Rich Toward God

Most of us keep a running inventory of the things in our lives even if we’d never call it that. The retirement account, the paid-off car, the freezer stocked for winter, the quiet sense of being covered. Prudence is a virtue. However, underneath the inventory, a conviction settles in that we rarely say out loud: my life is mine, built by my work and secured by my savings. Once the margin is big enough, I’ll finally rest and be at peace. That conviction fits in a modest checking account as easily as it does in a large vault. In either case, it leaves God out of the arithmetic.

Today’s Gospel tells the story of a man who gets everything he planned for. His land produces so much produce that his barns can’t hold it. His reaction is one most of us would have: he plans to build bigger barns and settles in to talk to his own soul: “Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; take your ease, eat, drink, be merry.” That night God calls him a fool and calls in his life.

Paul gives the Ephesians the other side of the ledger. Before Christ we were “dead through the trespasses and sins.” Then come two words that change everything: “But God, who is rich in mercy.” Even our faith is “the gift of God,” and we ourselves are “his workmanship.” The rich man thought he had made his own life. Paul says God made it, and then made it again in Christ.

Today the Church in the United States keeps the Memorial of Saints Isaac Jogues, John de Brébeuf and their companions, the Jesuit martyrs of North America. They spent everything they had among the Huron people. So here’s the question these readings put to you and me: are we building bigger barns so we can store up the things of this world, or are we rich toward God as we work to store up treasures in heaven?

The Readings

First Reading: Ephesians 2:1-10

And you he made alive, when you were dead through the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience. Among these we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, following the desires of body and mind, and so we were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind. But God, who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead through our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ (by grace you have been saved), and raised us up with him, and made us sit with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. For by grace you have been saved through faith; and this is not your own doing, it is the gift of God, not because of works, lest any man should boast. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.

Gospel: Luke 12:13-21

One of the multitude said to him, “Teacher, bid my brother divide the inheritance with me.” But he said to him, “Man, who made me a judge or divider over you?” And he said to them, “Take heed, and beware of all covetousness; for a man’s life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions.” And he told them a parable, saying, “The land of a rich man brought forth plentifully; and he thought to himself, ‘What shall I do, for I have nowhere to store my crops?’ And he said, ‘I will do this: I will pull down my barns, and build larger ones; and there I will store all my grain and my goods. And I will say to my soul, Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; take your ease, eat, drink, be merry.’ But God said to him, ‘Fool! This night your soul is required of you; and the things you have prepared, whose will they be?’ So is he who lays up treasure for himself, and is not rich toward God.”

Scriptural Analysis

Today’s first reading opens with a diagnosis. Paul has just praised the power God worked when he raised Christ from the dead and seated him in heaven (Ephesians 1:19-20), and now he turns to what that power found when it reached us. “You were dead.” Peter Williamson, in the Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture, says the word shows how far gone these Gentile converts had been, incapable of a right relationship with God. They were dead while moving about. Paul says they “walked” in their sins. The verb is peripateō (peh-ree-pah-TEH-oh), which the Bible uses for a person’s whole way of life. Two forces set the pace: “the course of this world,” human society insofar as it opposes God, and “the prince of the power of the air,” the devil. Then Paul puts himself in the same line: “we all once lived in the passions of our flesh.” Williamson warns against hearing “flesh” as bodily appetite alone. The flesh includes the mind, with its own disordered impulses, “such as pride, envy, or greed.”¹

Then come the two words on which the whole letter turns: “But God.” Williamson says Paul “bursts out” with the good news here, and he names what kind of God this is. He is “rich in mercy,” and “Mercy, eleos (EH-leh-os), refers to the good will and kindness that seeks to help someone who is in trouble or need.” His motive is love, and the Greek says it twice: “the great love with which he loved us.” Margaret MacDonald, in the Sacra Pagina commentary, points to the little word “even” in verse 5. God’s love was so great that he saved his people in that terrible condition, “even when we were dead through our trespasses.”²

“By grace you have been saved.” Then Paul stacks up three verbs carrying the prefix syn- (soon), “with”: God made us alive with Christ, raised us with him, and seated us with him in the heavenly places. What happened to Jesus on Easter and at the Ascension happened, in a hidden way, to everyone joined to him in baptism. And God’s reason is generosity: “that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace.” Williamson puts it simply: “Lovers long to express the immensity of their love.” God saved us so that he could spend eternity showing us how much he loves us.³

