This past week during our campus ministry’s Bible study at Bryn Mawr College, we discussed the “Parable of the Rich Fool” from Luke’s Gospel (12:13-21). If you recall, in this parable, a well-off man finds himself with an abundant harvest. Running out of room for storage, he decides to tear down the existing barns and build larger ones to store up his overflowing crop. At that very moment, God comes to him and says that he will die that night. The question is this: to whom will belong all that the rich man has amassed? Without knowing he would die (and perhaps imagining that he was invincible), the man has saved up his fortune for nothing. The moral of this parable is that there is judgment for those who are not “rich toward God.”
As we discussed this challenging parable at our Bible study, we explored what this might mean for us today. Does it mean that we shouldn’t prepare for our future through fiscal responsibility or savings? Are we not supposed to “store up” material things to provide for our children and relatives after we’re gone? We could ask question after question in this vein. But I don’t such questions are really what Jesus was after when he told this parable. I think that Jesus was speaking about a posture of abundance as opposed to a posture of scarcity. If you recall, the “rich fool” enters into a solipsistic dialogue with himself. He addresses his own soul in the dialogue. It’s a terribly self-centered conversation that he’s having. And God is the one who interrupts this self-centeredness with a stark reminder that the man is mortal and the world is larger than this man and his wealth.
My reading of this parable is that it’s not a question of preparing for the future or not. Of course, we should be sensible in preparing for our future, that of our loved ones, and yes, of the Church that will live on after we have died. Rather, the parable poses the questions of whether our preparations for future security are fear based and whether or not we are willing to give even more than we are willing to save. Jesus’s parable challenges our desire for security, which is usually material security or emotional security. We want to store up everything we can so that we can be happy. In short, if we see with the eyes of scarcity, it’s hard to trust God.
Trusting God is what the spiritual practice of self-denial is all about. Self-denial can look like any number of things, but ultimately, it’s about parting with what seems dearest to us in order to strengthen our reliance on God alone. In this sense, self-denial is quite similar to fasting. Fasting refers, particularly, to refraining from food or drink to remind ourselves that we don’t live on bread alone but on every word that comes from the mouth of God (Deuteronomy 8:3). Self-denial means that we refrain from doing something that pleases us in order to recall that it is indeed possible to survive (and even thrive!) without the thing that has taken hold of us. Self-denial is not masochism or deliberate torture of ourselves; there’s no edification in such practices. Instead, denying ourselves is instructive in forming our whole-hearted dependence on God alone.
Self-denial is the opposite of what the rich fool does. The rich fool is foolish because he things that material happiness is all there is to life. But with the mind of Christ, what seems foolish to the rich fool is wise, and the rich fool (wise by the world’s standards), is indeed foolish. Self-denial reaffirms our truest joy and spiritual fulfillment as coming from the One who is the Source of our life and strength: God.
There is a striking paradox in self-denial. The more we deny ourselves, the more we find our true selves, as we have been created and are loved by God. In self-denial, what we’re really denying is not our self but a self shaped by lies, which tell us that we need money, material things, success, affirmation (fill in the blank) in order to be fulfilled. When we deny ourselves—emptying ourselves so that God can fill us with his Spirit and life—we find who we really are in God.
What does self-denial look like, practically speaking? During a season of self-denial, such as Lent, it could be as simple as refraining from eating something that we rely too much on (e.g., sweets, desserts, chocolate are the typical Lenten ones). It could mean that we stop ordering all those things we don’t really need but which are readily accessible online (do we really need one more piece of clothing or that extra book?). Perhaps we give up practices that are spiritually harmful, such as gossiping or reveling in criticism of others, practices that perversely make us feel stronger through the denigration of others. Maybe we give up social media, because it has become an obsessive source of self-affirmation for us. Whatever we give up or deny ourselves, it should be something that hurts when we part with it. In that experience of loss, we will hopefully discover that we have gained something far better—an awareness of our true self as made in the image of God. Ultimately, we learn that in our fear, we can yet trust God to take care of us.
At its heart, self-denial means that we break the vicious cycle of turning inwards on ourselves. We enlarge our world to include, first of all, God, and then our neighbors and all of creation. Self-denial affirms our citizenship as members of the family of God. That is what Lent is all about: living more fully into the promises we made in baptism, or promises that were made on our behalf. And in doing so, we discover who we truly are.
Yours in Christ,
Father Kyle