Exodus says:
“You shall not covet…”
In Luke, Jesus tells the story of a man who has so much that he no longer knows what to do with it. His barns are too small, so he builds bigger ones. And then comes the haunting line: “You fool! This very night your life is being demanded of you.”
The two texts ask essentially the same question: When is enough enough? Coveting is often misunderstood as simply wanting what belongs to someone else. But the final commandments expose the restless human imagination that says: If only I had a little more…
And the remarkable thing about “more” is that it never tells us when to stop. The rich man in Jesus' parable never says, “I have enough.” Instead, his prosperity creates a new problem: How can I store everything I have? His barns become monuments not to gratitude but to anxiety, which has become a burden.
The man's question moves from farming. It is about the future. What will I do with all this? How can I make certain that I will be secure? This is where coveting and anxiety touch one another. Sometimes we covet not because we are greedy, but because we are afraid.
We imagine that if we possess enough, save enough, accomplish enough, control enough, or prepare enough, we can finally make ourselves safe. Jesus' parable reveals the illusion. There is no barn big enough to contain our fear of tomorrow.
Luther's explanation of the Ninth and Tenth Commandments is especially helpful here. For Luther, “You shall not covet” is not merely a prohibition against wanting something that belongs to another person. It is a call to resist the schemes of the heart that seek to acquire what is not ours.
And positively, the commandments teach us to act with generosity rather than manipulation, and to be content with what God has entrusted to us.
That gives Jesus' parable another dimension. The rich man's failure is not simply that he has wealth. It is that his wealth has narrowed his imagination to the point that he can see only himself.
There is no neighbor in what he says. There is no community, gratitude or God. There is only I, me, and mine.
Jesus ends with an extraordinary contrast:
“So it is with those who store up treasures for themselves but are not rich toward God.”
Jesus doesn't condemn having treasure. He questions where our treasure is directed. We can accumulate things, or we can accumulate relationships. We can build bigger barns or wider tables.
We can spend our lives protecting what we have, or we can spend them giving thanks for what we have been given. Being “rich toward God” means recognizing that everything ultimately comes to us as a gift.
And gifts are meant to be received with gratitude and shared with joy.
At the end, the man says:
“Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.”
But he has confused having enough to live with having enough to guarantee life. He cannot possess eternity. That is why the Tenth Commandment is ultimately spiritual. It asks us to examine the appetite beneath our appetites.
What do we believe will finally make us enough? And what if the gospel answer is: Nothing you acquire will make you enough, because, in Christ, you already are enough.
Perhaps the opposite of coveting is not simply contentment but trust. Trust that there will be enough, that we are more than what we own, and that God's abundance is greater than our scarcity. We can trust that the life God desires for us is not a life spent building ever-larger barns, but a life in which what we have becomes a blessing for someone else.
So Exodus whispers: Do not covet. Jesus asks: What are you storing up? And instead of answering this question tallying how we have, we are free to ask “What am I doing with what I have been given?”
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