THE END OF COVETOUSNESS

Tolstoi has a powerful tale of a young Eussian who fell heir to his father’s small farm. He was no sooner in possession of this land than he began to dream eagerly of how he could add to it. One morning a stranger, evidently a person of power and authority, came to him and told him, as they were standing near the old homestead, that he could have, for nothing, all the land he could walk over in one day — but at sundown he must be back at the very place from which he started. Pointing to the grave of the young man’s father, the stranger said, ‘This is the point to which you must return.’

The youth looked eagerly over the rich fields in the distance and, throwing off his coat and without waiting to say a word to his wife and children, started off across the fields. His first plan was to cover a tract of ground six miles square; but when he had walked the six, he decided to make it nine, then twelve, and then fifteen — which would give him sixty miles to walk before sundown!

By noon he had covered two sides of this square, or thirty miles. But eager to get on and compass the whole distance, he did not stop for food. An hour later he saw an old man drinking at a spring, but in his hunger for land he brushed aside the cup which the old man offered him and rushed on in his eager quest for possession of land. When he was a few miles from the goal, he was worn down with fatigue.

A few hundred yards from the line, he saw the sun approaching the horizon and knew that he had but a few minutes left. Hurrying on and ready to faint, he summoned all his energies for one last effort — and managed to stagger across the line just as the sun was sinking. But as he crossed the line he saw a cruel, cynical smile on the face of the stranger who had promised him the land, and who was waiting for him there at his father’s grave. Just as he crossed the line — the master and possessor, as he thought, of fifteen square miles of rich land — the youth fell dead upon the ground which he had coveted.

The stranger then said to the servants, ‘I offered him all the land he could cover. Now you see what that is: six feet long by two feet wide; and I thought he would like to have the land close to his father’s grave, rather than to have it anywhere else.’ With that the stranger, who was Death, vanished, saying as he did so, ‘I have kept my pledge.’

‘Whose shall those things be?’ (Luke 12:20).

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