Verse 8 repeats the parenthesis and spells it out: “For by grace you have been saved through faith; and this is not your own doing, it is the gift of God.” Saint Thomas Aquinas, commenting on Ephesians, explains “saved” with a sailor’s image. Salvation means freedom from dangers, so a man’s perfect salvation comes in eternal life, “as a ship is said to be safe when it has arrived at port.” We are saved now in hope (Romans 8:24), still on the water and headed for the harbor. And Thomas reads “this is not your own doing” as a statement about faith itself: “That a man should believe, therefore, cannot occur from himself unless God gives it.” Then Paul closes the door on pride: “not because of works, lest any man should boast.”⁴

Then verse 10: “For we are his workmanship.” The Greek word is poiēma (POY-ay-mah), which gives us the English “poem,” and Williamson likes the way the New Jerusalem Bible renders it: “we are his work of art.” Paul means a new creation, made “in Christ Jesus,” and he tells us what it was made for: “good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.” MacDonald sums it up: “In essence, good works emerge as the purpose of God’s election.” Paul opened the passage with the walk of the dead (Ephesians 2:2), and he closes it with the walk of the living.⁵ The Catechism teaches the same about merit. Because God freely chose to associate us with the work of his grace, “the merit of good works is to be attributed in the first place to the grace of God, then to the faithful,” since our good actions “proceed in Christ, from the predispositions and assistance given by the Holy Spirit.”⁶

We turn our attention now to the Gospel. Jesus has been teaching his disciples not to fear those who can kill the body (Luke 12:4-5), when a voice from the crowd cuts in about a family estate. Pablo Gadenz hears an echo in Jesus’ answer, “Who made me a judge or divider over you?” It’s the question an Israelite threw at Moses in Egypt (Exodus 2:14), the deliverer his own people refused. Jesus declines to answer the voice in the crowd but instead goes to the root: “beware of all covetousness.” Luke Timothy Johnson explains that the Greek is pleonexia (pleh-oh-nek-SEE-ah), which “names the vice that always seeks more possessions,” and he adds that Colossians 3:5 “flatly identifies pleonexia with idolatry, an equation having much truth.”⁷

Jesus then presents a parable, which only Luke’s Gospel records. Gadenz says the man “is only concerned about ‘me.’” Count the possessives: my crops, my barns, my grain, my goods. Gadenz sets him beside Joseph, who also gathered grain in abundance, but to feed others in time of famine (Genesis 41:49). In the Catena Aurea (kah-TAY-nah OW-ray-ah) of Saint Thomas, Saint Basil the Great offers the man a better building plan: “Thy barns, if thou wilt, are the home of the poor.” And Saint Cyril of Alexandria catches the folly in “all my grain.” He talks “as if he thought that he had not obtained them from God, but that they were the fruits of his own labours.”⁸

“And I will say to my soul, Soul, you have ample goods laid up.” The word is psychē (psoo-KHAY), which can mean soul, self, or life, and Johnson notes that the man addresses his own so familiarly “that one is tempted to render it ‘old man.’” Then God speaks: “Fool!” The word recalls the psalm, “The fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God’” (Psalm 14:1), and Gadenz draws the conclusion without flinching: “He is an atheist in practice.” He may well have said his prayers, but he arranged his life as if nobody would ever ask for it back. That night somebody did. “This night your soul is required of you.” Gadenz explains that the verb was used “to call in a debt” (Luke 6:30), so “The ‘life’ that the man considered to be his own was really on loan from God.”⁹

Saint Ambrose answers the question “whose will they be?” with words the rich fool never considered: “Neither are these things ours which we cannot take away with us. Virtue alone is the companion of the dead, mercy alone follows us.” And Saint Bede says what it takes to be rich toward God: such a man “will not lay up treasures for himself, but distribute his possessions to the poor.”¹⁰

Johnson finds two levels in the phrase “rich toward God.” “The first is the response of faith, the second is the disposition of possessions in accordance with faith, which means to share them with others rather than accumulating them for one’s self.” He names what drives the greed in the first place: “It is out of deep fear that the acquisitive instinct grows monstrous.”¹¹ The Catechism, teaching on the tenth commandment, says it plainly: the commandment “forbids greed and the desire to amass earthly goods without limit.”¹²

Put the two readings side by side, and they describe one man from two directions. Paul’s dead man walks “following the course of this world”; the rich fool is that same man in a good year, prosperous but still dead toward God. Both readings ask who made your life and who owns it. The fool answers, “I did,” and spends his last night talking to himself. Paul answers, “God did”: we are his poiēma, saved by a gift we could never earn. Two kinds of riches face each other. God is “rich in mercy” toward the dead. The fool is rich in grain and “not rich toward God.” We become rich toward God by receiving the riches of his mercy and letting them pass through our hands to someone else. Mercy alone follows us.

