1 Beyond Lukan Reversal

Luke’s parable of The Rich Fool (12:16–21) is one of many parables Jesus relays on his way to Jerusalem. The parable is part of didactic discourse following a brother’s request for Jesus to intervene on the brother’s behalf for an inheritance dispute. The Rich Fool, as part of a response to the brother’s demand, narrates a wealthy person’s hoarding of several years’ worth of goods not knowing he will soon die. In the discourse closest to the brother’s appeal, Jesus never answers the question sufficiently (for me or for the brother). Moreover, the parable stands without the famous Lukan “status reversal.” Luke, famous for pronouncing judgment against the rich and privileged, does not pronounce judgment on the brother, nor on the rich fool, creating negative (symbolic) space for something else. This kind of negativity in the parables and in Jesus’ teaching is often perceived as Jesus “dodging” the question.¹ As Rindge argues, The Rich Fool relies on motifs from Jewish Wisdom literature rather than on Apocalyptic.² This is a choice paralleled with Luke’s use of negativity over status reversal. This paper, following up on Rindge’s argument, asks, “Why does Luke activate Wisdom motifs and negativity around this parable?” The short answer, as this paper will argue, is that Luke’s Jesus is warning Luke’s diasporic audience against securing the future, because Luke is pessimistic about his immediate future.

After introducing the concepts “negativity” and Edelman’s “reproductive futurism” this paper will demonstrate the negativity of The Rich Fool. To support this claim, it will continue to demonstrate the presence of negativity in several other Lukan parables. Throughout the discussion on the parables, this paper will highlight selected texts where the narrative works against reproductive futurism, even though Luke supports it in other “hopeful” passages. Aligning with this reading, it will speculate how the abyss of the cross operates in Luke’s diasporic setting, which gives birth to Lukan pessimism. Finally, it will return to The Rich Fool to discuss the broader infusion of pessimism in the narrative. While it is impossible to prove that expressions of pessimism are part of the intention of the author, nevertheless pessimism through doubt spreads itself throughout the third Gospel.

2 Negativity and Reproductive Futurism

The x in algebraic equations is an example of negative symbolic space. However, the expectation of a future “answer” to the value of x in the equation does not belong to negativity. That expectation belongs to desire and the force of the future (“We must solve for x”). Negativity is more than empty signification as well, a reverse magnetism that resists meaning, excavating received meanings sometimes. In psychoanalytic (Kristevan) terms, it may be helpful to imagine the symbol as an invaginated space into which phallic meaning may enter.³ Negativity is a force which repels the phallus.⁴ Importantly for the text of Luke, negativity forces its way into narrative through silence (e.g., dodging a question), obfuscation (τὰ µυστήρια τῆς βασιλείας τοῦ θεοῦ), negation, dubious or impossible futures, and exclusions.

Another way to perceive negativity is by considering it as a “thinking against itself.” Adorno as the originary thinker of negative dialectics, finds his way into corners of No Future, and in one footnote in particular:

If negative dialectics calls for the self-reflection of thinking, the tangible implication is that if thinking is to be true – if it is to be true today, in any case – it must also be a thinking against itself. If thought is not measured by the extremity that eludes the concept, it is from the outset in the nature of the musical accompaniment with which the SS liked to drown out the screams of its victims.⁵

In this way, one might view the inquiry into Lukan negativity, as a “turning-down” of the “musical accompaniment.” Recognizing negativity in the Lukan text would mean an interpretive “taking up the cross” by turning-down the volume of the resurrection and eschatological hopes of Luke. Negativity is the force in Luke that interrupts when he is “thinking” at the “extremities” of messianic concepts amidst colonial existence.

One might ask at this point, “Isn’t there negativity in reversal?” After all, one side of a reversed binary is negated. Still, there is at the same time the other side which is affirmed. Consider the famous maxim in Luke 13:30: “Those who are last will be first and those who are first will be last.” The “first” are negated, while the “last” are affirmed in the same instance. Reversal is an expression of desire, privileging one symbol over another (phallic signification). Meaning is made, not resisted. Moreover, meaning-making is aimed at the future through desire. We speak because we want something.⁶ Negativity resists this form of signification, refusing to rely on the future for its force.

