The Rev. Timothy B. Safford
Jesus said, “There was a rich man who was dressed
in purple and fine linen and who feasted sumptuously every day. And at his gate
lay a poor man named Lazarus, covered with sores, who longed to satisfy his
hunger with what fell from the rich man’s table; even the dogs would come and
lick his sores. The poor man died and was carried away by the angels to be with
Abraham. The rich man also died and was buried. In Hades, where he was being
tormented, he looked up and saw Abraham far away with Lazarus by his side. He
called out, ‘Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus to dip the tip
of his finger in water and cool my tongue; for I am in agony in these flames.’
But Abraham said, ‘Child, remember that during your lifetime you received your
good things, and Lazarus in like manner evil things; but now he is comforted
here, and you are in agony. Besides all this, between you and us a great chasm
has been fixed, so that those who might want to pass from here to you cannot do
so, and no one can cross from there to us.’ He said, ‘Then, father, I beg you
to send him to my father’s house—for I have five brothers—that he
may warn them, so that they will not also come into this place of torment.’
Abraham replied, ‘They have Moses and the prophets; they should listen to them.’
He said, ‘No, father Abraham; but if someone goes to them from the dead, they
will repent.’ He said to him, ‘If they do not listen to Moses and the prophets,
neither will they be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.’”Luke
16:19-31
Too often, we
think the parable of the rich man and Lazarus is about how the rich are cursed
and the poor are blessed. That misses the point. The rich man should not make himself poor, but he should make
Lazarus well. Meaning, if we have
wealth and possessions, they had best be shared for the good, for wealth is not
a signal of blessedness, but a call to stewardship. God has not blessed us with wealth as much as made us with
wealth blessed in distributing it.
In the agrarian
economy of Jesus’ time, the Christian ethic was clearer; we should open the
barns and let the hungry eat. How
do we do it in the world in which we live, where capitalism forces
compromises? Many more are cared
for in our economy than suffer its unfair consequences, so most of us who
benefit accept, often callously, a certain unfairness. For instance, clearly a
person of faith knows God would not want any person to suffer hunger if there
is enough food, yet we tacitly accept policies that store surplus food in
government warehouses rather than empty stomachs. Wouldn’t God be displeased that drug companies have ample
drugs to help relieve the suffering of AIDS but we do not have the willpower or
economic ingenuity to deliver them to the nations that suffer worst in the
pandemic? Yet most of us check the
bottom line on our retirement accounts knowing that it’s because pharmaceutical
companies sell their product rather than give them away that causes the
balances to rise.
Let’s explore
how the parable before us have speaks to the predicaments and compromises of
modern life.
In his telling,
Jesus details that the rich man wears purple, so we know that he is exceedingly
rich and powerful, as purple was restricted to the very few, and he dines
sumptuously every day, meaning he has a great household and many staff, and he
need not toil for his food.
Further, we conclude from the economics of the ancient world that he
probably has this wealth from his birthright as an elite. He did not earn this money; it was
given to him. He is like the
Pharisees themselves, who Jesus is addressing, who wore purple in their
richness and might, fussing on religious laws that allowed them to define who
is blessed (themselves), and those who are impure (Lazarus). This rich man no doubt considers
himself favored by God, and all that he has is indication that God cares for
him more than those who have nothing.
He would certainly scoff at poor Mother Mary’s song about herself, “God
has filled the poor with good things and the rich have been sent away empty.” This rich man does not see the world
that way, nor do we, really. But
Jesus did.
For in this
parable, the poor man Lazarus will prove Mother Mary’s point. He will die starving and ill, and be
carried to the bosom of Abraham, receiving goodness and mercy in the next life
in return for the evil he suffers in this life. The rich man will die too in the parable, and only get the
dirt nap, finding himself in torment, sent away with only the late
self-realization that his worldview and theology were deeply mistaken. For him, as Hegel would say, “the owl
of Minerva flew only at the dusk,” meaning wisdom came to him too late, after
anything could be done to understand his world as God would intend.
