To Be Rich Become Poor Series

Series: It’s Backwards!

To Be Rich Become Poor

Luke 12:32-34

You’ve probably seen Leonardo da Vinci’s painting of the Last Supper, as he depicts Jesus and his disciples around a long table, well da Vinci wasn’t the only artist to paint this event. It has been repeated over the years with some slight changes.

A pair of US academics have analyzed 52 of the most famous paintings of the Last Supper painted between the years of 1000 and 2000 -- and discovered that, over that period, the portions of food placed before Jesus and his disciples grew astonishingly.

Using computer-aided design technology, they scanned the main dish, bread and plates and calculated the size of portion relative to the size of the average head in the painting.

Over a thousand years, the size of the main dish progressively grew by 69.2 per cent, plate size by 65.6 percent and bread size by 23.1 percent, they found.

The growing size reflects the success of agriculture over the ages, the researchers said.

(www.briebart.com) But the main dishes depicted in the paintings contained fish or eel (18 percent), lamb (14 percent) and pork (seven percent). Now the lamb would have been part of meal but fish and eel? I KNOW pork wasn’t part of it, whoever painted these things clearly wasn’t Jewish! Funny how we imagine that what we see as something valuable can be the exactly opposite to another culture.

A common though in much of the world is that the greatest way to live is to be able to afford whatever you want to have. There is a certain sense that the good life can be acquired by hard work or luck of the lottery where the worries of financial demands vanish. We see the shiny happy people all the time who have the nice stuff and don’t seem too worried about how they are going to pay for it stressed about how much work they have to do to keep up. Everyone wants to be like them and the world encourages them that the ideal situation of carefree living is just around the corner. But around that corner is just another corner to go around with the same stress and worry. You either worry about where the money is going to come from or worry about how much of it is being lost every day.

Jesus spoke to the crowds of his day with the brutal hammer of truth stating they would have trouble and in fact told them that worries would be visiting them every day. The answer to their troubled soul was not going to be found on earth for no place is secure or sustaining enough to satisfy them. A whole world is looking for that place of worry free living and most believe it is connected to money and possessions. Jesus spoke to his friends about a different way to live, one which concentrates on giving more than keep and hope more than worry. He stated that it was possible for a person who had nothing to be happier than a person who had everything – to a world so focused on possessions this was completely backwards. Most of the people we know have…..

I. A Pile of Possessions.

A. One of the first tough lessons a child learns is that their toys are breakable.

*I mean you may not personally remember learning that lesson but you did and children learn it . A young child enjoys the toy and after abusing it properly it the toy breaks. The child is devastated and takes it to the parent to be fixed. When the parent is unable to fix it the child breaks down like he has lost his best friend. The toy doesn’t operate the same way or has to be disposed of – it is a tragedy when you are small, dreams are dashed and sorrow is felt for the first time. Things break, it happens and as an adult you hate to see it happen because your toys are so much more expensive! I find it amusing when products are advertized with a lifetime guarantee or they state that you will never buy something every again because this thing will last for your whole life. Nothing on this earth lasts forever but that idea of it doing so appeals to us.

1. So you can take your toys and keep them safely tucked away in order to protect them or save them for special occasions when they won’t be harmed. But then they cease to be toys because toys were meant to be played with.

2. This is a dilemma because usually the more you use something the more worn out it becomes and the less valuable it is – keep it safe and you don’t get to use it; bring it out in the open and potentially get it broken or stolen.