Passion and Possessions - Reflections on Luke 12:32-40, Pentecost 9, Year C
by John C. Holbert on Thursday, June 5, 2025
I am writing this essay on the day after the House of Representatives of our federal government passed a huge bill, wherein very wealthy people will receive a substantial reduction in their tax bills, extending an earlier bill passed during the first Trump administration, while middle class and poorer folks will receive very little if any tax relief. In order to avoid a huge increase in the burgeoning national debt, the bill also reduces the federal commitments to Medicaid and food stamp programs, a reduction that, by some estimates, will throw as many as nine million US Americans off any kind of health insurance plan, and will increase child poverty and access to food aid substantially. By the way, the Federal Budget Office still predicts that the debt will increase over the next ten years at least 3.5 trillion dollars—yes, that is trillion. All this after President Trump has said he will “not touch” Medicaid, nor will he “increase the debt one penny.”
As it has been often said, “economic bills are moral documents.” When our representatives enact legislation that has to do with money—and what legislation does not?—they are making moral statements. This current bill will profoundly affect poor people’s lives, and will handily aid those among us whose salaries are at least $400,000 a year. Such facts lead us directly to the Gospel of Luke, whose work is focused squarely on the relationships between our hearts and our cash. Luke 12 contains some of the more famous quotations that make these relationships prominent and unforgettable, however much they appear to be forgotten among large swaths of the people of our time.
“Do not fear, my little flock; it has pleased your father to give you the kingdom!” (Luke 12:32). With gentle words, likening his followers to a flock of sheep, Luke has Jesus make the astonishing claim that God has already given to them “the kingdom,” that is the world ruled by God, that world they were asked to pray for in in 11:2, Luke’s “Lord’s Prayer.” Now, says Luke, that gift should be followed by the continual concerns of what to do with money, and the demands are crystal clear. “Sell your possessions! Give alms! Make for yourselves purses that never wear out, an unfailing treasure in heaven, where no thief can come near and no moth destroys” (Luke 12:33). As Luke says elsewhere, all true followers of Jesus must sell their possessions, precisely because great possessions are burdens too enormous to bear on the way to full discipleship. Still, it is hardly enough simply to sell off excess possessions. One must take the proceeds of the sales and “give alms.” Be concerned especially with those who have less and little. Luke here echoes what Judaism has long said about the relationship between the giving of alms and a heavenly recompense for that action; rabbinic literature is rife with such demands.
Luke concludes this sharp demands for proper use of wealth by adding the now-famous phrase: “Where your treasure is, there your heart will also be” (Luke 12:34). Paul Tillich, 20th century theologian, famously spoke of one’s god as one’s “ultimate concern.” That is the meaning of Luke’s phrase: when you discern what really is your “ultimate concern,” it is there where one will find one’s heart, one’s central desire, one’s God. This is why selling possessions and giving alms is so crucial for clearing the way to follow Jesus. Luke goes right on to say: “Have your belts cinched and your lamps lit” (Luke 12:35). The first command is literally “let your loins be girded,” a phrase made memorable in Ex.12:11 as a demand to get ready to celebrate Passover by cinching up the robe to free the feet for action. And it is the phrase YHWH uses to ready Job to receive the long divine speech at Job 38:3. It is a locution designed to get a person ready for action. In addition, says Luke, one’s “lamps must stay lit,” as when a master of the house returns suddenly at night and finds his servants “awake when he comes.”
After demanding the proper use of money, Luke turns to the need to get about that work now, since “the Son of Man is coming at a time you do not expect” (Luke 12:40). We must not delay our appropriate employment of our possessions, for God is coming to make an accounting, says Luke, and that adjudication can come at any time! Best be about the business of using wealth in ways that further the existence of God’s rule on earth. And among the signs of that rule is the use of money in ways that make all people’s lives better, fuller, having more ready access to the goods and services of society. And that brings us back to the bill just passed in the House of Representatives. This bill is by no stretch of anyone’s imagination representative of the existence of the rule of God on earth. It in effect plunders the poor and rewards the rich, many of whom have already made for themselves purses of gold, hidden away in bank accounts well beyond the reach of any taxing agency, while the purses of the poor rot away, leaving them worse off than their meager lives already suggest. “You rich have your reward,” says Luke elsewhere, and that reward is made plain by their many possessions now.
Luke would conclude, after a 21st century observation of our world, that God may have given the kingdom to Jesus’s “little flock,” but that kingdom bears no resemblance to the world we have created. Our passions are too often focused on our stuff, and too little focused on the struggle for a beloved community. We desire our possessions more than we desire the reign and rule of our God. It is a hard word that Luke offers, but it is for him the very essence of becoming a follower of Jesus.