Again, I want
to make absolutely clear that this is not a parable about the blessedness of
poverty and the evils of wealth.
Typically, Jesus testifies to the blessedness of the poor, as Lazarus
embodies, not the evil of the wealthy.
Jesus simply rejected the notion that any one should be oppressed by
poverty if there is wealth. His
teachings of blessedness of the poor are rightly balanced by warnings to the rich
not to allow wealth to bend them from God’s kingdom. For Jesus, as with the Old Testament, wealth may corrupt,
but not absolutely. More often
than not, scripture treats wealth as an assignment of responsibility to be
stewards of it. When wealth becomes
simply a status or privilege, then scripture reminds us of its potential
evil. The rich man in the parable
suffers two catastrophic flaws: 1)
He sees wealth as a privilege, not a responsibility. He sees himself as entitled to, not a steward of, the abundance
of creation; and 2) He is blind to Lazarus, not seeing him at the gate, not
responding to his needs, treating him as sub-human in life and in death. If only he addressed these two flaws in
earthly life, he might rest in eternal life in the bosom of Abraham, too.
The parable
today subtly indicts the unfairness that Lazarus must remain poor, with only
dogs to minister to his needs. The
poor Lazarus, we are told, is covered with sores, meaning, the religious laws
upheld by judges and Pharisees have declared him unclean and impure. In their world view, Lazarus could not
eat the rich man’s food, for Lazarus would make it impure. Under those religious rules, Lazarus
cannot be delivered: The rich man
is justified in withholding comfort and food from Lazarus. The Pharisees might say, as we do in
our most callous political state, that it is Lazarus’ own fault that he
suffers. Still, in his world,
Lazarus could not work if he wanted to, for whatever he touched would
contaminate the product. This
diseased status was judgment from God, the rich man and Pharisee believed, so
Lazarus is destined to be miserable.
But Jesus turns the dinner table.
It is the wealthy without regard for mercy and compassion who have been
put in the scales of justice and found wanting.
I think the
detail of the dogs licking Lazarus’ sores is Jesus at his brilliant best. The dogs comfort Lazarus, because
religious custom or law does not burden them. The dogs have not been conditioned to shun the poor. On an animal level, they respond with a
simple reflexive compassion that the rich man does not have. Jesus is saying subtly that the rich
man who cannot see Lazarus is not as good as the dog who can. In our baptismal covenant, we pledge to
strive for the dignity of every human being. In the parable today, the dogs do better at this than the
Rich Man
The rich man in
this story isn’t a Bill Gates type, who invented a product in his garage as a
kid that everyone wanted to buy, so that he became rich, and along the way made
many others rich, and made jobs, and then became a charitable force for the
rebuilding of public schools and relieving of the AIDS pandemic.
In a
capitalistic economy, we acknowledge that every generation and societal
manifestation rewards some types of people economically and punishes
others. I think Jesus was just as
realistic about his own economy.
But, the idea that wealth is idle and not working to solve the problems
of the poor is at work in the parable of Lazarus and the Rich Man. Warren Buffett, the mild-mannered
billionaire from Omaha likes to say that he simply lives in the right time and
the right place for his particular skills. What I’ve liked about Warren Buffett, from a distance, is
that he doesn’t have the arrogance or blindness of the rich man in the parable.
Allow me to use
these broad strokes to make the point that the rich man is not judged for his
own wealth, but that he does little with it, and what he does do, is for
himself and not others.
The rich man is
not like the steward in the parable of the talents, for instance who has been
given five talents, and turns them into fifty. Rather, the rich man is like the slothful worker who gets
one talent and buries it in the ground so that it has no use to anyone. What is this rich man good for? Jesus
seems to ask.
In today’s
terms, we admire most hard work.
Most of us gathered might give tacit assent to what sociologist Max
Weber called “the Puritan ethic,” passed down to us through the strong
Calvinist traditions of the Reformation, ever present in this church and in
Philadelphia in general.
