewriting?

One his hearers already knew, from Ben Sirach.

Bailey points to Sirach 11:18-19, where a man grows rich by sharpness and grabbing, tells himself he has found rest and can now enjoy his goods, and does not know how long it will last; he will have to leave his goods to others and die. Psalm 49 and Eccl 2:1-11 work the same ground. What matters is what Jesus did with it, and Bailey counts six changes.

Sirach has one speech; Jesus has four, with two speakers. God himself is heard at the end. Sirach’s man earned his wealth and asks what to do with his earnings; Jesus’ man is handed a bumper crop he did nothing for and has to ask what to do with what he has not earned, and never notices that this is the question. Jesus introduces the idea of a loan, so that when the soul is called in the listener wonders whether the wealth was ever his either. Sirach exposes the man’s way of life and stops; Jesus shows the isolation it produces. And Jesus’ man is already rich when the story opens, so the whole parable is about surplus. Snodgrass is more cautious: no direct dependence is likely, the two share a wisdom tradition’s view of wealth and sudden death, and in Sirach the man gets rich by effort while in the parable it is the land that prospers.^[2]

What Does the Rich Man Actually Do Wrong?

Nothing illegal, and that is the difficulty.

He has a good harvest. His barns are too small. He builds bigger ones, stores the surplus, and tells himself to relax and enjoy it.

Every step is prudent. A farmer with a surplus and inadequate storage should build storage. Nobody in the parable is defrauded.

What is absent is the tell. He never considers that any of it might be for anyone else. Sharing does not occur to him, not as a duty declined but as a thought never entertained. Bailey adds a detail from the period that makes the barns themselves an accusation: the barns were where the tithes and offerings were set aside, and the priests and Levites came to the barns to collect them. This man is planning bigger barns with other things on his mind.

Underneath that sits an assumption about ownership. He treats the surplus as exclusively his, when a surplus of that kind arrives as much by weather and land as by effort. Bailey’s framing is that material possessions belong to God and reach people as gifts, sometimes as unearned surplus, and the rich man has quietly reclassified a gift as property.

How Is the Parable Built?

As five stanzas inside two wisdom sayings, on Bailey’s reading, with the goods given at the start and left behind at the end.

GENERAL PRINCIPLE   "Take heed, and beware of every kind of insatiable desire.
                     For life for a person does not consist in the surpluses of his possessions."
1  GOODS GIVEN      "There was a certain rich man / whose land brought forth plenty.
 2  PROBLEM           And he discussed with himself saying, 'What shall I do, / for I have no place to store my crops?'
  3  PLAN (PRESENT)     And he said, 'I will do this: / I will pull down my barns and build larger barns; / and I will store all my grain and my goods.
 4  PLAN (FUTURE)     And I will say to my soul, "Soul! / You have ample goods laid up for many years. / Relax, eat, drink, and enjoy yourself"'
5  GOODS LEFT       But God said to him, 'Fool! / This night your soul is required of you, / and what you have prepared, whose will these things be?'
GENERAL PRINCIPLE   So is he who treasures up for himself, / and is not gathering riches for God."

The first stanza gives the goods, the centre stores them, the last leaves them behind. The rich man’s speeches fill the middle three, and the centre of the structure is the man’s own voice, which is where the turn comes in the unjust steward as well. The last line is Bailey’s translation, with both verbs active: treasuring up for himself, and not gathering riches for God.

Who Is He Talking To?

Himself, and Bailey counts that as the sharpest detail in the story.

Read the monologue. What shall I do. I will do this. I will say to myself. My crops, my barns, my grain, my soul.

There is no other person in it. No wife, no children, no steward, no neighbour, no friend. A man with that much grain had people around him constantly, and none of them appears.^[3]

Bailey’s reason is cultural. A village landowner lives in the village, not out on his land, and the leading men decide things at the gate after hours of talk; a man like this does his thinking in a crowd. Luke does not write “he said to himself,” the phrase used of the unjust steward and the unjust judge. He writes that the man dialogued with himself, which to Bailey means he had nobody else to dialogue with. The prophetic text behind the picture is Isa 5:8, the woe on those who add field to field until there is no room left “and you are made to dwell alone in the midst of the land.”

