A Sermon for the Twenty-Sixth Sunday of Ordinary Time (25/09/22):The Rich Man in his Castle, the Poor Man at his Gate

Luke 16:19-31

There was a rich man . . . . And at his gate lay a poor man named Lazarus

Jesus starts his story in the real world, the world as it actually is. His picture may be a caricature, a mild exaggeration for dramatic effect. But it is certainly something that his listeners could accept as possible. It is definitely within the bounds of real experience. His story may not be “actual.” Though it is interesting that Lazarus is the only character in all of Jesus’ storytelling who is given a proper name. It is almost as if he wants his listeners to call to mind a real person who they actually knew. But the circumstances he describes are real enough. He pictures immense wealth living close by, in the very presence of, desperate need and poverty.
Rich man is very rich indeed. He has wealth beyond need. He has reached the point where he hardly knows what to do with it. He feasts sumptuously every day. He eats as if every day were a great celebration, in a way that reasonable people would perhaps expect to eat once or twice in a year. He no longer eats to live, but lives to eat. One can only imagine what it was doing to his waistline! He was rich to the point that he could be wasteful.
Meanwhile, very nearby, as Jesus pictures it, in sight of this everyday extravagance, lies the poor man Lazarus. He is the picture of the most desperate need. He is not just poor, but sick and weak as well. He is too weak to help himself,
too weak even to fend off the dogs that lick at his sores. He knows that even what the rich man can waste would be enough to help him. He sees that the resources which the rich man has access to and can control as he wishes would be enough to supply both their needs, and bring relief to his suffering.

Perhaps we don’t see the poor lying on the doorsteps of the rich. But maybe we don’t because the rich made sure they were already moved on. But Jesus’ picture remains realistic. In this world now there is still great wealth and desperate poverty. And pretty much everywhere the economic distance between the two is growing, even as the rich and the poor continue to live very close together, in sight of one another. Perhaps this is most obvious in some of the vast cities of the global south; like Rio di Janiero, or Cape Town or Jakarta. These are places where the wealth is displayed in the gleaming towers of modernity, glass and steel office blocks and housing complexes and hotels, juxtaposed with the homes of the poor, made of plywood and cardboard and corrugated iron, lives lived in filth and degradation. There is unbelievable wealth in sight of desperate poverty. Or perhaps our attention could fall on the desperate refugees washed up on the beaches of the Mediterranean. There the displaced poor and desperate of the Middle East and Africa come ashore in the summertime playgrounds of Europe. Poverty and wealth are alongside one another everywhere if we choose to see it.

Jesus’ realistic picture ends with perhaps the most certain reality of all. Both the rich man and Lazarus die. After which Jesus’ story takes leave of reality and becomes fantasy. Though his words are no less true for all that. Another unique feature of this parable is that this is the only occasion that Jesus’ storytelling pictures the afterlife. Lazarus dies. His life of need and pain and misery is replaced by an afterlife of comfort. Lazarus is carried away by the angels into the security of Abraham’s arms. He at last has all that he needs.
By contrast the rich man is simply buried and finds himself in hell. His life of comfort – excess even – is replaced by an afterlife of agony. He is in a place where there will be no relief from suffering.

As a fantasy this satisfies our longing for justice. It is the great reversal promised by God. This is the words of the Magnificat in narrative form: He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty. [Luke 1:52-53] Here is comfort for the afflicted, and affliction for the comfortable. It satisfies our sense that the inequality that is so evident in the world is not right. We grasp that there really is sufficient resources in the world that if they were shared more evenly it would be possible for everyone to have enough, that everyone could be at least comfortable if no one had too much. There is a recognition perhaps that wealth is the cause of poverty, that some are in need because other took more than their share.
We know that it is a situation which demands justice, a justice which in the end, we trust, God will provide. Jesus’ fantasy underscores what we have heard from him and from the Bible time and time again: God’s preference is for the poor. God’s attention, God’s help is focused on those who really need it. If in the end the poor, the sick, the dispossessed receive help from no one else they will at last receive help from God. And, Jesus implies and we infer, those who didn’t use their wealth to help them will be punished.

