Someone in the crowd asks Jesus to settle an inheritance dispute. Jesus refuses — it is not his jurisdiction — and instead warns against greed with a parable. The rich man is not a villain; he is a successful farmer. His soliloquy in the parable is perfectly reasonable: a good harvest, bigger barns, a comfortable retirement. He speaks only to his own soul. God speaks into that soliloquy with a single word and a question that dissolves the entire plan: “Fool. Tonight you die. All this — whose will it be?”

From the writers we read together

Nancy Pearcey

cultural apologist, author of Total Truth and Love Thy Body

Pearcey writes about the consequence of a secular worldview that reduces human beings to their material and economic dimensions. The rich fool's soliloquy is the internal monologue of exactly that worldview: the soul is addressed (“Soul, you have ample goods”) but treated as a body that eats and drinks and merries — as if the soul's needs were merely bodily needs in higher register. Pearcey would say the parable is not just a warning about wealth; it is a diagnosis of the self that has forgotten it has a soul with needs that barns cannot meet.

The question “whose will it be?” is God's gift to the fool. It is the question that interrupts the self-referential loop of the man who speaks only to himself. The rich man has been in conversation with his own soul for the whole parable — his plans, his comfort, his future. Then God interrupts. Pearcey would say that interruption is the grace the secular self most needs and most resists: a voice from outside the self that asks whether the self's accounting has included the right items.