Snodgrass will not follow him there. Soliloquy, he says, is a rhetorical device and has nothing to do with whether a man has friends; first-person pronouns are what soliloquies are made of and prove nothing on their own. The self-centredness is shown by the plans in v. 19, not by the fact that he talks to himself. Blomberg keeps the pronouns as the most striking feature of the passage. I still think Bailey has the better ear for the scene, but the isolation is his inference from a Middle Eastern reading rather than a plain fact of the text, and I should have said so the first time.

His wealth had already cost him every relationship capable of bearing weight, and he had nobody to talk to about his own life except himself. Worse, he did not know it was a problem.

What Does God Actually Say to Him?

That the life he is planning to enjoy is being recalled.

The wording is precise. This night your soul is required of you. Required is the language of a loan being called in, which recasts everything he has been assuming. He thought he owned his life the way he thought he owned the grain.

The man’s own last line had been borrowed, and borrowed badly. Bailey traces “eat, drink, and enjoy yourself” to Eccl 8:15, where the Preacher commends enjoyment “through the days of life which God gives him under the sun.” The rich man remembers the first half of the verse and forgets the half about who gives the days. God’s reply is also in Ecclesiastes, at Eccl 2:18-19: I must leave it all to the man who comes after me, “and who knows whether he will be a wise man or a fool?” As Bailey puts it, the rich fool had not read Ecclesiastes carefully.

There is a play on words underneath “fool” as well. The rare verb for the land bringing forth plenty in v. 16 is euphoreō; the word for enjoying yourself in v. 19 is euphrainō, whose root phrōn is the diaphragm, the seat of the spirit and the emotions in Greek thinking, so that a man with euphrōn had the good life in full measure. Then God calls him aphrōn, the same root with the negating prefix, a man with no diaphragm left to expand. Bailey reads it as deliberate: the man thinks many things will produce the good life, and is in reality without mind, spirit or emotion. The New Testament has four words for fool, and Luke chose one of the two strong ones.

Then the second half, which is the part that stings. The things you have prepared, whose will they be?

He is not merely losing his wealth. He is losing any say in where it goes. He may have a will, and when the dust settles somebody else will hold what he spent his life accumulating, and he will not be consulted.

Is the Parable Against Wealth?

No, and reading it that way lets everyone off.

Nothing in the story condemns the harvest, the barns, or the farming. Scripture does not treat wealth as inherently evil, and this parable does not either.

What it goes after is a specific mistake, which is locating security in accumulation. The man’s plan assumes that enough stored grain buys enough years, and the plan fails on its own terms within hours.

The closing line names the alternative. Being rich toward God, which the parable defines by contrast: treasuring for God rather than for self, and understanding a surplus as something entrusted rather than earned.

What Does This Have to Do With the Brother?

Everything, and the frame is the point.

A man asks for his fair share. Jesus tells a story about a man who got his fair share, kept all of it, and died that night with no one to leave it to and no one to talk to.

Wright gives the frame a national dimension that Bailey does not. The man asking about the inheritance was typical, he says, of the attitude many of Jesus’ fellow Jews took to the Land itself: possession of the Land was a vital symbol, families clung to their inheritance for religious as well as economic reasons, and Jesus was announcing that God was changing all that. In his bigger book Wright compresses it to a sentence: Israel is like a rich fool, storing up investment in land and property when her world is about to collapse around her. Snodgrass rejects the transfer outright; this is a single, non-metaphorical parable about one man’s trust in his possessions, and nothing in it points to Israel. I find Wright persuasive because of where Luke puts the story, in a run of warnings about a master coming back and signs not being read, but the reading is Wright’s and the parable stands without it.^[4]

The answer is not that the brother is wrong about the inheritance. It is that winning the argument would have given him exactly what the rich fool had.

Part of a series working through the parables. See also the parable of the talents.

