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.

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.

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.

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.