Catholic Commentary
Refusal to Arbitrate and Warning Against Greed
13One of the multitude said to him, “Teacher, tell my brother to divide the inheritance with me.”14But he said to him, “Man, who made me a judge or an arbitrator over you?”15He said to them, “Beware! Keep yourselves from covetousness, for a man’s life doesn’t consist of the abundance of the things which he possesses.”
Luke 12:13–15 records Jesus refusing to arbitrate an inheritance dispute and warning against covetousness. Jesus teaches that human life's authentic meaning cannot be derived from the accumulation of possessions, redirecting spiritual focus from material acquisition to the Kingdom of God.
A man asks Jesus to settle his inheritance dispute; Jesus refuses—not because the claim isn't valid, but because no amount of possession can make you more yourself.
Luke 12:13 — The Request from the Crowd The scene opens with an unnamed man interrupting what appears to be a sustained teaching on discipleship and fearless witness (Lk 12:1–12). His appeal — "Teacher, tell my brother to divide the inheritance with me" — is not, on its surface, dishonest. Under Mosaic law (Num 27:1–11; Deut 21:15–17), firstborn sons received a double portion of the estate, and disputes over implementation were common. Rabbis and itinerant teachers were regularly consulted as informal arbiters in such matters; the man is not behaving unusually by first-century Jewish standards. The word he uses, didaskalos (teacher), acknowledges Jesus' authority, yet he deploys that authority instrumentally — as a tool for his private litigation. He wants Jesus to be useful to him, not transformative of him. This is the first irony Luke embeds in the scene: the man has access to the living Word of God and asks for a property settlement.
Luke 12:14 — Jesus' Refusal Jesus' reply is deliberately distancing: "Ánthrōpe" — "Man," or more forcefully, "Fellow" — a form of address that in Greek carries a note of mild reproach, used elsewhere by Luke only in moments of correction (Lk 22:58, 60). Jesus does not simply decline; he asks a counter-question: "Who appointed me judge or arbitrator over you?" The word meristēs (arbitrator, divider) occurs only here in the New Testament and may carry an additional resonance: Jesus refuses to be a divider, because his mission is precisely the opposite — to unite humanity to the Father. This is not a statement of incompetence or indifference to justice. Rather, Jesus is diagnosing what lies beneath the request: not a legal question but a spiritual one. He has not come to adjudicate earthly estates; he has come to announce the Kingdom (Lk 4:43). The refusal is itself a teaching — a prophetic redirection that exposes what the man is actually seeking.
Luke 12:15 — The Warning Against Covetousness The pivot to "them" — the wider crowd — signals that Jesus heard in this one man's request a universal temptation. The imperative "Beware!" (horate kai phylassesthe) is doubled in the Greek, intensifying the urgency: "See and guard yourselves." The word pleonexia (covetousness, greediness) literally means "the desire to have more" — not mere want, but the compulsive orientation of the self toward acquisition. This is one of the vices St. Paul will later identify as idolatry (Col 3:5), a counterfeit worship in which created goods occupy the place of God. Jesus then delivers what is essentially a definition of human dignity in negative form: life (zōē) does not consist in the perisseúō of one's possessions — the surplus, the overflow, the abundance piled up beyond need. The word zōē here refers to authentic human life in its fullness, the life that corresponds to what a person is. Jesus' claim is ontological: possessions cannot constitute a person's being. No accumulation of property can make a man more of a man. This verse sets the stage for the Parable of the Rich Fool (Lk 12:16–21), which will illustrate the same truth in narrative form.
The Typological and Spiritual Senses At the typological level, the unnamed man's appeal echoes the disputes among Israel over the divided land — a land that, in covenant theology, was never fully Israel's own but held in trust from God (Lev 25:23). The deeper inheritance that cannot be arbitrated or divided is the Kingdom of God itself (Lk 12:32), which Christ has come not to distribute as a legal settlement but to bestow as pure gift. The spiritual sense reveals a pattern: whenever human beings approach Christ primarily with a transactional agenda, Christ does not comply but converts — not the terms of the transaction, but the questioner's relationship to the question.
Catholic tradition uniquely illuminates this passage at several levels.
The Catechism and Covetousness. The Catechism of the Catholic Church treats covetousness (pleonexia) as a violation of the tenth commandment (CCC 2535–2540), which "prohibits greed and the desire to amass earthly goods without limit." The Catechism specifically identifies envy — wanting what belongs to another — as its most acute form, noting that it "can lead to the worst crimes" (CCC 2539). The man in the crowd may not be envious in the full moral sense, but Jesus recognizes the grain of covetousness in his appeal and addresses the root before it bears fruit.
Church Fathers on Wealth and Being. St. Basil the Great, in his Homily on "I Will Pull Down My Barns", directly exegetes this Lukan context: "The bread you store up belongs to the hungry; the cloak that lies in your chest belongs to the naked." St. Ambrose, commenting on Luke, notes that the man's request reveals how possessions can become the lens through which a person sees everything — including God. St. John Chrysostom, preaching on the parallel temptation in Matthew, warns that pleonexia is uniquely dangerous precisely because it disguises itself as prudence.
Magisterial Teaching. Gaudium et Spes §35 echoes Christ's ontological claim directly: "The norm of human activity is this: that in accord with the divine plan and will, it should harmonize with the genuine good of the human race, and allow men as individuals and as members of society to pursue their total vocation and fulfil it." Possessions serve the person; they cannot constitute the person. Laudato Si' §203 extends this to a critique of the "technocratic paradigm" in which worth is measured by productivity and accumulation — exactly the spiritual error Jesus diagnoses in verse 15.
The Universal Destination of Goods. Catholic Social Teaching holds that while private property is legitimate, it is subordinate to the universal destination of all goods (CCC 2402–2406). Jesus' refusal to adjudicate the inheritance is not indifference to justice but a reminder that all material goods are ultimately held in stewardship under God.
Contemporary Catholics live inside an economy specifically engineered to cultivate pleonexia — algorithmically curated advertising, aspirational social media, and financial products that reframe unlimited accumulation as simple prudence. Jesus' warning in verse 15 is not directed at the visibly greedy; it is directed at the crowd — at ordinary people whose default orientation has quietly shifted toward accumulation without their noticing. The practical challenge this passage poses is diagnostic: What do I bring to Christ? Do I approach prayer, sacraments, or Scripture primarily asking Jesus to validate or advance my existing agenda — a better job, a favorable outcome in a conflict, financial security? Or do I come prepared to be redirected, as this unnamed man should have been? A concrete practice: before financial decisions — major purchases, investment choices, estate planning — Catholics might deliberately ask not "What am I entitled to?" but "What is this doing to my soul?" The Sacrament of Reconciliation is a particular place to examine the covetous thoughts that never become actions but still quietly reorder the heart away from God.