Footnotes4

1. That Jesus declines to give a just ruling deserves more attention than it gets, because it cuts against a common assumption that justice is always the right answer. His judgment here is that a correct verdict would have completed a destruction already underway, and he goes after the appetite behind the request instead.
2. Snodgrass's caution belongs here. He grants that Jesus knew the content of literature like Sirach and that the parable shares its attitude to wealth and the suddenness of death, but he would not say Jesus rewrote Sirach's story. Bailey's six differences still stand as a description of what is distinctive in the parable, whichever way the dependence runs.
3. The absence of any second person in the monologue is easy to miss on a fast reading and hard to unsee afterward. Count the first-person pronouns. A man that wealthy had a household, and the parable does not let a single one of them into his thinking. Snodgrass's objection, that the pronouns are simply what a soliloquy is made of, is taken up in the body.
4. Wright's sentence sits in his survey of Luke 11-13 as a run of warnings: those who refuse Jesus will be cast out, the rich fool, the master coming home to unready servants, the crowd that can read the weather but not the times. Read in that company the parable is about Israel's moment. Read on its own, as Snodgrass insists it should be, it is about one man and his barns. The two readings do not exclude each other unless you make them.

Sources

Kenneth E. Bailey, Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes: Cultural Studies in the Gospels (IVP Academic, 2008), chapter 23. Supports the reading of the refusal as declining to finalise a broken relationship, the treatment of the cry for justice as a symptom, the analysis of possessions as gifts rather than property, the observation that the rich man has no one to share his life with, the recall of life as a loan, the Isaiah 5:8 background to the isolation, and the half-quoted Ecclesiastes 8:15 with 2:18-19 as the reply. Supplied in full.

Kenneth E. Bailey, Poet and Peasant and Through Peasant Eyes: A Literary-Cultural Approach to the Parables in Luke, combined ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1983), Through Peasant Eyes chapter 4, "The Rich Fool." Supports the five-stanza structure and the diagram reproduced in the post, Sirach 11 as the literary background and the six differences, the tithe barns, the distinction between "said to himself" and "dialogued with himself," the euphoreō / euphrainō / aphrōn wordplay, the four New Testament words for fool, "required" as loan language, and the active-participle translation of v. 21. In print, and in Logos.

Tom Wright, Luke for Everyone (London: SPCK, 2004), on Luke 12:13-34. Supports the reading of the petitioner as typical of the attitude to the Land, the Land as a vital Jewish symbol, and Israel in danger of becoming like the man in the story. In print, and in Logos.

N. T. Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1996), chapter 8, "Stories of the Kingdom (3): Judgment and Vindication," on the Luke 12 warnings. Supports the one-sentence reading of Israel as a rich fool storing up investment in land and property when her world is about to collapse. In print, and in Logos.

Klyne R. Snodgrass, Stories with Intent: A Comprehensive Guide to the Parables of Jesus, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2018), "The Rich Fool." Supports the dissent on soliloquy and first-person pronouns as proof of isolation, the caution that no direct dependence on Sirach is likely, the note that in the parable it is the land that prospers, and the rejection of Wright's Israel reading on the ground that the parable is single and non-metaphorical. In print, and in Logos.

Craig L. Blomberg, Interpreting the Parables, 2nd ed. (Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2012), section 8.1.5. Supports the repeated "I" as the most striking feature of the passage. In print, and in Logos.

The biblical texts cited: Luke 12:13-21, Matt 20:1-16, Jas 1:11, Isa 5:8, Eccl 2:1-11, Eccl 2:18-19, Eccl 8:15, and Sirach 11:18-19.

Where the sourcing stops: the legal background to the inheritance dispute is not detailed here and the man's specific claim is not recoverable from the text. Whether the parable was originally told in this setting or joined to the inheritance question later is not addressed. Bailey lays the parable out in five stanzas in Through Peasant Eyes and in seven in Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes; I have used the five. The Sirach numbering follows the common versification (11:18-19); Bailey's own citation reads 11:19-20. The isolation reading and the Israel reading are both presented as their authors' inferences, and Snodgrass disputes both.