Scripture: Luke 16:19-31
It’s a sad story, the one Jesus told that we heard just a few minutes ago. Maybe it didn’t bring tears to your eyes or make your heart bleed. Probably not. It’s just a story after all. The people aren’t real, not Lazarus or the rich man. Jesus is not talking about people he knew. He made them up. It’s fiction. It’s a parable. One of those stories Jesus told to make some point or another. And this is the Bible after all. We don’t usually think of the Bible as being in the business of telling sad stories. It’s supposed to have a message, isn’t it? It tells stories that are supposed to comfort, inspire, challenge, or instruct us. And certainly the parables Jesus told were like that. They were his way of illustrating a point or making it more real. Bible stories, and especially the stories of Jesus we refer to as parables, are not just sad stories. And maybe it’s not just a sad story. I guess maybe I’ll get around to saying it’s more than that. But at the beginning today, before I get very much into what we’re supposed to make of it, I’m thinking of it more than anything else as a sad story.
I haven’t always thought of it that way. To be honest I think I have most of the time treated this story as in some way instructional. And there are lots of possibilities along those lines, possible “morals to the story.” Probably the most obvious for me would be the gap between rich and poor. That is the reality that Jesus is explicitly describing here after all. One of the characters is a rich man, that’s the only name he has, rich man. And in a few sentences Jesus makes sure that we understand that he’s living in the lap of luxury—dressed in fine clothes and feasting sumptuously every day. And just outside the rich man’s door is Lazarus, a man who is clearly hungry and lacking in your basic sort of health care, since his body is covered with sores.
Jesus seems to be saying that this is the world’s reality. And that observation is of course just as relevant to our world as it might have been in Jesus’ world, and in fact much more so. On a global scale, we all have a sense, I’m sure, without being quoted statistics, that the gap between rich and poor is enormous, so enormous that maybe the only thing that keeps us from being psychologically and spiritually tormented by the thought of it is that it is so enormous and is global in scale, and therefore we can’t really expect to solve such a huge problem all at once or even make a whole huge difference and so we content ourselves to chip away at it somehow, give a few dollars to a worthwhile organization or support micro-credit or lobby the government to make its foreign aid programs more effective and more generous. Meanwhile, even in our own country we are aware that the gap between rich and poor, even in one of the richest countries in the world, is stark and is growing. In telling this story about the rich man and Lazarus, Jesus surely means to confront us with these realities.
And not just for the purpose of our edification either. There is, as I read this story, a judgment being made here. The rich man as portrayed here clearly has a deficit of compassion. God’s own heart goes out to the suffering Lazarus; God wants to hold Lazarus close, which is the symbolism of Lazarus going to heaven after he dies. God has no tolerance for the lack of compassion shown by the rich man. He is either so wrapped up in enjoying his luxurious life that he doesn’t even notice the man at his gate, or he notices but fails to do anything. In any case his lack of awareness and/or lack of response is not acceptable, and it places him a great distance from God, which is the symbolism of his finding himself in Hades after he died. And so one message, one lesson we might draw from this story is that Jesus is here making a simple call to compassion. The needs of “the poor” cannot fail to touch the heart of the Christian, or the disciple, whoever is paying attention to what Jesus is saying.
That’s one kind of moral point the story might have to make. Another point that may not be made explicitly in the story itself but that certainly begs to be made by the preacher is that compassion is not the same thing as charity. It may include charity, but it’s not limited to it. And so the response of the Christian, a preacher might say, is not only to get together a plate of food for the man at the gate every so often or to make an extra donation to a soup kitchen but to find ways to work for a society where everyone has health care and enough to eat, a society where there are no people feasting sumptuously while other people wait at the gate. Compassion means more than charity. It means working for justice. Compassion includes charity because justice takes a while and in the meantime people need to eat. But the Christian response, the response of those who hear what Jesus has to say, is also a justice response. And we ought to be doing those things. That’s the message here. No way we can have Lazarus at our gate, as we do, and not respond by practicing charity and working for justice.
There’s another message here that I’ve sometimes drawn from this scripture. It’s of a different sort, having to do with heaven and hell. Although Jesus uses heaven and hell as settings for this story, and although he makes it almost sound like he is saying that there is a heavenly reward for Lazarus’ sufferings on earth and a punishment in the afterlife for the rich man because of his hard heartedness, or maybe just his cavalier way of going through life, although Jesus seems to be giving some credence to the idea that God will reward the good people and punish the bad people in the afterlife, in fact he ends up, in my reading of it, saying almost the exact opposite. The rich man pleads with Father Abraham to send Lazarus to his brothers, who are still alive on earth, to warn them of what awaits them if their hearts don’t warm up a little. Abraham replies that “if they do not listen to Moses and the prophets, neither will they be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.” In other words, spiritual morality isn’t all about threats and promises, rewards and punishments, what’s going to happen to you after you die. We don’t know any of that, and more important we have what we need to decide what is right and good without any of that. We should not need the promise of heaven or the threat of hell to convince us to do the right thing. We should not need to be threatened, enticed, or cajoled into loving our neighbor.
