NOTES for Luk 12:1-34
Today's reading continues the theme of the Kingdom and religiosity. It begins with Jesus' warning about the ‘leaven of the Pharisees’ (v. 1). And it is certainly no accident that Luke places this well-known saying of Jesus in the context of another saying of His: there is nothing hidden in the world that will not be revealed (v. 2). For religion changes a person only outwardly; inwardly, that person remains the same, and on entering the Kingdom will be unable to conceal their true nature behind religiosity.
But rejecting the ‘leaven of the Pharisees’ inevitably leads to conflict and persecution, of which Jesus immediately warns His disciples (vv. 4–5). Here the Saviour returns to the theme of poverty as a spiritual condition. On the one hand, it is, of course, wholly incompatible with the pursuit of profit and possessions. This apparently explains why Jesus has no intention of settling the inheritance dispute in which He is asked to intervene (vv. 13–15). Moreover, He immediately tells a parable about a man who has laid up provisions for years to come, which, as the parable makes clear, he will never get to use (vv. 16–21). What we have here is not simply a condemnation of greed, but an indication of misplaced priorities that distort a person's spiritual life and render it meaningless. Jesus also explains how to put those priorities in their proper order (vv. 6–7, 22–34).
This is not a call to live in destitution, but simply a reminder of the Kingdom, which must in any case come first. Then God will give those who seek the Kingdom everything else: enough to live on, while those who seek the Kingdom have no need of stockpiles. And then the essential thing happens: a person begins to live no longer their own life, but the life of the Kingdom (v. 32). A life that no one can take away, unless the person living it renounces it of their own accord. Only someone who lives the life of the Kingdom can be a faithful witness to Christ: such a person knows that they are living not their own limited, finite life, which anyone can easily take away, but the life of the Kingdom, which can be lost only by yielding to the one who can ‘cast into Gehenna’ (v. 5). In this way Jesus reminds His disciples of the essential thing that gives a Christian's life its meaning: the triumph of the Kingdom, and the fact that the chief task of anyone wishing to follow Christ becomes the endeavour to do everything possible to become part of the Kingdom and, in due time, share in that triumph.