The Ravens Have No Barn

At the Tower of London a legend has outlived every king who ruled from it: if the ravens ever leave, the Tower and the kingdom will fall. So at least six are kept on the grounds, and a Yeoman Warder called the Ravenmaster feeds them twice a day.¹ A kingdom that believes it hangs on its birds, and birds that hang, morning and evening, on one man with a bucket. The ravens do not know they are holding anything up. They only know that someone comes with food.

Jesus has just told the story of a man who would have found that arrangement unbearable. The rich fool's whole plan was storage — "I will tear down my barns and build larger ones" (Luke 12:18) — and God's answer arrives the same night: "Fool! This night your soul is required of you" (Luke 12:20). Then Jesus turns to his disciples and picks the bird that has nothing: "Consider the ravens: they neither sow nor reap, they have neither storehouse nor barn, and yet God feeds them" (Luke 12:24). Not the dove; the raven — an unclean scavenger under the law (Leviticus 11:13–15), whose hungry young Job hears crying out to God (Job 38:41). No barn, and a full stomach.

Let us be honest about what our worry is made of. On the surface it is about food, clothing, the bill and the calendar. Underneath, it is the fear that no one is minding us — that we are on our own, and had better build accordingly. Keller's diagnosis is that money and anxiety make us live as orphans, as if there were no Father to come with food.² And the orphan's remedy is always the barn. A barn is a fear with a roof on it. But a barn holds grain, not tomorrow; the rich man's was full the night he died, and the more we store, the more we have to lose.

Into that fear Jesus speaks one of the tenderest sentences in the Gospels: "Fear not, little flock, for it is your Father's good pleasure to give you the kingdom" (Luke 12:32). The kingdom is not the thing we build to keep ourselves safe; it is the thing our Father is glad to hand us. And the one who says so had less than a raven — "the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head" (Luke 9:58) — and would end with less than a lily, soldiers casting lots for his last garment (Luke 23:34). That is where the promise gets its weight. "He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things?" (Romans 8:32). A Father who has already spent the costliest thing he had will not be stingy with bread. Israel learned this on bread they cannot store; we learn it at a cross, where the fixed verdict of his love was settled before any harvest of ours came in. Only that Father can make "your Father knows that you need them" (Luke 12:30) weigh more than a barn, because only he has already shown what he will give.

This is not a promise that every field yields. It is a promise that we are not orphans. The birds at the Tower were never holding up the kingdom; they were being fed inside it. So are we. The kingdom is being given, with a Father's good pleasure, to a small and frightened flock — and "where your treasure is, there will your heart be also" (Luke 12:34). Let the heart follow the treasure, then, out of the barn and into his hands, where it was always meant to live.