One way or another the passage does seem to present itself as a searing social commentary, condemning casual attitudes toward poverty and the unconscionable gap between rich and poor, urging compassionate response to the existence of poverty, and being quite clear about where the eyes of faith should be trained, not on visions of the afterlife, but on the needs of people who are very much present with us in this life. I think all those points are pretty clear in the scripture.
Still, I approached it this week in something of a different spirit, not unrelated, but a bit different. I actually didn’t start out to preach on this passage. As I started to think about this sermon, I was still thinking about the idea of community, left over from last week, feeling like I wasn’t done with that. Also I had on my mind words connected to the communion we’ll be sharing today but also reflecting just parts of our lives—brokenness, healing, repair, atonement or at-one-ment. I was reflecting not so much on the various conflicts that stand in the way of community but just our separation from each other as human beings. The story of the rich man and Lazarus just sort of came to me, not, I realized, as a story about rich and poor but as a story about human beings who were cut off from each other, and in that sense not so much a story about social concern and social responsibility and social justice but just a sad story that holds up before us a picture of two human beings unable to relate to each other as human beings. In their case, of course, the difference in their social station and circumstance is clearly part of that difficulty, but maybe not the only reason there is this gap between them. Even for them, it may not be entirely a matter of the gap between rich and poor. And certainly for us that is not the only gap there is between human beings. It occurred to me that at a more basic level the story Jesus told is about all the kinds of gaps there are between us. Our brokenness is very basic, though it gets acted out in all sorts of ways.
Our brokenness is very basic. It has to do, of course, with the different worlds we live in because of being rich or poor, black or white, gay or straight, man or woman, the difficulties of relating to each other being made more difficult because of the barriers and injustices and prejudices that get embodied in our living. But it also has to do with the different worlds we live in because we are individuals and we can get all caught up in our own little worlds. It almost comes naturally. We value individuality so highly. Our main project in life is to be and become who we, each of us individually, is meant to be. We set our own goals, make our own decisions, succeed or fail on our own, reach out for God on our own. We need to take responsibility for ourselves. We have jobs to do, things to achieve, lonesome valleys to walk, all on our own. We don’t expect others to do it for us. We don’t expect ourselves to be responsible for others. Individualism and individuality is built in to the way we think and the way we live our lives.
What Jesus may be doing in this parable is not just presenting us a mirror where we see reflected the gap between rich and poor but where we see reflected the human distance there is so often between us because we live in different worlds, all kinds of different worlds, including the world of the self that we seem to prize so highly. It is a sad story not just because it reveals those distances and asks us to focus on all the kinds of painful distances there are in our own lives. It is sad too because at the end the human distance between the rich man and Lazarus is not any less than it was at the beginning, and not just because one is depicted as being in hell and the other in heaven. The sad reality is that the rich man hasn’t learned anything. Well, he may have learned that he should have been more generous to “the poor” during his earthly life. But he hasn’t learned much about connecting to another human being. His request is that Abraham send Lazarus to him to give him a drop of water in the torments of Hades. And when that is denied, he asks Abraham to send Lazarus to warn his brothers. In other words, the rich man still sees Lazarus as nothing more than an errand boy whose job it is to serve the rich man, give him some water, carry a message to his brothers. There is no breakthrough in the story at all, which is why I have been referring to it today as such a sad story.
And our own stories are sadder, I think, than we sometimes imagine. There is more brokenness among us than what is obvious and more than we probably care to admit. It is rooted in our being locked in our own separate worlds, born of our individualism and our notions of self-suffiency. The theologian and preacher, Frederick Buechner, is quoted as saying, “You can survive on your own. You can grow stronger on your own. You can even prevail on your own. You cannot become human on your own.” And yet so often, it seems, we try, and in so doing we let many of the distances between us remain.
But the good news of course is that that is not all there is to the story. I am reminded that so often in the scriptures, especially in the gospels, reaching out toward another human being is a symbol of faith: a woman reaching out to touch the hem of Jesus’ garment, Peter reaching out to Jesus as he steps out of a boat to come to Jesus out on the water, Jesus reaching out to someone afflicted with leprosy. And time and again in spite of our brokenness we do reach out to one another, in sometimes tentative, sometimes desperate, sometimes loving ways. In spite of our brokenness we reach out for connection. How often we do that, with what measure of hope, with what degree of willingness to share our own brokenness, is of course up to us. May God help us as we continue to become more fully human. Amen.
Jim Bundy
February 1,2009