Edelman’s negativity is “queer” because he writes against what he calls “reproductive futurism,” a form of “futurism” (immutable faith in a good future). Inasmuch as the reproductive function of human futures is normative to heterosexual relationships (producing children), Edelman rejects futurism as far as it is an ideological assumption/belief that the future is good, “to refuse the insistence of hope itself as affirmation.”⁷ This negative refusal of an affirming future is a refusal of a social order, a refusal which “will register as unthinkable, irresponsible, inhumane.”⁸ The negative space of this refusal is a paradox, whereby oppositional hopes for the future stand opposed by an opposition to “the logic of opposition.”⁹ The opposition made possible by negativity is also a refusal

of history as linear narrative (the poor man’s teleology) in which meaning succeeds in revealing itself – as itself – through time. Far from partaking of this narrative movement toward a viable political future, far from perpetuating the fantasy of meaning’s eventual realization, the queer comes to figure the bar to every realization of futurity, the resistance, internal to the social, to every social structure or form.¹⁰

We encounter these oppositional forces in the reversals of Luke’s Gospel. Moreover, Luke is a tragic story with respect to the “restoration of Israel,” but not one whose tragedy necessarily produces new meaning.¹¹ Luke’s Gospel, at certain (often under-represented) moments, highlights the tragedy, whose trauma is echoed in the negative spaces, where Adorno’s “screams of [the] victims” can be heard and meaning unravels.

Writing against Adorno, Edelman continues to describe queer as that which “would deliberately separate us from ourselves, from the assurance, that is, of knowing ourselves and hence of knowing our ‘good.’”¹² As I will demonstrate in a reading of The Great Banquet, Jesus’ negativity gives way to a doubt about who is in and who is out with respect to the Kingdom of God. When one begins to doubt previously certain eschatological futures, it follows that one may begin to doubt what one once thought of as good. He continues,

Such queerness proposes, in place of the good, something I want to call “better,” though it promises, in more than one sense of the phrase, absolutely nothing. I connect this something better with Lacan’s characterization of what he calls “truth,” where truth does not assure happiness, or even, as Lacan makes clear, the good.¹³

Recognizing negativity in Luke’s narrative means that one reads some of his parables outside the binaries made through reversal, since reversal structurally affirms a certain good. In this way, some parables resist optimism, instead expressing the absence of hopeful futures and the jouissance of transgressing the logic of narrative as fulfilment.¹⁴

3 Just Answer the Question, Jesus!

Frederick Danker in his commentary on Luke proclaimed, “There is no end to peripeteia!”¹⁵ While he is describing the ubiquity of reversal-forms in the Third Gospel, he unwittingly, is alluding to a problem of the Political, where competing institutions vie for power, tipping the scales this-way-and-that ad infinitum. One power is on top, then the other. This is evidenced in Aristotle’s definition of περιπέτεια as “change to the opposite of things being done, just as had been said [by others], and this, as we are saying, in accord with what is likely or necessary.”¹⁶ The implicit structure of a reversal requires, then, a binary opposition – albeit for Luke, the binary also includes a power imbalance. For this reason, recent scholars have opted for the category, “status reversal.” This is best seen and modeled in Mary’s song (1:52–53),

It can be found in certain maxims as well, most famously in Luke 13:30, “Those who are last will be first and those who are first will be last,” as mentioned above.

The parables of Luke have also been “lifted up” as examples of reversal, most obviously in the “Rich Man vs. Lazarus” (16:19–31). Or, for example, the performance of a status reversal in “The Seat of Honor” (14:8–10) demonstrates how to benefit from a future reversal. This parable in particular concludes with a reversal maxim that is repeated a second time in 18:14: “All who lift themselves up will be brought low, and those who make themselves low will be lifted up.”¹⁷ However, if one were to look past the literal meaning of the maxim, one may imagine ὑψωθήσεται as a figurative reference for crucifixion (as it is used in the Fourth Gospel). In such a case the reversal is pregnant with its own ironic figuration, one that is haunted by the “national” history of imperial oppression through the event of the crucifixion. And irony, as Edelman sees it, is the “queerest of rhetorical devices.”¹⁸

