‘Isn’t it senseless to work at what will never be finished, however hard you may try! Death will always come before you have built up the tower of your earthly happiness. And if you know beforehand that however you may struggle against death, it will conquer you, would it not be better, instead of struggling against it, not to put your whole soul into what shall surely perish, but to seek some work that cannot be destroyed by inevitable death?’
Luke 12:22-27: And He said to His disciples, ‘Therefore I say to you, take no thought for your life, what you shall eat; neither for the body, what you shall put on. Your life is more than meat, and your body is more than clothing. Consider the ravens; for they neither sow nor reap; they neither have storehouse nor barn, and God feeds them; how much more are you better than they? And which of you by thinking about it can add to his stature even one cubit? If you are not able to do the very thing that is least, why do you take thought for the rest? Consider the lilies, how they grow; they do not toil, they do not spin; and yet I say to you that Solomon, in all his glory, was not arrayed like one of these.’
However much a man may care about body and food, he cannot add one hour to his life.12 Then isn’t it foolish to trouble oneself about things that cannot be done?
While knowing that the end is death, you care only to assure your lives by gaining wealth. Life cannot be assured by wealth. Why will you not comprehend that you but delude yourselves with a ridiculous deception?
The purpose of life, Christ says, does not lie in what we possess, and in what we gain, what is not ourselves; it must lie in something else than that. He says (Luke 12:16-21) that the life of man, in spite of all his riches, does not depend upon his property. ‘The ground of a certain rich man brought forth plentifully; and he thought within himself, “What shall I do? I have no room to store my fruits.” And he said, “I will do this: I will pull down my barns and build larger ones, and there I will store all my corn and all my goods. And I will say to my soul, Soul! You have much goods laid up for many years; take your ease, eat, drink, be merry.” But God said to him, “You fool, this night your soul shall be required of you; then whose shall those things be, which you have provided?” So it is with him who lays up treasure for himself, and is not rich toward God.’
Death stands every moment over you. (Luke 12:35-40) ‘Therefore, stay dressed and keep your lights shining; and you yourselves be like men who wait for their lord, when he will return from the wedding; that when he comes and knocks, they may open to him immediately. And if he shall come in the second watch, or come in the third watch, and find them so, blessed are those servants. And know this: if the owner of the house had known what hour the thief would come, he would have watched, and not have allowed his house to be broken into. Therefore, be ready also; for the Son of Man comes at an hour when you do not think.’
12 These words have been incorrectly translated. The word ηλικιαmeans age, time of life; therefore the expression signifies: ‘you cannot add one hour to your life.’
The parables of the virgins awaiting the bridegroom, of the end of the age, and of the last judgment all refer, according to the opinion of interpreters, not merely to the end of the world, but also to the peril in which every man hourly stands.
Death, death, death attends us every second. Our lives are passed in the presence of death. While working individually for your future, you well know that the future will give you nothing but death. And death will destroy all you worked for. Thus, it is clear that life for oneself can never have any meaning. If there is a rational life, it must be some other kind of life; it must be one, the purpose of which does not consist in securing one’s own future. To live rationally, we must live so that death cannot destroy our life.
Luke 10:41: ‘Martha, Martha, you are careful and troubled about many things. But one thing is necessary.’
All the innumerable affairs that we transact for ourselves will be of no use to us in the future; all such things are but the illusion with which we deceive ourselves. ‘But one thing is necessary.’
The state of man from the day of his birth is such that inevitable destruction awaits him, that is, a senseless life and a senseless death, if he does not find what alone is necessary for the true life. Christ reveals to men that which alone gives them the true life. He does not invent it, He does not promise to give it by His divine power; He only shows mankind that, besides the individual life, there must be another life, which is truth, and not deception.
Christ, in his parable of the vine-dresser (Matt. 21:33-42), explains the source of human error, which hides the truth from men, and which makes them consider the shadow of life, their own individual life, as the true one.
Certain men, living in their master’s cultivated garden, fancied themselves the owners of that garden; and that error leads to a series of irrational and cruel actions on the part of those men, ending in their banishment, their exclusion from that life in the garden. So likewise do we fancy that the life of each of us is his own, that we have a right to it, and that we can do as we like with it, without being responsible to any one. We cannot, therefore, avoid the same series of senseless and cruel actions and misfortunes, or escape the same exclusion from the life we misuse. As the vine-dressers fancied that the more cruel they were the better they would assure their own prosperity, by killing the servants and the master’s son, so do we fancy that the more cruel we are the more independent we shall become.
As it was with the vine-dressers, who, after refusing others the fruits of the garden, were driven out themselves by their master, so is it with men, who fancy that life for self is the true life. Death expels them and others take their place, not as a punishment, but merely because those men did not understand life. As the men in the garden either forgot, or would not admit, that the garden had only been entrusted to their care, that it was already cultivated and fenced around, and somebody had previously been working in it for them, and therefore expected them to work too, for the sake of others; so do men, while living for themselves, forget, or fail to recognize, all that had been done by others before their birth, and all that is done during their lifetime; and that, therefore, something is expected of them too; they choose to forget that all the blessings of life, which they enjoy, were entrusted and are entrusted to them, and must, therefore, either be transferred or given up.
This improved view of life, this μετανοια, is the cornerstone of the doctrine of Christ, as He says at the end of the parable. According to Christ’s doctrine, the vine-dressers, who lived in the vineyard that they had not cultivated themselves, should have known and felt that they were deeply indebted to the master; and so should men likewise understand and feel that, from the day of their birth to the day of their death, they owe a heavy debt to those who lived before them, to those who still live, and to those who are to live after them.
They should understand that every hour of the life they continue to live that debt grows heavier; and that, therefore, the man who lives for himself, and does not acknowledge the obligation that binds him to life and to the principle of life, deprives himself of life. He should understand that by living thus he destroys his life, while desiring to save it.
The true life is but a continuation of past life, and works for the good of the present life, as well as for that of the future. To be a sharer of that life, man must renounce his own will and fulfill the will of the Father of life, who gave it to the son of man.
John 8:35: ‘The servant who does his own will, and not that of his master, does not abide for ever in the house of his master; only the son, who fulfills the will of the father, abides forever,’ Christ says, expressing the same idea in another sense.
The will of the Father of life is not the life of the individual man, but of the ‘son of man,’ that lives in men; and therefore a man keeps his life only when he considers it as a trust given to him by the Father, in order to serve the good of all; and he really lives when he lives not for himself, but for the ‘son of man.’
Matt. 25:14-46: A
