This essay first appeared in our weekly Scripture reflection newsletter on August 2, 2025.
Ecc 1:2, 2:21-23; Col 3:1-5, 9-11; Lk 12:13-21.
You can find the readings for the 18th Sunday of Ordinary Time here.
In the wonderfully strange movie “Fargo” (1996), Frances McDormand plays Marge Gunderson, the seemingly spacey but in fact clever detective who tracks down and arrests a murderer whose gruesome crimes were motivated by a desire for money. As she drives him to jail in her police cruiser, she looks into her rearview mirror, and says to him ruefully, “There’s more to life than a little money, you know. Don’t you know that?”
Marge is one of my favorite characters in any film: She’s a loving wife, supportive coworker and a crackerjack police officer. She is also, as we can tell from this brief interchange, a moral person with a healthy sense of right and wrong.
The criminal in “Fargo” is not the only person who doesn’t understand that there’s more to life than a little money. That’s also a problem for the person in Jesus’ parable this week, who is often called the “rich fool.” The parable comes in response to a man who asks Jesus to tell the man’s brother to share his inheritance. The man is one of only a few people in the Gospels who bark orders to Jesus; another is Martha, who complains about her sister Mary’s supposed laziness. Martha, too, asks Jesus to scold a sibling: “Tell her to help me!” (Lk 10:40).
Jesus warns him that storing so much excess wealth is useless, since at any moment his life could end.
The Parable of the Rich Fool is a relatively simple one, in which a man builds bigger and bigger barns to hold more and more grain. After that, he figures he can “eat, drink and be merry.” But Jesus warns him that storing so much excess wealth is useless, since at any moment his life could end. Elsewhere in the Gospels, Jesus says something similar: “Where your treasure is, there also your heart will be” (Mt 6:12).
It’s a straightforward parable about the dangers of the love of money and possessions, and it carries an implicit warning against not only greed but selfishness. As the New Testament scholar Fred W. Craddock wrote in the HarperCollins Bible Commentary, “A man is blessed with abundance and he responds with self-congratulations and conversations with himself. Family, neighbors, God: all are absent from his plans.”
We see this parable play out in public frequently, with billionaires amassing more and more—in our case not grain, or even nourishing foodstuffs, but things like mansions and boats and planes and what are sometimes referred to as “toys.”
There is enough and then there is too much. And with too much, we should ask not only what it is for, but whether there are others who need it more.
But billionaires are not the only intended recipients of the Parable of the Rich Fool. Many years ago, I took a vow of poverty as a Jesuit, which means that my salary, the royalties from my books and any donations that I receive must be turned into the community or my ministry. Still, I have a small monthly allowance and a few possessions, and it’s easy to get attached even to those. Do I really need another shirt? Do I really need an extra pair of sneakers? Do I really need to have that book in hardcover?
Obviously, people need some things simply to live on; those with families also must provide for their spouses and children. But the point of the parable is that there is enough and then there is too much. And with too much, we should ask not only what it is for, but whether there are others who need it more. Remember Fred W. Craddock’s line about “family and neighbors.”
St. Basil’s challenging saying—“The unused coat in your closet doesn’t belong to you, it belongs to the poor”—works well here. Marge Gunderson, I suspect, would agree.