Yet, beyond these two parables, the (status) reversals are not so clear. Consider then the moment that Jesus, in Luke, begins to teach about (and through) parables, “The Sower” (8:5–8). When asked what the parable “means” (τίς αὕτη εἴη ἡ παραβολή), Jesus responds

You have been given the mysteries of God’s kingdom, but these mysteries come to everyone else in parables so that when they see, they can’t see, and when they hear, they can’t understand.¹⁹

The movement from seeing to not-seeing and hearing and not-understanding in the text looks like reversal because there are two oppositions. Yet, it is a significant distinction to notice that the “not-seeing” and “not-understanding” are purposeful negations. The binary is not between seeing and blindness or hearing and deafness. This is apparent in the juxtaposition of the second binary, ἀκούοντες vs. συνιῶσιν, not a pure opposition. Instead, the positive positions of seeing and hearing are turned into negative spaces, where unnamed alternatives are possible and positive positions are resisted. This crucial (non)sense of a number of Luke’s parables make them difficult to interpret, but also create a space for a queering of the Political that make it difficult to determine whether Luke-Acts is an apologetic for Rome or a liberation manifesto, particularly when those are the oppositional positions. Negativity forces the auditor into a space outside the oppositions.

As Matthew Rindge’s thorough monograph notes, there has been very little scholarly attention to The Rich Fool, because it has been assumed the parable is fairly straightforward.²⁰ By and large this is true – the parable in comparison with other Lukan parables is succinct and sharp, much like The Two Debtors (7:41–43), requiring little interpretive work to get the punchline. However, when taken with the surrounding material, one might ask why the parable proper was inserted here. Both Mikeal Parsons and Luke Timothy Johnson have drawn attention to the way in which the Lukan parables interact with their introductory materials, including proems, which Parsons argues is evidence of Luke’s use of Theon’s Progymnasmata.²¹ The Rich Fool is no exception, since the parable is part of a didactic response to a specific request weighted with the aorist imperative “εἰπὲ”: “Tell my brother to divide the inheritance with me” (12:13). Where is the response to this request? Is there an answer at all?

Let us consider four responses to the brother’s request. First, Jesus immediately responds to the brother with a question of his own: “… who appointed me as judge or referee between you and your brother?” (v. 14). It is certainly not a positive response, but it probably correlates to the previous material (12:8–12) before the brother’s question, in which Jesus teaches how to interact with human authorities. In the previous material, Jesus attributes higher authority to the Human One, and so the brother takes the opportunity to ask Jesus for something he would normally ask to the other authorities. The negative space created by the question perhaps gives it a negative answer, a “no,” yet Jesus continues to the second and third possible answers.

Jesus, taking the chance for another teaching moment, warns his audience, “Guard yourself against all kinds of greed.” Is asking for a divided inheritance a kind of greed? We know neither the situation nor the amount of the inheritance, thus making it likely that such discussions and numbers were not relevant to Luke. So, if the answer is a simple “no,” then the parable (and the coming discourse) makes even less sense, as we shall see. In the next sentence, Jesus explains why one must be on their guard: “After all, one’s life (ζωὴ) isn’t determined by one’s possessions, even when someone is very wealthy.” This, too, does not seem to answer the brother’s request. In fact, this type of didactic discourse suggests that Jesus (and Luke) has probably already turned his attention back to the crowd and is teaching them rather than giving an answer. The parable and its punchline are no better for addressing the brother’s concern. The introductory request and parable are unique to Luke within the canonical Gospels. Luke’s Jesus responds to the question about the division of inheritance with a parable about a rich man who was foolish for storing up several years’ worth of wealth. Again, if the amount of the inheritance is not so relevant to Luke (he specifies amounts elsewhere),²² then the “wealthiness” of the parable’s character does not map back onto the brother. The concluding remark on hoarding (v. 21), which “explains” the meaning of the parable, makes certain that the parable, while responding to the brother, does not answer his concern. The Rich Fool is not an allegory for the brother, but one can (and should) ask how the metaphoricity of the parable functions, and whether or not it functions in relation to the brother.

