Pay Attention to the Great Economy (Lk 12:13-21)
9th Sunday after Pentecost
This week I am commenting on Lk 12:22-34, a keystone teaching that has been marginalized in the lectionary (Sunday’s RCL gospel is 12:32-40). By skipping over it, the RCL cuts out the heart of Jesus argument following on the 8th Sunday’s story of the rich farmer. Year A, meanwhile, places Matthew’s version of this teaching (Mt 6:25-34)—a Q tradition that is substantially the same—on the 8th Sunday after Epiphany, which rarely gets read because the season is almost never that long. I strongly believe we should hold together all of Luke 12:13-34, the first half of which we looked at last week.
Having established equity as the plumb line of Sabbath Economics in Luke’s “first rich man” story, Jesus now turns to its deeper underpinnings in the cosmology of grace. The section begins: “For this reason I tell you not to be anxious!” (12:22-23). This is a command, not a suggestion, and is repeated in refrain in what follows (vv. 25, 26). Jesus’ counsel provides striking contrast to the rich farmer’s strategy.
Rich man: “I will say to my soul (psuche) … take it easy, eat.”
Jesus: “Don’t be anxious for your life (psuche), what you will eat.”
Jesus understands that our preoccupation with “market security” blinds us to the truth of the Great Economy and asserts a counter-imperative (12:24, 27). The Greek katanoesate commands urgent action: “Refocus your attention!” Jesus is no doubt pointing out his alternative object lessons as he walks through a field with his disciples.
The truth is close at hand—if we pause long enough from our civilizational preoccupations to encounter what Aquinas called “the book of nature.” Or as Luther put it: “God writes the gospel not in the Bible alone, but on trees and flowers and clouds and stars.”
Two examples follow in parallel, each including an assurance about God’s care and a reiteration about anxiety (12:24-29):
a. Turn your attention to the ravens: they neither sow nor reap, they have neither storehouse nor barn,
b. and yet God feeds them. Of how much more value are you than the birds!
c. And can any of you by being anxious add a single hour to your span of life? If then you are not able to do so small a thing as that, why do you worry about the rest? (23-26)
a. Turn your attention to the lilies, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin; yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these.
b. But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, how much more will he clothe you—you of little faith!
c. And do not keep striving for what you are to eat and what you are to drink, and do not keep being anxious. (27-29)
Sadly, we modern folk have no intention of learning economics from birds and flowers. Yet to dismiss Jesus here is to miss the key to his alternative cosmology—and to our liberation. The raven (12:24) calls to mind three Hebrew Bible texts that praise the Creator’s gracious provision to all living things, particularly in times of hunger.
- Job 38:41: “Who provides for the raven its prey when its young ones cry to God and wander about for lack of food?”
- Psalm 147:9: “God gives to the animals their food, and to the young ravens when they cry.”
- 1 Kings 17:4-6: The prophet Elijah is fed by a raven, a story that takes place during a famine and is followed by another “feeding miracle” (17:7-16).
Birds know nothing about the rich man’s agriculture or barns, yet they can teach us about divine provision.
Jesus invites us to have “eyes to see” a Great Economy from which we are deeply alienated, being utterly preoccupied by the works of our hands and our built environments, having objectified and commodified nature beyond recognition. His teaching is not utopian ranting. “Utopia” was Thomas More’s contemptuous term for the world that does not and cannot exist. Jesus, however, is talking about a very real world right in front of us: the alive, complex, interdependent world of the biosphere.
Nor is Jesus suggesting an “unattainable ideal.” This cosmology has been embraced by Indigenous peoples the world over and throughout history, whose economic lifeways were traditionally characterized by symbiosis with nature and by local, cooperative, and sustainable production and consumption. The Bible is simply reminding us of the oldest wisdom on the planet. But we moderns long ago rejected it in favor of the delusion that we can defy every limit in our pursuit of artificially engineered “growth”—a delusion that Jesus addresses explicitly.
He warns us against imagining that we can add a single cubit to our stature (12:25f; prosthenai, whence our word “prosthetics”), a metaphor for increasing our life span (as in Ps. 39:5- 6, which also reminds us that we can’t take possessions beyond the grave). The ancients understood the grace of finitude, but we are the children of Icarus: Our footprint is too big on the earth, and we are flying too close to the sun.