In this Puritan
ethic, we see wealth only as a negative, as did our forbearers, if it leads to
idleness, like that in the rich man.
However, we see as positive hard-work, industriousness, pulling one’s
self up by the bootstrap sort of hard work. We will accept happily the notion of being middle-class, or
better, if it results from labor.
The danger here is that we will never claim the wealth we clearly
have. We strive to be modest about
what we’ve achieved, partly out of fear of appearing idle. I am not being critical; I subscribe to
this Puritan ethic. But the danger
is that we don’t see ourselves connected, deeply, to those who are poor, lying
at our gate, and needful of our stewardship. Our flaw is to see them as idle, rather than wealth as idle.
That’s why this
parable reveals a tension in the middle class American with Jesus and the
Christian gospel. Our protestant
ethic inculcates in us that if we work hard, apply our intellect and keep
ourselves pure, then we will be blessed.
The puritan ethic of hard work, of God blessing our industrious nature,
of being led to middle class comforts or better by keeping the nose to the
grindstone, has mostly positive effects, but some few significant downsides. It allows us to mistakenly conclude
that the poor are somehow responsible for their own fate totally. Well, some are, but the predicament of
birth, the obstacles of gender and class, of inadequate education, curse
many. Our caricature of the poor
makes us think of the homeless, the addicted, the mentally ill in the
streets. As David Shipler writes
in The Working Poor, most Lazarus’s are
working on the margins. He
describes them as “Invisible in America.”
Invisible, like Lazarus to the Rich Man. Nevertheless, as he so carefully documents in this brilliant
book, the working poor work incredibly hard at Target, Burger King, child-care
centers, coffee shops, office buildings, in our houses cleaning toilets and
doing laundry, and the like, yet they do not generate any wealth for themselves
or family. They remain invisible
to our basic view of compassion and to governmental tax policy. On this point, we stand indicted like
the rich man.
Now, here I
want to make one of my most common points: most of us do not acknowledge how
wealthy we are, measured against the extreme poverty of this city and the world
at large. If you woke up with a
roof overhead, food in the fridge, clothes in closet, a doctor in the rolodex,
and the ability to read the morning paper, as well as had enough spare cash to
buy a latté on the way down here, you have entered the rare economic strata (as
measured against the world) of the rich man dressed in purple and fine
linen. Let us avoid his fate, not
using as an excuse our struggles to pay all the bills at the end of the month,
care for our kids, get medical insurance, and find some meaningful leisure, to
pretend that we aren’t truly wealthy.
I see the
warning in this parable about the rich man to be about his inability to see
Lazarus. He lies at the rich man’s
front door, so there is no possibility that the rich man has not seen him.
This parable
demands of us to ask, “How is our perception?” Who, do we not see?
How do we not respond?
Pay close
attention to what the rich man does when he looks up from the torment of Hades
and sees Lazarus in the bosom of Abraham.
“Father Abraham,” he cries out, “send Lazarus to fetch me a cool glass of water.”
So, it turns
out that the rich man knows Lazarus after all, even knows his name. But even in the reality of judgment, he
treats Lazarus as a nobody, a hired hand.
To the rich man, Lazarus still isn’t fully human, just some one to be
used for his own purposes. Even in
death, he has no solidarity with Lazarus.
It is in this moment that the chasm is set between the rich man and
Lazarus for eternity. Up until
that moment, I think the rich man had a chance.
He tries one
last time to turn the tables. He
has brothers at home, who know the laws of the Old Testament, but who still
will treat the Lazarus’ of the world like he did. Maybe Abraham would dispatch Lazarus on that errand, because
they would listen to a man who was raised from the dead. “What good would that do?” Abraham
asks, and in that warning Jesus reminds us today that we will not take the
monstrous concreteness of his resurrection very seriously.
For if we
believe that Jesus Christ is raised from the dead, and we proclaim that truth
not merely with our lips but with our lives, how is it that Lazarus is still
laying at the gate? Friends, it is
just too frightening for me to answer that question. We have work to do, let’s be about it.