Fourth, beyond the conclusion, Jesus’ didactic discourse continues in full negation: “don’t worry (µὴ µεριµνᾶτε) about your life, what you will eat, or about your body, what you will wear” (v. 22). The ravens “neither plant nor harvest, they have no silo or barn” (v. 23) like the rich fool. The lilies “don’t wear themselves out with work, and they don’t spin cloth” (v. 27). And you, “don’t chase after what you will eat and what you will drink,” for “all the nations of the world long for these things” (v. 29–30). Following this negative discourse, finally Jesus gives a positive response, possibly in response to the brother’s question: “Instead, desire his kingdom and all these things will be given to you as well.” If we sum up option four, Jesus uses a string of negatives to make space for one positive term, “τὴν βασιλείαν αὐτοῦ.” Unfortunately, this symbol (ἡ βασιλεία τοῦ θεοῦ) in Luke does not contain much content, and often obfuscates (negativity) rather than clarifies.

ἡ βασιλεία τοῦ θεοῦ is such a complex matter in Luke that scholarship has never settled on its meaning, and Karl Allen Kuhn has recently written a comprehensive monograph on the topic.²³ Consider again Jesus’ instructions on the kingdom is introduced in this way: “You have been given the mysteries of God’s kingdom, but these mysteries come to everyone else in parables so that when they see, they can’t see, and when they hear, they can’t understand” (7:10). In other words, if you are encountering the negativity of the parables, you are encountering the “mysteries of God’s kingdom.” Likewise, Jesus later obfuscates the mystery more, saying, “Whoever doesn’t welcome (δέξηται) God’s kingdom like a child will never enter it” (18:17). Moreover, every time Jesus is asked directly about the kingdom (13:29; 17:20; 23:42; Acts 1:6), he never gives a straight answer. So, there is a mystery that can be both received and entered, and this mysterious formula provides more negative space on which the Lukan Jesus can instruct as he wishes.

It is possible now to see the relationship between the parables and the Kingdom in terms of negativity, although the Kingdom does frequently function as futurism, as it often does in contemporary settings. Nevertheless, for the case of The Rich Fool, Jesus’ “positive” response to the brother is veiled in mystery, obfuscating the meaning and the future of the parable. The negativity of The Rich Fool is natural to discourse, and indeed, negation in conversations and narratives is common. The argument here is not that negativity should be especially attributed to the Lukan parables. Rather, negativity, and not reversal, is more common to Lukan parables (or at least as common). Let us look at several instances of negativity in the parables.

4 Negativity in Lukan Parables (and Beyond)

The Samaritan and its surrounding discourse (10:25–37) like The Rich Fool is fairly straightforward, making its positive meaning accessible to auditors: in order to love one’s neighbor (v. 27), one must show mercy (v. 37). Since the face of its positive meaning is hyper-visible, its negativity has been significantly overlooked, even though there is no status reversal in the parable proper. Another interpretive focus highlights the antagonistic relationship between the Jews and Samaritans. Luke, for his part, seems to have a preference for Samaritans (17:16; Acts 1:8). And being unique to Luke, scholars have suggested that this parable aligns with his “Gentile” bias.²⁴

The Gentile bias hypothesis is too simplistic because it does not account for a contested Judaism in a repressed diasporic context, as one finds in Kotrosits’ reading of Acts.²⁵ Samaria, being in between Galilee and Judea, is a material expression of the rendering of “neighbor” (πλησίον), more than “Gentile.” In the diasporic context though (more on this below), including in the very synagogues of worship, gentiles may have been the “othered” neighbors in their midst (see Acts 17:1–5). Problems arise in determining who is in and out due to the permeable boundary of ethnicity in the Ancient world and the importance of circumcision for crossing that boundary, since one cannot immediately see circumcision. Nevertheless, the radical negation in the parable is that Jesus does not say that the Samaritan is the neighbor whom one should love.

