Scripture: Luke 16:19-31.
I was talking last week about the story Jesus told about the wedding banquet, how he used that example to talk about what the reign of God would be like. You want to know about the reign of God? Well, it’s a little like…
What I left out of the picture last week was the people who were left out of the banquet, and there were some, even though the picture is meant to be an inclusive one. There were some people who were not at the banquet because they chose not to be, because they had other things to do that were more important, because they didn’t seem to be captivated or pulled toward that vision that Jesus spent his whole ministry laying out before people.
The scripture reading we have heard this morning is also about such people, people who do not grasp, or are not grasped by that vision of people coming together. As the title of the sermon suggests, I believe it is a hard story. Not so much hard to understand, though I think there are some ways to misunderstand the story, but more that it is hard to hear. This is not a heartwarming passage of scripture. There’s nothing much here in the way of what we would normally think of as inspiration or uplift. This is a hard story, and to make matters worse, I believe it is a true story. So true that we can’t just ignore it.
This is an unusual parable. Usually when Jesus tells a story he uses examples from everyday life in order to talk about the reign of God. He has this very real sense of what God hopes for us, what God dreams on our behalf, the promises that are inherent within us as God’s children. He has this sense of where we need to be headed, and how if we could set our hearts on this reign of God that it would give joy and meaning and direction to these earthly journeys of ours. And he talks about this reign of God by using stories drawn from everyday life. So he says, you know this reign of God I’m talking about is a little like a wedding feast…or, it would be a little like if a child left home and went off and acted like a fool never called or sent an e-mail or anything and then one day came home and the parents were just so overjoyed that they threw a huge party. The reign of God is sort of like that. Those were the kinds of parables Jesus usually told.
This one is different. Instead of using something from the present world to talk about a future that is still only a promise, here he uses a story set in another world to try to talk about this one. That’s the way I read this parable. It sounds like it’s about the afterlife. The two main characters die and one goes to “heaven” and one goes to “hell”. But this parable is not about the afterlife, any more than the story about the wedding banquet is about weddings.
What we have here is not a pie-in-the-sky theology that promises a heavenly reward for those who endure earthly suffering, and a heavenly punishment for those who enjoy themselves in this life. Jesus was not above using images about eternal bliss and damnation, and he does that here, but his point here is not to throw around careless promises of what heaven or hell will be like or of who will go there. This is not theology or moral instruction. It is a story. In fact it helps me to see it as a sort of one-act play, with three scenes.
Scene one: As the curtain goes up we see a picture from everyday life. There’s a man, well-to-do, not filthy rich but better than comfortable, sitting at a table, having a meal with friends. The wine is flowing, the food is delicious, life is good. They’re not doing anything terrible. They’re not obnoxiously drunk or saying horrible things, they’re just enjoying themselves, enjoying the abundance that life has to offer.
Then off on the side of the stage we see someone else, obviously not well-to-do, tattered clothing, his body covered with sores, probably doesn’t have health insurance, hungry, hoping the rich person will throw some food away so he can have it. This person is lying at the gate of the well-to-do person, so that the wealthier one can see him if he wants to, but he doesn’t have to. There’s a safe distance there and the comfortable people inside the gate talk as though the man outside the gate could not hear them.
In this play (I’m embellishing Jesus’ story a little) the people who are at the table talk somewhat wearily but somewhat kindly about the situation—“You know, every day this fellow is here. It’s hard to know what to do. Should we give him something, or not. I mean we’re not running a shelter here. We don’t want to have a whole bunch of people lying at the gate ready for a meal every day, but it’s sort of hard to walk around the fellow as though he weren’t there. And shouldn’t the city being doing something? Well, my heart goes out to the guy. Here, you done with this chicken breast? I’ll go give it to him. Hey, did you see that Georgia Tech game the other day? Can you believe we lost three times to them?”
Scene one is the truth as the world often sees it. The world is filled with poverty and with inequality. Some people have it pretty easy. Some have it not so easy, in fact pretty tough. It’s too bad. But, that’s the way it is. It’s the way it always has been and the way it always will be. That’s the way you see it, Jesus says to the wealthy people he’s talking to.
But what if that’s not how God sees it? What if the same scene, reflected in eternity, is very different? Scene two.
What we see as the curtain comes up is an ironic reversal of everything from the previous scene. Things have been turned practically upside down. This is how things appear from the other side, as it were. Now it’s the rich man who waits desperately for just a taste of something from the hand of Lazarus. Now it’s Lazarus surrounded by good company. Abraham has his arms around him and there are angels everywhere. There is a vast space between the two men and maybe now a locked gate in between. In any case, Abraham makes it quite clear that there is no way that people can move back and forth here. There is no greater distance than the distance between heaven and hell and the distance separating these two people is just that great.
This, I believe Jesus is telling us, is what God sees when God looks at that same scene we saw in scene one. We see the externals, the physical, material reality. God sees things from a different perspective, maybe from the inside out. God sees the inward truth of the situation. God’s eyes penetrate to the reality that is more real than the real. And what God sees in that same scene that we saw earlier, what God sees is that although Lazarus is physically near to the people seated at the table that in reality there is a vast, almost unspeakable distance separating the two people from each other. It is a distance brought about not by hatred, not by cruelty, not by the evil of the rich man and the goodness of Lazarus, which is nowhere stated. The distance is born maybe partly of indifference, but even more than that, of something deeper than indifference, the taken-for-grantedness of the way the world is.
