Message of Abbot Paul - Thursday - 29th February 2024
Abbot Paul • February 28, 2024
Today’s message makes for uncomfortable reading, but the Gospel is meant to disturb the way we think and the way we live. Our Gospel passage is a parable that we only find in Luke, (Lk 16: 19-31), the parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus. It’s a salutary parable to read at any time. The rich man has no name, although he’s been given various names in later history such as Dives, which means “rich” in Latin. On the other hand, Lazarus is the only name given to anyone in Jesus’ parables; it means El-azar, “God has helped.” There would seem to be no connection between this Lazarus and the friend Jesus raised from the dead, the brother of Mary and Martha. The story begins with a drastic reversal that happens after these two men die. In his lifetime, the rich man ostentatiously displayed his wealth with expensive clothes and sumptuous feasts. Conversely, Lazarus was covered with sores, was hungry, and had only dogs to lick his sores. After his death, Lazarus is taken by the angels to an honoured place beside Abraham, God’s friend and the father of Israel, whilst the rich man finds himself in Hades, a place of torment and eternal punishment.
We read, “In his torment in Hades he looked up and saw Abraham a long way off with Lazarus in his bosom. So he cried out, ‘Father Abraham, pity 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.’ ‘My son,’ Abraham replied, ‘remember that during your life good things came your way, just as bad things came the way of Lazarus. Now he is being comforted here while you are in agony. But that is not all: between us and you a great gulf has been fixed, to stop anyone, if he wanted to, crossing from our side to yours, and to stop any crossing from your side to ours.’ The rich man replied, ‘Father, I beg you then to send Lazarus to my father’s house, since I have five brothers, to give them warning so that they do not come to this place of torment too.’ ‘They have Moses and the prophets,’ said Abraham ‘let them listen to them.’ ‘Ah no, father Abraham,’ said the rich man, ‘but if someone comes to them from the dead, they will repent.’ Then Abraham said to him, ‘If they will not listen either to Moses or to the prophets, they will not be convinced even if someone should rise from the dead.’”
The parable focuses on the reversal of fortunes after Lazarus and the rich man die. It links agony or comfort after death with how we treat the less fortunate around us, much like Matthew links eternal life and punishment with how we treat the hungry and thirsty, strangers, the naked, the sick, and those in prison (Mt 25). This reversal after death is final. An unbridgeable chasm exists between Lazarus at Abraham’s side and the rich man in Hades. Luke, in particular, stresses the way the status of rich and poor is reversed in the kingdom of God. When Jesus is conceived in Mary’s womb, she exults that the hungry have been filled and the rich sent away empty. In the Sermon on the Plain, Jesus tells the poor that God favours them and that the kingdom of God belongs to them, but warns the rich of what is to come since they have already received their consolation in this life. In Luke we definitely find a preferential option for the poor. He makes clear that the poor are a focus of Jesus’ ministry. In his inaugural sermon, Jesus declares that he has been anointed by the Spirit of the Lord “to bring good news to the poor”. Jesus admonishes his followers not just to invite to their celebrations the friends and neighbours who can repay them, but to extend their invitations to “the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind”. This is echoed when Jesus describes the kingdom of God as a wedding banquet where the invitation has been extended to “the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind”.
The parable of the rich man and Lazarus might be difficult for those of us, whose lifestyle stands in sharp contrast with a majority of people in the world who live on much less. Like so much else that Luke says about money and possessions, it stands as a stinging indictment not only of the great confidence we place in financial security, but also of the enormous inequities between rich and poor we allow to perpetuate. In this parable, God’s eternal judgment reflects how we use wealth in this life and whether we attend to those less fortunate in our midst. Our temptation is to explain away or simply spiritualise a parable like this and to remove its blatant depiction of how God will ultimately vindicate the cause of the poor. But the message has been clearly stated. Like the rich man’s five brothers, we have been given all the warning we need.
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