The parable begins with didactic discourse, much like The Rich Fool. But the primary question is the lawyer’s penetrating insight, “Who is my neighbor?” (10:29). What is Jesus’ response? Or more importantly, how does the parable function in the response? The first possibility we encounter is the man (ἀνθρωπός τις), with the mystifying Lukan “τις.” It is likely this man is a Jew, but Luke does not include this detail. The uncertainty functions to suggest it could be any of “us.” Is this uncertain man our neighbor? The priest and Levite are clearly negative examples and are thus not the neighbor. The other possible option (disregarding the innkeeper) is the Samaritan, of course. Perhaps, the lawyer (and Luke’s audience) must ask “Is the Samaritan my neighbor?” Yet, neither Jesus’ parable nor his concluding question answer the lawyer’s question about his neighbor directly. We find that Jesus’ parable and concluding question shift the subjective perspective of the parable, in fact modeling the love of neighbor, as a negation of the self.

When the lawyer poses the question, “Who is my neighbor,” it is for clarifying the object of love in the greatest commandment (v. 27). Yet Jesus’ follow-up question presents the neighbor as subject (v. 36), as a subject becoming (γεγονέναι). The parable is a turning, a movement that rotates the perspective, destabilizing the clear subject-object relationship of love and neighbor, of hate and Samaritan. For loving one’s neighbor requires a certain negative space in one’s subjective experience to learn (at least to imagine) the question of love from another’s experience, more radically, from a hated one’s experience. The Samaritan is the neighbor, not because we are God’s chosen subjects of neighborly love, but because a neighbor can be a subject who “shows mercy,” more than God’s chosen subjects may do. The parable functions to destabilize the objectification inherent in the Lawyer’s question, making it difficult to formulate the other as neighbor, or to formulate a cohesive understanding of the other. As Edelman articulates in No Future,

In this way the command to love one’s neighbor unleashes its negativity against the coherence of any self-image, subjecting us to a moral law that evacuates the subject so as to locate it through and in the very act of evacuation, permitting the realization, thereby, of a freedom beyond the boundaries of any image or representation, a freedom like the ground of God’s power, according to Lacan, ultimately resides in nothing more than “the capacity to advance into emptiness.”²⁶

In the Great Commandment there is a negation of the self which is necessary in the act of loving one’s neighbor, not simply as willingness to suffer for the other (what Foucault condemns as “pastoral power”), but the suppression of one’s perspective to make space for the other’s. This particular negation, with respect to Jewishness in the diverse diaspora of Rome’s oppressed, negates the future question of the “restoration of the kingdom to Israel” (Acts 1:6), making space for something else. In short, The Samaritan has negative implications for Lukan eschatology, where (now nearby) diasporic others might otherwise have been subjected to the future victories (violences) of Israel. Unfortunately, in Acts, Luke begins to rely on the figure of the Jew to maintain positive hopes for the future.

The Friend at Midnight (11:5–8) negates an expected logic of the world, a logic that makes it difficult to keep faith in the god of Israel. While there is an internal reversal (the friend changes his mind in v. 9), there is no status reversal associated with this parable. Rather, the parable functions to reopen a closed posture towards the future. Although, in this case the future is aimed at the optimistic possibilities of “good gifts” and the “πνεῦµα ἅγιον.” Nevertheless, the negation of a world order that makes it difficult to have daily bread (11:3, 5) or crucifies an innocent man is grounds for a new logic. This parable has a parallel in The Widow’s Judge (18:2–5). Just as the sleepy friend changes his mind, so does the faithless judge. This parable is introduced as one to give hope (18:1), especially eschatological hope (18:6–8). Yet v. 8 ends with the very pessimistic, “when the Human One comes, will he find faithfulness on earth?” In summary, these two parables operate by negating expectations, the second one concluding with a question that dampens eschatological hopes.

Immediately following The Rich Fool and its discourse, Jesus tells a parable, The Vigilant Servant, in two halves (12:35–40; 42–48). In the initial sequence, we have encouragement about the eschatological future, where Jesus assures “… those servants whom the master finds waiting up when he arrives … he will dress himself to serve, seat them at the table as honored guests, and wait on them.” For Luke however, this happens in the narrative itself, at the Last Supper (22:14–20), and Jesus names himself as the “one who serves,” instructing his disciples to do the same. This is not the expected eschaton to which the parable probably refers. The second half of the parable responds to the disciple’s question: “Is this parable for us or everyone?” Again, Jesus responds with his own question (creating negative space), “Who are the faithful and wise managers whom the master will put in charge of his household servants, to give them their food at the proper time?” Those who do their responsibilities will be blessed (12:43), but those who do not remain faithful will receive severe physical punishment (12:47) or be cut into pieces (12:46) by the master. This is negativity through doubt, employed by Luke’s Jesus to leave a bit of uncertainty about who is in and who is out, even with respect to eschatological judgment.²⁷

