What to Do with the Barn: Comfort and Trust

Almost everyone knows the feeling. The day went well, the house is warm, the fridge is full, and the phone offers whatever we want to see. Nothing is missing. And in the middle of all that plenty, a quiet question sometimes shows up: is this all?

That question is not ingratitude. Comfort is a good thing, and anyone who has known hunger, cold or fear knows what a roof and a set table are worth. The problem is not in having. It is in what happens to us when what we have becomes the place where all our trust rests.

Jesus told a story about this. It is only a few lines long, and hardly anyone feels accused when hearing it. Maybe that is why it is worth reading slowly.

Comfort is not the villain

Let us say at once what this text does not argue. It does not say the good life is suspect, or that suffering on purpose makes anyone better. The Bible does not treat a full table as a sin. In Ecclesiastes, eating, drinking and enjoying one's work are described as gifts from God (Ecclesiastes 3:13). A letter in the New Testament even says that God richly provides us with everything so that we may enjoy it (1 Timothy 6:17).

That same verse, though, asks the wealthy not to set their hope on the uncertainty of riches, but on God. The next one asks them to be generous and ready to share (1 Timothy 6:18). There is the point. The question Scripture asks is not "how much do you have?" but two others: what do you do with what you have, and where do you place your trust?

The "bars" in the title, then, are not comfort itself. They are the almost invisible habit of letting comfort decide for us: what occupies us, what worries us, whom we remember. An invisible bar is one we do not notice is there.

A full house, a narrow life

The passage is in the Gospel of Luke, chapter 12.

What the text says

Jesus is teaching a large crowd. Someone in it interrupts with a practical request: that he tell the man's brother to divide the inheritance (Luke 12:13). Asking a respected teacher to help settle a dispute like this was not strange, and the request does not seem absurd. Jesus declines the role of judge and gives a warning: be on guard against every kind of greed, because a person's life does not consist in the abundance of their possessions (Luke 12:14–15).

Then he tells a parable (Luke 12:16–21). A rich man has land that yields a great deal. The harvest is bigger than his barns. He asks himself what to do. He decides to tear down the barns, build larger ones and store all his grain and goods there. Then he tells himself that he has plenty laid up for many years and can now rest, eat, drink and be merry. God says to him: "Fool, this night your life is demanded of you." And he asks whose all that stored-up wealth will be. Jesus concludes: so it is with whoever stores up treasure for themselves and is not rich toward God.

What it means

First, notice that the man is not accused of theft or laziness. The land "produced well." The harvest is presented as a good thing.

Second, notice how he speaks. He talks only to himself. In the story, he says "my" again and again: my crops, my barns, my goods, my soul. He consults no one, thinks of no one who is hungry, gives no thanks, asks no advice. Plenty arrived, and his world shrank until it fit inside the walls he built.

Third, in the Bible "fool" does not usually mean someone without intelligence. It tends to describe someone who lives as if God did not count (Psalm 14:1). Here, it is someone who plans everything well except what matters most. The plan was good. The mistake was treating the future as already secured, and himself as the owner of his own life. The text does not say he was a wicked man. It says his security was resting in a fragile place.

God's words may sound harsh, but they are not a threat to anyone who has a good harvest. The Greek verb used there means "to ask back," as one reclaims what is one's own; many commentators see in it the image of a loan whose time to be returned has come. The man spoke to his own soul as if he owned it; the parable reminds us that life is given, not possessed, and that no one holds tomorrow (Proverbs 27:1).

Fourth, "rich toward God" is not explained in detail in this passage. What follows helps. Jesus tells his disciples not to worry about food and clothing, to look at the ravens and the lilies, and to sell their possessions and give to the poor, because where the treasure is, the heart will be too (Luke 12:22–34). Being rich toward God seems, then, to mean walking with open hands: trusting the Father and sharing.

What changes in life

As an application, and not as something the text says about our time: we can ask, without guilt, what becomes of the "what shall I do?" in our own days. The man in the parable asked what to do with the surplus, and could think only of storing it. Other answers are possible: share, give thanks, help someone, listen to advice. Each of us has a barn: savings, a full calendar, a well-arranged comfort. The parable does not ask anyone to tear it down. It invites us to open a door in it.

The people who missed Egypt

A much older episode shows the other side of the same coin. In the book of Numbers, Israel crosses the desert after leaving Egypt, where they lived as slaves (Exodus 1:13–14). God sustains them with manna, a food that appears every morning. But at one point some of the people begin to complain. They remember the fish they ate, the cucumbers, melons, leeks, onions and garlic, and say that now they see nothing but manna (Numbers 11:4–6).

What stands out is what their memory leaves out. They remember the menu and even say they ate it "for nothing"; of the slavery, they say nothing. Past comfort, seen from afar, looks like freedom. The text gives no reason for the complaint beyond the menu, but the scene suggests that what they missed was a predictable life, even in chains, and that the open road toward the promise felt less certain than the past.

To be fair: real hunger is real pain, and the text does not mock anyone for missing a good meal. But the scene shows what comfort, remembered from afar, can do to us: it makes the past bigger than it was and the present smaller than it is.

Two ways of being stuck

The two stories resemble each other more than they seem to. The rich man in the Gospel already has everything and closes himself in. The people in the desert miss what they once had and complain. In both, comfort, or the memory of it, became the center. And in both cases, the remedy the text points to is not suffering more.

It is worth insisting. Nothing in Luke's parable praises being hard on oneself. The text does not suggest the rich man should have slept on the floor. What it points to, in short, is looking beyond the walls: toward God, who feeds the ravens, and toward those nearby, who may need what is left over. Someone who tries to "toughen up" to escape comfort may simply swap one kind of bar for another, because their attention is still locked on themselves.

What opens the door, in these texts, is simpler and more human: gratitude, which recognizes that what we have was given; generosity, which makes what we have circulate; and trust, which remembers that life does not fit in any barn.

A small step

Instead of a conclusion, a quiet question. If my harvest were bigger than my barns, what would I do? And of everything I have today, what could I share or give thanks for?

Perhaps the answer is small: a phone call to someone who is alone, a gift nobody will see, a pause to give thanks before eating. A bar we notice has already begun to open.

Further reading

• The Gospel of Luke, by Joel B. Green, Eerdmans (New International Commentary on the New Testament), 1997.
• Luke 9:51–24:53, by Darrell L. Bock, Baker (Baker Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament), 1996.
• Numbers, by Gordon J. Wenham, InterVarsity Press (Tyndale Old Testament Commentaries), 1981.
• Bible: Luke 12:13–34; Numbers 11:4–6; Exodus 1:13–14; Ecclesiastes 3:13; 1 Timothy 6:17–18; Psalm 14:1; Proverbs 27:1.