The Man Who Had No One to Talk To

The interruption

The parable does not begin as a parable. It begins as an interruption.

Jesus is speaking to a crowd about acknowledging him before others, and a man calls out from it: “Teacher, tell my brother to divide the inheritance with me.” Whatever else this man heard, he heard someone with enough standing to settle a family dispute.

Jesus refuses. “Man, who made me a judge or an arbitrator over you?” The words echo Exodus 2:14, where the Hebrew rejects Moses with almost the same sentence. That echo is worth noticing before deciding whose side the parable is on.

Be careful with the background here. Preachers often say a teacher would have been the natural person to settle such a case, but the evidence for that is mostly later rabbinic material read back into the first century, and the Babatha documents show Jewish property disputes going to Roman courts. The text alone gives you everything you need: a man wanted a ruling, and Jesus gave him a warning instead.

The relevant law is not Numbers 27, which handles inheritance when a man leaves no son. It is the ordinary situation of brothers holding an estate jointly, which stands behind Deuteronomy 21:17 and Deuteronomy 25:5.

The word Jesus puts over the parable

Verse 15 supplies the heading: “Guard yourselves against all pleonexia.”

The word means, quite literally, having-more-ness. It is wider than love of money; Paul uses it in Ephesians for appetites that have nothing to do with silver. Luke writes “every kind” of it, which widens it further.

Greek moral philosophy had thought about this. In the Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle defines the unjust man as the pleonektes, the one who takes more than his share. So there is real ancient warrant for hearing something zero-sum in the word, and none of it requires importing a modern cultural model.

Exegetical observations

12:16. “The land of a rich man produced well.” Notice what Luke does not say. There is no fraud, no seized field, no unpaid labourer. The land produced. Any sermon that makes this man a swindler is adding a character to the story.

12:17–19. Here is where the parable does its real work, and it does it with grammar.

In these three verses there are eight first-person singular verbs: what shall I do, I have, I will gather, I will do, I will pull down, I will build, I will gather, I will say. There are four occurrences of “my”: my crops, my barns, my goods, my soul. And there is one reflexive, “he considered within himself.”

Thirteen first-person markers in three verses. And in the whole of verses 16 to 19 there is no other human being. No wife, no steward, no neighbour, no poor man at the gate. No mention of God. The only conversation partner he can find is his own soul, and he has to address it directly to have anyone to speak to at all.

The soliloquy is a Lukan device. He uses it in 7:39, 16:3, 18:4 and 18:11, and 16:3 opens with the same words: “What shall I do?” Luke uses it to let a character convict himself out loud.

12:20. God speaks, and the first thing that happens is that the man is addressed in the second person for the first time in the parable. “Fool. This night your soul is demanded of you.”

“Fool” translates aphron, which in the Greek Old Testament is a moral and religious word rather than an intellectual one. It is the word of Psalm 14: the fool says in his heart there is no God.

The verb rendered “is demanded” is third person plural, literally “they are demanding it back,” and it is best read as a way of speaking about God’s action without naming him as the agent. A textual note worth knowing: some important witnesses read a simpler verb without the “back” prefix, so do not build a whole point on the idea of a loan being recalled.

Then the question that has no answer in the story: “The things you prepared, whose will they be?”

12:21. “So is the one who stores up treasure for himself and is not rich toward God.” The reflexive closes a loop. He deliberated within himself in verse 17, and so he stored for himself in verse 21. The contrast Luke draws is between self and God, not between self and neighbour.

The parallel worth showing your people

Sirach 11:18–19 is almost a quotation:

When he says, “I have found rest, and now I shall feast on my goods,” he does not know how much time will pass until he leaves them to others and dies.

The verbal contact is close: found rest, my goods, leaving them to others. But there is a difference worth naming from the pulpit. Ben Sira’s man got rich by miserliness. Luke’s man simply had a good harvest. Luke has taken a familiar warning about death and removed the part that would let a comfortable listener off the hook.

What most readers miss

It is an interruption, and Jesus refuses it before he tells the parable. The story is not a lesson Jesus set out to teach. A man in the crowd wanted a ruling on his family’s estate, and the parable is what he got instead of one.

The refusal is a quotation. “Who made me a judge or an arbitrator over you” lands almost exactly on Exodus 2:14, where a Hebrew rejects Moses for stepping in. Before deciding whose side the parable takes, notice that Jesus answers a request for arbitration with the sentence used to push an unwanted arbitrator away.

Thirteen first-person markers in three verses, and not one other person. Eight “I” verbs, four occurrences of “my”, one “within himself”. No wife, no steward, no neighbour, no labourer, no beggar. Not God either. The man has to address his own soul because there is nobody else in the scene to talk to.

He is not spoken to until God speaks. Verse 20 is the first time in the parable that anyone addresses him in the second person. The loneliness is not an inference from the plot. It is built into the pronouns.

“Rich toward God” is not defined here. Luke defines it twelve verses later, at 12:33, and the definition is giving. Preachers routinely supply their own content for the phrase when Luke has already supplied his.

