According to a report the other day, personal debt in the UK now stands at 1 trillion pounds. That makes us among the biggest borrowers in the world. One trillion pounds is something I can’t quite picture with its 12 noughts! For that sum you could buy a mere 4 million Rolls Royce Phantoms* or if you prefer you could pay for 214.5 million hip-replacement operations on the NHS. A more topical use of the money, with the crisis in Sudan, is that £1 trillion would provide food for the world’s starving children for 182 years.

Now before we start devising our personal spending plans for this massive pile of dosh, it would take someone on the average income something like 40 million years to earn that sum. Given that our own species, Homo sapiens, only evolved in Africa 150,000 years ago we shouldn’t hold our breath. Forty million years takes us back to a time when the climate made much of Britain swamp-like and the first dogs evolved!

It turns out that 80% of this debt is actually tied up in home purchase loans and that our combined household net worth is something like £5 trillion. So on a debt-to-assets ratio we have some way to go before we are in deep trouble, assuming interest rates don’t rocket and house values don’t crash! As we know with financial matters the rock we build our confidence on can turn out to be more like sand and when that happens an awful lot gets washed away. That happened with endowment mortgages and one or two pension companies and policies. There are demographic time bombs ticking away on a number of fronts which cause us alarm.

By the standards of these mind-bendingly large numbers a rich farmer who decides to build a bigger barn and ponder the prospect of taking a few years off looks positively tame and mild by comparison (Luke 12:13-21). Debt, credit cards and loans is how we do things. No business plan operates without some kind of bank borrowing facility. Building a bigger barn looks like prudent planning for the future. To us it looks like a good way of breaking free from the interest payments and the riskiness of trusting in the stability of potentially volatile markets.

It is precisely the volatile and ultimately shifting-sand nature of the markets that reminds us that we cannot place our ultimate trust in them. They may be how we get by for now, but they are not to put a lid on our vision and concern. We know that they actually cause us just as much anxiety about the future as would any other system of organising our corporate life and personal household bills. If you are currently not on the housing ladder, they cause you considerable anxiety as to how on earth you are ever going to get on it without a sizeable helping hand from somewhere.

The gospels were of course written in a pre-industrialised and agrarian culture. That said the heart of this encounter between Jesus and the unnamed person in the crowd is still remarkably relevant. When we look at this from the perspective of the 40 million years it would take to earn just £1 trillion, let alone the combined net worth of £5 trillion, our 4 score years and 10 is but a blip on the eternal time line of God.

The rich man in the parable is criticised for his lack of vision and his self-centredness. He is more focussed on the 4 million Rolls Royces than the 214 million hip-replacements or the 182 years of food for the world’s starving children. There is a link implied here between his failure to even give a quick glance to the ultimate and his decision to keep his bumper crop for himself and sit on his hands for the next few years giving no thought to anyone else.

Actually even from a selfish angle, sitting on your hands for a few years means that the land will need much more work for it to be brought back into the right condition for sewing when his stock pile runs out, as it one day will, even if he doesn’t die that very night. So his plan is based on bad stewardship of the earth, unless of course he lets it out to a tenant farmer. It becomes even more ridiculous when we take into account the shelf life of all this produce. After a year or two quite a bit of that food is going to be pretty unappetising. The sudden death just brings an element of immediacy and urgency into the equation.

There is a seductive appeal to the story Jesus tells. After all the allure of a massive lottery win holds out a similar prospect of sitting back and living off the proceeds. Which takes us quite nicely to the heart of what Jesus is saying.

Two morals run side by side. One moral is that if we pool our combined wealth, the contents of our bigger and bigger barns, we can do extraordinary things. A few of us, even if it is 4 million, can drive around in Rolls Royces. But 55 times as many can have the hip-replacement operation they need. Cranking up the stakes, we could wipe out world poverty at a stroke, if not all disasters. The ability to feed the world’s starving children for 182 years just shows the relatively small sums required! Perhaps there is a global wake-up call here for the obscenity of 20% of the world enjoying, possessing, even hording 80% of the world’s riches.

And for what? Ultimately where does it get us? Death awaits us all and no amount of riches can avoid that or stave it off. One option is to take Shakespeare’s adaptation of this parable. On the eve of battle he has an army deciding to ‘eat drink and be merry for tomorrow we die’. That is not what Jesus meant! ‘Get what you can, while you can’ is a gospel of cynicism, which is no gospel at all.

The Christian faith does lay before us the prospect of judgement as well as redemption, the second moral. Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, recently described judgement as being ‘brought face to face with the truth with no possibility of escape’. Truth leads to justice because injustice is ultimately the fruit of lies and the denial of what is true and real. Judgement is about being brought face to face with the consequences and reality of what we have done or been involved in.

The ultimate and the practical combine in this parable and we find that one is the fruit of the other. If we raise our sights above the size of our own balance sheet to the living God we will find that we are all the richer for it, materially and spiritually.

© Ian Black 2004

* 4 million Rolls Royce Phantoms would stretch from Leeds (UK) to Jakata (Indonesia) and back again!

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