Today’s Gospel invites us to take a hard, honest look at the things we value most. Often, our relationships and lives are shaped—sometimes even torn apart—by the way we handle material possessions, especially when inheritance is involved. Many of us have seen how even the closest families begin to fracture once parents pass away and it’s time to “divide” what’s left behind. Love gives way to entitlement, and “what’s mine” begins to matter more than “who’s mine.”
This painful reality was already present in Jesus’ time. In today’s Gospel (Luke 12:13–21), Jesus is interrupted by a man who asks him to settle a family dispute over inheritance. Rather than taking sides, Jesus refuses to be an arbitrator and instead uses the opportunity to reveal a deeper truth. He warns: “Take care to guard against all greed, for though one may be rich, one’s life does not consist of possessions.”
Jesus shifts the conversation from material justice to spiritual clarity. The issue isn’t the inheritance, but the greed hidden beneath it—the desire to secure life through possessions. He tells a parable of a rich farmer who enjoyed an abundant harvest. The man’s problem wasn’t dishonesty or injustice. It was that he kept everything for himself. His focus was on building bigger barns and securing his future. His fatal mistake? He forgot he was mortal. “You fool,” God says to him, “this night your life will be demanded of you. And the things you have prepared, to whom will they belong?”
This parable isn’t about condemning wealth. It’s about challenging how we view it. The farmer’s downfall was not that he had much, but that he lived only for himself. He became blind to the people around him and deaf to God’s call. His possessions became his idol—blocking his view of others and even of himself. He thought he was living well, but in truth, he had stopped living altogether.
We’re not so different. We admire the hard-working person who plans ahead, accumulates wealth, and then retires in comfort. But Jesus warns us that success measured by possessions is not success at all. The only lasting wealth is love—what we give, not what we store. As St. Paul says, “We brought nothing into the world, and we can take nothing out of it” (1 Tim 6:7).
Jesus urges us to become “rich in what matters to God.” What matters to God? Compassion, justice, mercy, generosity, and faithfulness. These are the treasures that last—eternal inheritances we can share without fear of losing anything. They multiply, not diminish, when given away.
The Gospel ends with a choice. We can live like the farmer, hoarding for ourselves and calling it “life.” Or we can open our hands, share our blessings, and discover a joy that death cannot touch. In the end, what we own fades. But what we give lives on—in others, in love, and in God. Let us live for the kind of inheritance that keeps us close to God.
Father Josekutty Mathew CMF