Why this matters: a man talking to himself

Luke has a habit worth pointing out. He repeatedly lets a character deliberate out loud, and the deliberation convicts them without a narrator’s help: the Pharisee at dinner in 7:39, the dishonest manager in 16:3, the unjust judge in 18:4, the Pharisee praying in 18:11. Two of them open with the same words this man uses, “what shall I do.”

So the soliloquy is not a stylistic accident, and it is not there to give us access to his private thoughts in a modern novelistic way. In Luke it is the device that shows a person reasoning without anyone to correct them. Once a congregation knows that, verse 17 stops being a man thinking and becomes a man with no one to think alongside. That is the whole parable in one grammatical habit, and it costs nothing to show.

Movements

1. The question Jesus would not answer (12:13–15). A man asks for what is his. Jesus does not say the claim is invalid. He says the man is standing in more danger than he knows, and names it.

2. A man alone with his own plans (12:16–19). Read the soliloquy aloud and let the congregation hear how crowded it is with one person. This movement carries the sermon.

3. The word God uses (12:20). Not “thief.” Not “swindler.” Fool, in the biblical sense: the man who has arranged his life as though God were not a factor in it.

4. Rich toward God (12:21). Luke does not define the phrase here. He defines it twelve verses later, in 12:33, where the treasure that does not fail is made by giving. Preach the definition Luke supplies rather than one you supply.

From study to pulpit

On the refusal. Possible way to explain this to the congregation: “A man asks Jesus to make his brother split the inheritance. Notice that Jesus never says the man is wrong. He might well have been cheated. Jesus just refuses to be the one who settles it, and warns him that there is something more dangerous going on in him than an unfair brother.”

On the grammar. Possible way to explain this to the congregation: “Listen to how he talks. My crops. My barns. My goods. My soul. I will pull down, I will build, I will say. Three verses, thirteen times he refers to himself, and there is not one other person anywhere in them. He ends up talking to his own soul, because there is nobody else there.”

On the word fool. Possible way to explain this to the congregation: “God does not call him a thief. He calls him a fool, and in the Bible that is not an insult about intelligence. It is the word for someone who has arranged his life as though God were not a factor. This man was not stupid. He was a good farmer with a sound plan. He had simply left one name off the list of people the plan involved.”

Theological implications

The parable locates folly in a relationship, or the absence of one. This man’s sin is not visible in his accounts. It is visible in his sentence structure.

Second, the parable treats death as a matter of ownership. The life is demanded back, which means it was never held outright. That is a harder and more interesting claim than “life is short.”

Christological connection, where it is warranted

Do not force one into the parable itself; there is no Christ figure in it. The warranted connection is contextual. This sits inside a chapter where Jesus tells his hearers not to be anxious about food and clothing, points at ravens who have no storehouse or barn, and then tells them to sell their possessions and make purses that do not wear out.

The one who says this is the one who, in Luke 3:17, gathers his own harvest into his own barn. The image is not condemned. The question is whose barn, and for whom.

Contemporary pastoral application

Aim at competence, because that is who this parable is for. The man does nothing stupid. He assesses a surplus, identifies a storage problem, and solves it. Every instinct he shows would be praised in a performance review.

The application is not “do not save.” Luke has just had Jesus commend prudent stewards. The application is the question the parable leaves open: who is in the room when you make your plans? A man can build a whole future without once consulting God, a spouse, a friend, or anyone who might need what he is storing, and nothing in the plan will look wrong from the outside.

For an older congregation, the sting is verse 20’s unanswered question about the heirs. For a younger one, it is that the man’s reward for a lifetime of good decisions is a night he did not see coming.

Illustration possibilities

The grammar is the illustration. Put verses 17 to 19 on a screen and mark every “I” and “my.” It costs nothing, invents nothing, and it lands.

Second, contrast the two barns in Luke: this man’s in 12:18, and the Messiah’s in 3:17.

Avoid inventing a story about a wealthy man in your town who died suddenly. Congregations recognise those, and the parable does not need help.

Sermon dynamics

Visual contrast. Put verses 17 to 19 on a screen and highlight every “I” and every “my” as you read. Then, on the same screen, show verse 20 with the single word “you” marked. The turn from one to the other is the sermon, and the room will see it before you explain it.

Intentional silence. After reading “The things you prepared, whose will they be?”, stop. Ten to fifteen seconds. The parable leaves the question open; a preacher who fills the gap immediately closes something Jesus deliberately left standing.

Congregational question. “Who is in the room when you make your biggest decisions?” Ask it once, early, and let it sit under the rest of the sermon rather than answering it.

Congregational reading. Have the room read verse 15 aloud together at the start, and again at the end. It is the heading Jesus himself put over the parable, and hearing it twice frames everything between.

Closing direction

End on the unanswered question rather than on an application. “The things you prepared, whose will they be?” is where the parable stops, and it stops there on purpose.

If an evangelistic call fits, the door is “rich toward God” understood as a relationship rather than a balance. The man in the parable was never poor. He was only alone.