This parable concludes with discourse that is important to quote in full:

I came to cast fire upon the earth. How I wish that it was already ablaze! I have a baptism I must experience. How I am distressed until it’s completed! Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, I have come instead to bring division. From now on, a household of five will be divided – three against two and two against three. Father will square off against son and son against father; mother against daughter and daughter against mother; and mother-in-law against daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law.

Luke 12:49–53

The baptism of Jesus here refers to crucifixion, central to this passage’s anger. The very conditions that make his execution likely (namely the Imperial alliance with Jerusalem) is cause for him to set it all on fire. Moreover, Jesus says emphatically that he has not come to bring peace, and the division he incites will be strong enough to divide family ties. Considering this from the perspective of Edelman’s queer negativity, the future is not necessarily good for children or the family, and the institution of the family can be interrogated.²⁸

Continuing with the theme of eschatological judgment, Jesus tells the parable of The Fruitless Tree (13:6–9).²⁹ Having just pronounced more possible eschatological judgment (12:59), someone tells Jesus about those “Galileans whom Pilate had killed while they were offering sacrifices” (13:1). Once more, Jesus responds with a series of questions, each followed by a call to repent or die. The final question asks, if those who suffered were more guilty “than everyone else who lives in Jerusalem” (v. 4), implying that at least some in Jerusalem are guilty. Then, Jesus tells another parable without status reversal, The Fruitless Tree. In it, the κύριος wants to cut down the barren tree (a metaphor for Israel/Judah), but the gardener asks for one more year.

The passage concerning the anxiety over the righteous use of material resources has now turned to general instructions in doing what one “judges” to be righteous.³⁰ But the question the crowd asks concerns the ability to perform righteousness through the sacrifices.³¹ Commentators often focus on whether or not the Galileans or those at Shiloam suffered because of their sins, as if Luke had Job and his friends in mind for this passage.³² Yet, this is not in any way parallel or a response to the information given from the crowd. Where the crowd is suggesting a lack in the righteousness of the Galileans, Jesus responds, again negating expectation, by demanding repentance (µετανοῆτε). Then, Jesus’ rhetorical questions do not address the question of suffering and sin, for no one can answer such a question. The outlook towards Israel’s future is pessimistic and filled with caution.

Again, someone asks Jesus, “Will only a few be saved” (13:23)? Jesus responds with another parable about a narrow gate/closed door. This time he does not answer with a question but with a parable that shifts the perspective again. The final conclusion in v. 28 responds to the question, “There will be weeping and grinding of teeth when you see Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and all the prophets in God’s kingdom, but you yourselves thrown out.” We do not know a single thing about the person who asks the question, except that they live outside of Jerusalem. But like other parables, Jesus’ story negates the audience’s self-identification with the “people of God,” or in this case, “God’s kingdom.” The audience in this negation are pushed to interrogate their own insidedness and consider the possibility of their outsidedness. In 13:29, Jesus gives a positive view of the eschaton, saying, “People will come from east and west, north and south, and sit down to eat in God’s kingdom.” But this unusual positive statement is part of the interrogation of the audience, who in fact, might not be one of those people (negativity).

This statement forms the opening discourse for another negating parable, The Great Banquet (14:16–24). The parable is also filled with reversal, as the wealthy invited guests are replaced with “the poor, crippled, blind, and lame” (14:21). However, just like the previous negative parables, the hopeful eschatological future is negated. During Jesus’ preceding didactic discourse, a dinner guest says to him, “Happy are those will feast in God’s kingdom.” Jesus responds immediately with the parable of The Great Banquet, where those invited do not eat, and those excluded are finally invited. It is not a simple status reversal, because the parable puts in doubt what was sure, rather than telling the dinner guest that he will not be invited. This doubt is the space of negation. This is part of Jesus’ divisive rhetoric (12:51), because in the subsequent discourse, Jesus interrogates the family once more: “Whoever comes to me and doesn’t hate father and mother, spouse [wife] and children, and brothers and sisters – yes, even one’s own life – cannot be my disciple.”