Jesus’ “fantasy” is a source of great hope, and comfort to those who are poor and in need. They can hope that there will be an end to their suffering. But sometimes this hope which Jesus provides has had consequences quite unintended by him. During the depression years of the 1930s, another time when inequality became acutely real and visible, at the time the Salvation Army received the bitter nickname “the Starvation Army.” They got this name, perhaps unjustifiably, because it was said that they preached “Pie in the sky when you die.” There was the idea that the injustices and inequalities of this life can and should be endured on the strength of the promise which Jesus’ fantasy makes, comfort and relief hereafter, rather than address inequality, rather seek explanations and demand solutions. Inequality becomes justified and permitted in the present because God will deal with it later

The hymn “All things bright and beautiful” used to contain that notorious line “the rich man in his castle and the poor man at his gate.” Which seems to be a pretty clear allusion to Jesus’ parable. The verse that contained the line has long since been expurgated, removed from the hymn as it is sung. Because it seems to suggest that this isn’t a bad thing, that indeed this is the way God intends it, because the verse went on: “God made them high and lowly, And ordered their estate.” No wonder some people reject God as capricious and unjust if that is the picture of God they are being offered. Reasonably they ask, “How can you believe in God when the rich man can feast sumptuously while Lazarus is forced to lie on his doorstep.” Pie in the sky when you die is not a good enough answer to that question! And indeed to take Jesus’ words that way is the exact opposite of his intention. He wants poverty and need to be dealt with, here and now!

For Jesus, as it is for the whole of scripture, Moses and all the prophets, for them, to tolerate poverty and suffering and do nothing about it, is to deny the clear will of God. The rich man dies and goes to hell, not simply because he didn’t do good deeds, though evidently he didn’t. He died and went to hell because he ignored Lazarus. And because he was ignoring Lazarus he was ignoring the testimony of scripture. And ignoring the testimony of scripture allowed him to hold onto his wealth, using it only for himself, without really acknowledging where that wealth had come from and why it had been given to him. In practice the rich man was an atheist. To accept wealth or comfort or security in a world where there is poverty, suffering and displacement, and to take no action to relieve those things, to live that way is a denial of the testimony of Moses and of the prophets. It is a denial of the testimony of the resurrection. It is atheism. From beginning to end the testimony of scripture is clear. God is on the side of the poor, the suffering, the dispossessed. This is not intended to excuse or justify the existence of poverty and suffering. It is meant as a warning and as a call to action. The testimony of scripture is consistent, right from the start; Very near the beginning of the Bible, in the first pages of the book of Genesis, God asks Cain about his missing (dead) brother Abel. Cain dissembles, answering the question with another question; “Am I my brother’s keeper?” [Genesis 4:9] God doesn’t answer the question directly, right away. But the sum of all scripture, including Jesus’ parable of the rich man and Lazarus, confirms that the answer to that question is “Yes.”

Jesus provides a powerful metaphor for the human social condition, how we do and should live together. Though we could almost overlook it. Jesus provides us with that picture of a gateway, the rich man’s door, with the “haves” on one side and the “have-nots” on the other. There is an inescapable connection between the rich man and Lazarus. The gateway is a powerful symbol of the connectedness of all human beings. But a gateway is also a suitably ambiguous image. A gate is an opening which can be passed through. Or it is a barrier which can be closed to shut in or out. It is the owner of the gate who in the end controls how the gateway is used and what the ending of the story might be. The rich man effectively closed the gate to cut himself off from Lazarus. The warning of Jesus story is that if it is left to God to help the poor, the consequences for the rich, those who had resources to help and didn’t, will be catastrophic!
The barrier which the rich man created by his inaction in the story became everlasting and uncrossable, his closed gate became an impassable barrier. But it turns out that by shutting himself in he had shut himself on the wrong side. Because God is only to be found on the same side of that barrier as the poor.

But the real invitation, challenge of the parable is different. It is a call to use the gate differently, Another “fantasy” might have pictured the rich man passing through his gate to feed and wash Lazarus, or better still picking Lazarus up and taking him into his home. The rich man and we have Moses and the prophets, indeed we have more than the rich man since we do have the one who returned from the dead. They all tell us one thing; To act in solidarity with and to help those in need, to use the gateway not as an obstacle but to take it as an opportunity
Amen

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