Jesus’ second example is the wild lilies that bloomed around the Jordan Valley in early spring. They do not engage in hard labor such as spinning cloth. “But I’m telling you,” he urges with rhetorical insistence, “Solomon in all his glory was never ‘wrapped around’ like one of these.” His reference to the sumptuous royal garb of Israel’s most powerful king is probably a euphemism for the Jerusalem temple, the zenith of Israel’s civilizational aspirations. In other words, the greatest technological and social achievement known to his Judean contemporaries has less intrinsic value than one wildflower in the Divine economy. Yikes, what if Jesus means it?
This is the opposite of our capitalist cosmology, which legitimizes the routine sacrifice of whole landscapes and species to the idols of technological hegemony and economic growth in a continuing holocaust of extraction and extinction. Mountain tops are blown off for coal and prairies poisoned for tar sand oil, while the baiji dolphin, the West African black rhino, and the Pyrenean ibex have disappeared forever.
A quarter century ago the World Conservation Union’s 2003 Red List of Threatened Species already included a fifth of all mammals across the globe, almost a third of all amphibians, more than a third of all gymnosperms, and significant percentages of all fish, flowering plants, mosses, and insects. And we think Jesus was crazy? (Right: Art by Bob Haverluck, http://ccsonline.ca/haverluck/)
Jesus in Luke 12:29f is not invoking some heroic or ascetic imperative. He emphasizes that God is mindful of our legitimate material needs. Rather, he is repudiating the rich man’s feasting in the shadow of his barns of greed (12:19), the kind of Affluence that “all the nations of the world hustle after” (12:30). Roman imperial culture was indeed awash in such addictive-compulsive behavior, and so is ours. We are taught to compete incessantly to accrue private wealth to satisfy our socialized appetites. Our nurturing heavenly parent, on the other hand, just wants to gift us with sustenance.
The vision here, as in Exodus 16, is of an economy of enough. If we seek the Great Economy, our life necessities will be “added” to us (Lk 12:31; same verb as verse 25). Last week’s rich farmer secured his food and drink by playing the market to his advantage, and trusting in accumulation. Disciples are to trust in a different economic cosmology, one in which the Creator is “pleased” to gift sustenance for all (12:32).
This is why we can feel free to communitize our assets with a special concern for the poorest—which is what Jesus abruptly commands us to do in 12:33. His rationale is simple: thieves can’t steal what isn’t hoarded, and moths can’t eat what isn’t stockpiled (James employs this same image in his rant against murderous Affluenza, Jas 5:1-5). Jesus will make this same discipleship demand of another rich man—which is rejected (Lk 18:22-24). Anticipating this, the teaching concludes by reiterating the moral to the parable of the barns: “Where your treasure is, there your heart will also be” (12:34 = 12:21).
“Pay attention to the spotted owl,” urges Jesus. “Blather!” responds our internalized voice of modern economic orthodoxy. The history of “Progress” has been predicated on the belief that nature is an object to exploit for our industrial purposes, and that value is only what we impute through our relentless pillaging of the biosphere for profit. Yet this project has clearly brought both ecological and socio-economic systems to the brink of collapse. So who is the “fool” here? Shall we trust in an economic cosmology that sustained human life for 100,000 years or more, or
one that may not last another 100?
We need a new economic story—or rather an old one—in which our material behavior is meant to serve social and ecological relationships, beginning with the most vulnerable. But we won’t embrace it as long as we are captive to our capitalist cosmology.
Sabbath Economics is a vision whose time has come again; may we “have ears to hear” to listen to the birds.
Recent kind words for HARP:
“I want to thank you for your Healing Affluenza book. I am a recovering evangelical who has been theologically adrift for a decade or so after spending 30 or so years as a pastor inside the movement. I haven’t had a framework in which to understand the bible and God since abandoning evangelicalism. Long story short, your writings have been an immense help, and I have followed your work since then and have grown in appreciation for your wisdom and hermeneutic. I am so grateful to be reading this latest tome – it excites my mind and heart as it reorients me in so many ways. I am ashamed to think of how badly evangelical theology and ‘practice’ has left its adherents bereft of the ability to discern its practice and place in a time such as this. Thank you, thank you!” –Tim, Virginia
–Ched