Luke is the only canonical gospel to use the word “hate” (µισεῖ) against the family. Thomas uses it, Matthew does not. And Luke is the only one of the three to include “wife” (τὴν γυναῖκα) and the emphatic “one’s own life” (ψυχὴν ἑαυτοῦ). In 8:19–21, Luke’s Jesus seemingly ignores his “mother and brothers,” saying, “My mother and brothers are those who listen to God’s word and do it” (8:21). In 11:27, a woman kindly said to Jesus, “Happy is the mother who gave birth to you and who nursed you.” Jesus responded, “Happy rather (µενοῦν) are those who hear God’s word and put it into practice.” Next there is the aforementioned division against family members (12:49–53). In Chapter 17, Jesus instructs his disciples to “Remember Lot’s wife!” Two will be in the same bed, one will be taken and the other left (17:34). Luke, relying on the family for hopeful futures, utilizes negation against family to show pessimism towards the future of his narrative (Luke’s own present and future). This culminates in a blurring of the line between reversal and negativity: “Whoever tries to preserve their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life will preserve it” (17:33). Ultimately, in this reading, there is nothing inherently wrong with family for Luke. However, he ends the “hate” passage with this statement that must haunt all “Christian” futures, particularly those in the Lukan diaspora: “Whoever doesn’t carry their own cross and follow me cannot be my disciple” (14:27). The cross is the abyss that infects all Lukan futures with a certain pessimism. The “hate” towards the family for Luke is one which knows the pain that loved ones will suffer when one’s self takes up the cross.

This examination of negativity in the parables is by no means comprehensive, but by this point I will only be repeating myself were I to continue. Since a good portion of the negativity in the parables and their discourses has come from Jesus’ refusal to answer questions directly and/or from Jesus negating expected futures, what I see in the parables is a refusal to accept the logic of the world, a logic that crucifies an innocent man (23:4), a would-be messiah. If we include the initial negativity present in reversal, then every parable challenges (negates) a certain narrative about the world. Where reversal expresses the hope of the resurrection though, negativity insists the theoretical excavation that the abyss of the cross does.

If a messiah is one who saves, then the cross is the abyss where messiah dissolves. When Jesus returns, he is something else other than messiah. Even in the reconfiguration of Jesus as Christ (24:25–27), diasporic mourning dampens the reversal of the resurrection sequence. What was the “Son of Man” in the passion prediction (9:22) becomes “Christ” after the resurrection (24:46). The Scriptures that predict that the Christ must suffer and be resurrected after the third day are absent. If national belonging is a contested issue in the Jewish synagogues of Luke’s present (as Kotrosits suggests), then the live issue of messiah is still one of national restoration. Concerns of national restoration are founded against imperial repression, the desire for subjects to engage in cultural expressions towards belonging. If the Lukan diaspora is a diverse place of “monstrous belonging” and ambivalent alliances,³³ then the failure of unity is bound up with national mourning which forces multi-ethnic belonging. Both national mourning and forced belonging make their way into Luke’s narrative, expressed as negativity, through the cross, where everyone must die (9:24–25). For those in synagogues desiring the restoration of Israel, Jesus cannot be the messiah. And for those that want to center on Jesus as Christ, Israel cannot be restored (yet), but neither can messiah (it must be something otherwise). In both cases, national mourning births a pessimism that daily encounters the Imperium.

5 Foolishly Securing the Future

If anything, the negativity of the parables, refusing to clearly identify the insiders, allows space for something otherwise in Luke’s own diasporic context. The negativity of the parables means that Luke is pessimistic about the restoration of Israel in his present moment, and this haunts the narrations of eschatological hope that he has received. He includes eschatological futures alongside pessimistic discourse, not necessarily to cure pessimism with hope, but rather to allow possible hopes to be haunted with real suffering. So for Luke, the resurrection does not solve the problem of the crucifixion, but rather the resurrection and its hopeful futures are bound securely to the specters of the crucified. The resurrection does not redistribute new content on the negative space of the cross. The cross is a refusal of the future, of reproductive futurism.

