Someone in the crowd said to Jesus, “Teacher, tell my brother to share the inheritance with me.” He replied to him, “Friend, who appointed me as your judge and arbitrator?” Then he said to the crowd, “Take care to guard against all greed, for though one may be rich, one’s life does not consist of possessions.”

Then he told them a parable. “There was a rich man whose land produced a bountiful harvest. He asked himself, ‘What shall I do, for I do not have space to store my harvest?’

And he said, ‘This is what I shall do: I shall tear down my barns and build larger ones. There I shall store all my grain and other goods and I shall say to myself, “Now as for you, you have so many good things stored up for many years, rest, eat, drink, be merry!”’

But God said to him, ‘You fool, this night your life will be demanded of you; and the things you have prepared, to whom will they belong?’ Thus will it be for the one who stores up treasure for himself but is not rich in what matters to God.”

The book of Ecclesiastes—Qoheleth in Hebrew and referred to as such by Bible scholars—is a subversive book. The author surprises and upsets because he questions the standard religious mentality of his time: that the good are rewarded and the evil punished. Qoheleth shocks by his pessimism: all is hebel, meaning empty. Human beings are no better than animals; one who is hardworking is no better than a sluggard; acquiring wisdom and knowledge is like chasing after wind.

Qoheleth’s contribution to religious thought is his honesty to question ready-made ideas and complacent optimism which extol success as the fruit of a well-ordered world. Qoheleth’s restlessness and pessimism are, in the final analysis, but the expression of his anguished cry for what lasts: the Absolute. He desires for the Absolute: for One who is not “vanity.”

Qoheleth’s conviction about the fundamentally empty human efforts to create something more than wind effectively prepares us for the Gospel teaching about the folly of wealth.

“One’s life does not consist of possessions” (v 15), Jesus emphatically declares in today’s Gospel. And to drive home that message, he tells the parable of a rich man who “has it all,” the means to enjoy his wealth. But he dies the very night he makes his great plans.

The only answer to the inevitability of death is to be “rich in what matters to God” (v 21). What does this entail? The Gospels do not give specifics, but enunciate a principle: consider always what will remain after our death. We will be stripped of all material goods, even those legitimately acquired. What remains will only be the quality of our life and how we have made use of our goods, be they much or little.

“Take care to guard against all greed” (v 15), Jesus warns. Avidity, cupidity, and lawless seeking for material wealth can possess a person. Material possessions can become an end, an “idol,” a rival of God. Alas, like the pagan idols of old, they are hebel, empty and vain.

Paul understands Christ’s teaching well and declares, “Seek what is above, where Christ is… Think of what is above, not of what is on earth” (vv 1-2, Second Reading). Life in Christ is the only wealth worth having, because it is not hebel, not passing, not made of wind.