FINDINGS II
Proper
21 - C - September 26, 2010
Luke 16: 19-31
Luke 16: 19-31
Jesus told some Pharisees this story: "There was a rich man who always dressed
himself in purple and fine linen and treated himself to a big feast every day.
Outside at the gate to his villa lay a poor man named Lazarus, his skin covered
with sores, and who would have been most glad to eat the scraps of food that fell
from the rich man's dinner table. The dogs would come and lick Lazarus's
running sores. The poor man died and was transported by heavenly messengers
into the presence of Abraham. The rich man died and was buried. In Hades where
he was tormented, he looked up and saw Abraham afar off with Lazarus at his
side. He shouted, 'Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus to dip
the tip of his finger in some water to cool my tongue, for I am in agony with
these flames.' But Abraham replied, 'Child, remember that during your lifetime
you prospered but Lazarus suffered. Now he enjoys comfort and you complain of
agony. Not only that, but between us there is fixed a great chasm so wide that
no one can cross in either direction.' The [formerly] rich man answered, 'Then,
father, I beseech you to send him to my father's house where I have five
brothers. They must be warned so that they will not end up in this place of
torment.' Abraham replied, 'They have Moses and the prophets; they should heed
them.' The man said, 'No, father Abraham, but if someone goes to them from the
place of the dead, they would see ample reason to repent.' Abraham said, 'If
they do not listen to Moses and the prophets, they will certainly not be
convinced by someone rising from the dead.' " (Translated and paraphrased by
Harry T. Cook)
 By Harry T. Cook
9/20/10
RUBRIC
So much for those who crowd into church on Easter Day, and, at
least for one hour of the year, eagerly embrace the supposed truth of the
resurrection in a ridiculous attempt to save their eternal skins. If they have
not taken care of the Lazaruses deprived and suffering at the outer gates of
society, then what they hear at church that day will not matter very much, and,
in fact, will count for nothing. Because it is what people do, not what they
believe that counts. The religion that emanates from biblical Judaism and its
younger cousin, Christianity, has to do with salvation in the here-and-now, not
a there-and-then, nor, by the way, with any guarantee of personal immortality.
It has to do with being fully human, which fullness requires first, last and
always care for the fellow human being in a culture of attention and
forgiveness "now in the time of this mortal life."*
*See the Collect for the
First Sunday of Advent, Book of Common Prayer 1979, p. 159.
WORKSHOP
The heat is on. You can feel it even from Lazarus' side of
the abyss. If the Gospel According to Luke were to be turned into a Wagner
opera, 16:19-31 would be its G�tterd�merung. The passage is the culmination of
all Luke's commentary on economic and social injustice, which theme is first
sounded in 1:52, viz. "He hath put down the mighty from their seats, and hath
exalted the humble and meek." With the rich man in the pit and the
once-miserable beggar cradled in the bosom of Abraham, the vision of the
Magnificat has been realized. The Negro spiritual, "Rock-a my soul in the bosom
of Abraham" springs directly from this text.
Luke begins this parable with a graphic description of two
lives lived side by side in time and place. All that physically separated those
lives was a gate -- the rich man on the inside dressed to the nines in the
vesture of royalty (purple and linen) seated at a table ever groaning with rich
food in prodigious amounts. Immediately outside the gate -- but surely not in
view of those gathered around the festive board -- is another human being
barely subsisting under quite different circumstances. He is unemployed, maybe
unemployable, due to his skin disease. He would no doubt have been thought
unclean. He is hungry -- and here Luke uses the same imagery he uses of the
prodigal son at 15:16. The man is so hungry that he will fight with the vagrant
dogs over the garbage from the table inside, and, while grappling with the
curs, cannot prevent them from licking his open sores. How's that for a
snapshot of "the humble and meek"?
In Luke's view, this picture cannot go unaltered. So, for
effect, Luke alters it. He has the Great Equalizer alter it: both Lazarus (in
Hebrew/Aramaic something like "El-azar," meaning "God comforts" or "God aids")
and the unnamed rich man die. In the moment they are dead, they are at least
equals. Following lifetimes of privilege on the one hand (though the rich man
may have labored hard for his money) and abject destitution on the other
(though Lazarus may have brought on his own disease and poverty), death reduces
the both of them to corpses.
Under the purple finery as under the beggar's rags lies the
same decomposing flesh. Thus does justice roll down in a torrent and redress
forever that imbalance of plenty and want. Such a monstrous grievance must be
further adjudicated. So Luke, the master storyteller, looks beyond what must
have been a fairly common sight in the first century word -- the beggar at the
stoop -- to a fantastic vista taking in both Gehenna and Paradiso in one broad
sweep. Where one might expect to find the rich man, one finds Lazarus, and vice
versa. (A note to the primacy of this parable is that the beggar is given a
name while the rich man is not. In no other parable included in the Lucan
corpus is any person given a name.)
The (formerly) rich man is shaken by the perceived injustice
of being torched along with Jerusalem's garbage. (Gehenna was the name given to
the caves underneath the city where refuse was burned day and night for years
on end.) He does not want to be among the smoldering garbage that used to be
Lazarus' daily bread. He wants to be on the good side of and with Abraham, at
the pinnacle of eternal security. But it is too late -- Ebenezer Scrooge's
worst nightmare.
Luke does not relent. The gulf is forever fixed, which is
Luke's way of saying that "now" counts for everything. Whatever you want to do,
that you must do, that must be done needs to be done here and how. And for Luke
what must be done is justice: pure and simple. Now is the time. Now is the day
of salvation.
HOMILETIC COMMENTARY
There is no way around it. Luke absolutely meant it, in the
bewildering context of the late first century, in the wake of the after-shocks
of the Temple's destruction, in the threatening ambiguity of a changing world.
In the parable, the beggar lived in crisis day to day. The daily emptying of the
garbage pail at his feet was the one break in the ongoing crisis. But even then
there were the proximate dogs who demanded their share. Who would get the
juiciest pieces? Him or them? But inside the house, no crisis. Yet in the
vision of Hades, the rich man finds himself in the eternal crisis of regret: a
nightmare worthy of Dickens.
The homiletic possibilities are so excruciatingly obvious
that seven out of 10 homilists will probably choose another reading upon which
to build the day's sermonic offering. The hints are broad. The impact is
blunderbuss.
Either the church will tear down the gate between itself and
the suffering world and invite its outcasts in, or it will continue to pursue
the path to ultimate irrelevance collectively as a whited sepulcher.
I think there is no in-between here just as there was no
bridge from Hades to Paradiso in Luke's parable. One chooses by doing or not
doing. The results are predictable.
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