It is this attentiveness to the refusal of reproductive futurism that brought my attention to Luke’s Rich Fool parable. As I have demonstrated the negativity of The Rich Fool and other parables, stemming from the negativity of the cross, refuses certain futures. In addition, the future plays an important role in tension between Wisdom and Apocalyptic literary traditions in Second Temple literature. I see this tension playing itself out in The Rich Fool and its surrounding discourse. If we can see a rejection of eschatological futurism in the negativity of Jesus’ response, then we might pose the question: what is Luke’s reason for refusing certain futures in this particular discourse, especially considering Luke’s attention to wealth and possessions? The strongest indictment against The Rich Fool is that he stores up enough grain and goods for “several years” (v. 19). We can see, then, the conflict between Wisdom and Apocalyptic in two similar stories.

First in Sirach 11:16–19, the wisdom perspective casts no judgment, but only wonders if such “storing up” is wise with respect to the unknown future.

While in 1 Enoch 97, storing up goods is done through “unjust means” (97:8), the apocalyptic judgment provides a future: “For your wealth shall not endure/but it shall take off from you quickly / for you have acquired it all unjustly, / and you shall be given over to a great curse” (98:10).³⁵

The first thing to notice with respect to this inquiry is that the future in the Wisdom tradition is open and unknown, while the Apocalyptic tradition aims to make the future, at least with respect to judgment, certain. Both the Gospel of Thomas (Logion 63) and Luke make the death of the rich fool ambiguous as judgment, the primary difference being that in Luke, God scolds the rich fool for not realizing that he might die. God’s prediction of the man’s death is not a pronouncement of judgment for his wealth, though. In other places, Luke does include apocalyptic attitudes towards wealth in his text, particularly later in the travel narrative.³⁶ And even at the end of the following discourse of The Rich Fool, Jesus instructs, “Sell your possessions and give to those in need” (12:33). The harshest example of judgment with respect to wealth is The Rich Man vs. Lazarus (16:19–31), the exemplar of apocalyptic reversal among the Lukan parables. It is interesting, then, that Luke does not include such a reversal here, seeing that such a reversal might support his overall economic message.

The key, as already suggested, is the relationship between inheritance and hoarding. Put simply, both are related through reproductive futurism, in the way that wealth functions to stabilize institutions beyond the mere present. Inheritance is related to the intergenerational stability of a certain family (likely at the expense of other families) in the same way hoarding stabilizes the daily life of the rich, which Luke gives no indication will be inherited or not. Both are examples of securing the future, written from the future present of the Lukan diaspora. This perspective makes sense if we accept the diasporic context of Acts as the idealized mirror image of Luke’s audience. Where Luke claims the earlier believers “would sell pieces of property and possessions and distribute the proceeds to everyone who needed them” (Acts 2:45), thus following the instructions of Jesus from the discourse in Luke 12, it is easy to imagine a community who was looking for support from (possible) members who might have excess beyond subsistence levels. Acts 5 narrates the divine execution of those who refuse to share and lie, including another apocalyptic ending to those aimed too far at the future. Diasporic life, precarious both in its internal identity conflicts, but also precarious in its proximity to poverty, becomes a place of futurelessness.

The Rich Fool must be considered with Jesus’ earlier words: “What advantage do people have if they gain the whole world for themselves yet perish or lose their lives” (9:25)? The answer for Luke is of course, “nothing.” But this is entirely against the logic of Empire and reproductive futurism, whose logic is to gain the whole world and perpetuate it forever. Read in this way, negativity is its own eschaton, the end of a world and the end of a story. Not only the end of a story, but a disruption of storytelling as such, so that a story, a gospel, becomes a space for something otherwise after the end of the world. Life-otherwise, though, is still infused with pessimism. If one tries to save one’s own life, through hoarding or inheritances or otherwise, one will lose it (17:33; cf. 9:24–25). And even on the more hopeful side, if one loses one’s life for Jesus, one still loses a life.