Daily Application

The interior movement these readings ask for is to stop treating your life as your own project and to receive it as God’s work, on loan and meant to be given away. Start with Johnson’s diagnosis, because greed often wears a good disguise. From the inside, it looks like responsibility, perhaps fear with a spreadsheet: I must set aside enough to make it through the difficult times. Williamson describes a religious version of the same fear: people who “adopt a legalistic approach to life, weighing their good deeds against their sins, hoping to keep the balance tipped in their favor.”¹³ That’s the rich fool’s barn with a pious coat of paint. Paul tears it down.

You need to take an honest inventory of your own lives. What are you storing up, and who is it for? Name the thing you’d reach for first if you felt your security slipping: the savings account, the reputation, the public record of being a good Catholic. Thank God for it by name, which Gadenz says the rich man was too busy to do, because it is a gift from God. Then give some of it away this week, to a person, if you can. Make sure you give away enough of it that you feel it. Basil said our barns can be the home of the poor. Let one of your barns be just that. Since Thomas says the faith that saves you is itself God’s gift, ask him for more of it. The Catechism tells us what that trust does: “Abandonment to the providence of the Father in heaven frees us from anxiety about tomorrow.”¹⁴

Saints Isaac Jogues, John de Brébeuf and their companions show what a life looks like when it’s spent as a gift. Franciscan Media tells how Jogues, a young Jesuit teaching literature in France, gave it up for the Huron missions, was held by the Iroquois for 13 months, and escaped to France with several fingers “cut, chewed, or burnt off.” He could have stayed home a hero. Within months, he sailed back, and in 1646 a Mohawk war party killed him. Brébeuf labored among the Hurons for 24 years and stayed with them even when the Jesuits were blamed for a smallpox epidemic. Franciscan Media’s reflection asks, “Just how deep is our faith and how strong our desire to serve even in the face of death.”¹⁵ These men built no barns. They were God’s workmanship, and they walked in the good works he had prepared for them.

Your soul will be required of you on a night God already knows. Be rich toward God and your fellow man before that day comes. Receive the riches of his mercy, and let them pass through your hands today.

---

Notes

1. ↑ Peter S. Williamson, Ephesians, Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2009), 56-58.
2. ↑ Williamson, Ephesians, 60; Margaret Y. MacDonald, Colossians and Ephesians, Sacra Pagina 17 (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2000), 231.
3. ↑ Williamson, Ephesians, 60-62.
4. ↑ Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on Saint Paul’s Epistle to the Ephesians, chap. 2, lect. 3, nos. 93, 95, at aquinas.cc.
5. ↑ Williamson, Ephesians, 64; MacDonald, Colossians and Ephesians, 234.
6. ↑ Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd ed. (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1997), no. 2008.
7. ↑ Luke Timothy Johnson, The Gospel of Luke, Sacra Pagina 3 (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1991), 198; Pablo T. Gadenz, The Gospel of Luke, Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2018), 239.
8. ↑ Gadenz, Gospel of Luke, 239; Saint Basil the Great, Homily on Avarice, and Saint Cyril of Alexandria, quoted in Thomas Aquinas, Catena Aurea: Commentary on the Four Gospels, Collected out of the Works of the Fathers, vol. 3, St. Luke (Oxford: John Henry Parker, 1843), on Luke 12:16-21.
9. ↑ Johnson, Gospel of Luke, 199; Gadenz, Gospel of Luke, 239-240.
10. ↑ Saint Ambrose and Saint Bede, quoted in Aquinas, Catena Aurea, vol. 3, St. Luke, on Luke 12:16-21.
11. ↑ Johnson, Gospel of Luke, 199, 201.
12. ↑ Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 2536.
13. ↑ Williamson, Ephesians, 67.
14. ↑ Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 2547.
15. ↑ “Saints Isaac Jogues, Jean de Brébeuf, and Companions,” Saint of the Day, Franciscan Media, accessed October 14, 2026, franciscanmedia.org.

Books Cited

As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

• Peter S. Williamson, Ephesians, Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture (Baker Academic, 2009)
• Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd ed. (Doubleday / Image)
• Luke Timothy Johnson, The Gospel of Luke, Sacra Pagina 3 (Liturgical Press, 1991)
• Pablo T. Gadenz, The Gospel of Luke, Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture (Baker Academic, 2018)
• Thomas Aquinas, Catena Aurea: Commentary on the Four Gospels, 4 vols. (Baronius Press)