For the rich man, Lazarus has been just another part of the landscape. He is not a very pretty part of it, but he is just as much taken for granted as any other part of the landscape. Lazarus is an unfortunate piece of scenery. So what God sees when she looks at this is this enormous human distance which Jesus describes as being as vast and unbridgeable as the distance between heaven and hell. There is no other way to describe it. They can no more touch each other as human beings than they could if one were in heaven and the other in hell. And to God this is not too bad. And to God this is not just too bad. It is horrible and depressing, so horrible that you would want to turn your eyes away, just as though you were watching someone sitting in the midst of flames.
The rich man is the center of this story. It is rich people we are told Jesus is talking to in telling this story. To the rich, to the people of privilege, the way the world is, is tolerable. They have the luxury of feeling a certain amount of compassion, whatever is convenient for them, and then turning it off if it interferes with their comfort or pleasure. The rich man has a built in wall of defense against Lazarus. His life is organized to protect his comfort, not because he has necessarily done something evil to make it that way but just because it is. It is this innocent looking aloofness of the rich man, this untouched neutrality, the secret satisfaction he takes in knowing that it is someone else who suffers and not himself—these are the things that Jesus points to as the earthworks of the devil.
To the rich, the way the world is, is tolerable. To God it is not. That is why Jesus went to the unusual length of telling a story about hell. It is not a statement about the terrors of the afterlife. It is a statement about the need to break through this world’s complacency. It’s not a matter of having the rich summon up a little pity, exercise some sweet charity, demonstrate their compassion, and go back to business as usual. The position of the rich, Jesus is saying, is no more tenable, no more comfortable than if we were roasting in hell, longing for a single drop of water. But how do you get through on these things.
The arrogance of the rich man is such that he can pretend to himself that he does not stand in need. In scene one, only Lazarus does. But as God sees it, Jesus says, it may be, it is the rich man who is the most in need. It’s his soul that is most in jeopardy. Jesus is in effect holding up a mirror for the rich. By telling the parable he is saying, Don’t you see, can’t you see that distance that God sees between the rich and the poor? Don’t you see that your position of privilege is cutting you off from other people and from God?
Then there’s scene three. In order to bring the contrast between God’s view of things and the comfortable, complacent view represented by the rich man—in order to bring these two viewpoints together into sharper focus, in scene three Jesus places them side by side on the same stage. On the one side of the stage are the rich man’s five brothers. They are carrying on though in his best tradition. With them it is business as usual. They don’t feel any crisis breaking over them. They sense no particular urgency about anything. There is nothing much at stake. Life just goes on and they’re sucking it in, like all good people of privilege. And they are quite oblivious to the scene on the other side of the stage.
Over there are still Lazarus and the rich man in heaven and hell. Over there are two people who need to join hands but cannot. Over there is a picture of a world in crisis because of the distance between people, a world in which heaven and hell are contending with each other. Over there the rich man is saying that something has to be done to let his brothers see what is really going on, that they are living in a state of crisis, even if they don’t recognize it.
I find it interesting and amusing—and of course I have no way of knowing whether Jesus intended this to be an element of the story—but the rich man still doesn’t get it. The rich man, as a person of privilege still is asking Lazarus to do his bidding. Lazarus, go and tell my brothers…Abraham, tell him to go and tell my brothers …that they need to pay attention, that they need to somehow change the way things are, or the way they are, or something. There is no offer, no pleading on the part of the rich man for Abraham to allow him to go and tell the truth about the position of privilege he has occupied all his life. The rich man still wants others to do his work for him, and he gets rebuffed. His brothers too will have to do their own work and come to their own realizations. There are no short cuts here.
And to be honest, I think there is no way out of the untenable position this passage puts us in, those of us who are people of privilege. One thing we cannot do, of course, is to take the position that there is nothing we can do so we might as well get over it and get used to it—just accept that this is the way the world is and will be. But that attitude is why Jesus told the parable in the first place. That attitude takes us back to scene one where Lazarus is just part of the scenery. But the other thing we cannot do is to assume that this parable is being told simply as an encouragement to all people of means to be a little more compassionate and generous. There is an unacceptable gulf between people of privilege and those who are not, between white people in our society and people of color, between rich and poor. It is an unacceptable gulf, and it cannot be bridged or destroyed by a few good deeds or by a greater generosity. We cannot dispose of our discomfort by saying if only we will do this or that. There is no social program connected to this parable.
That leaves us only one option. Doing nothing is not an option. Thinking there is nothing to be done is not an option. Neither is having a check list of things to do that we can work our way through and feel good about as we do it—that also is not a sufficient option. What remains is for us to be troubled by this parable, or rather to be troubled by the inequities and injustices of the world, to tell the truth about them, beginning with telling the truth to ourselves, and to refuse to let ourselves be comforted either by resignation or by a false confidence in our ability to change things. This parable is to me a hard story. It asks us not so much to envision the reign of God as to see the world as it is, to refuse to make our peace with the world as it is, but also to know that there are no easy remedies. The story is a hard one. It offers no way to feel good. It simply haunts us. May it continue to haunt us. Amen.
Jim Bundy
March 11, 2001