You remember Mary’s song, don’t you? The one she sang when she was pregnant with Jesus? The song about God who has brought down the powerful from their thrones and lifted up the lowly, who has filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away empty?[1] And do you remember Jesus’ sermon at Nazareth, where he declares that he’s been anointed to bring good news to the poor?[2] And you remember Luke 14:12, don’t you, where he admonishes his followers not to give dinners for friends and family and rich neighbors, but to invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind. And you remember how he told a certain ruler who wanted to inherit eternal life, “Sell all that you own and distribute the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven.”[3]
Poverty and wealth are of great concern to Jesus. Greg Carey calls today’s story from Luke a “juxtaposition of obscene luxury and abject poverty.”[4] Topics of great concern to Jesus are thrown into sharp relief in this story. Barbara Rossing calls it “a wake-up call, pulling back a curtain to open our eyes to something we urgently need to see before it is too late.”[5] A wake-up call, in case we got drowsy and dozed off when Jesus declared, “Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God. … But woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation.”[6] Poverty and wealth are of great concern to Jesus.
The poor man in today’s story has a name, which is remarkable. Lazarus is the only named character in all of Jesus’ parables. The name is the Latin rendering of Eleazar or Eliezer, which means “God helps” — and no one else in the story does. We live in a world where the rich have names and the poor are statistics. The rich have their names written on large buildings, and spoken with hushed reverence at fundraising dinners; tour busses drive by their homes and the guides point to the gates and speak their names and everyone on the bus knows who they are. The poor are nameless and countless. But Jesus tells a story of a nameless rich man and a poor man named Lazarus. A rich man dressed in purple and fine linen and feasting sumptuously every day, and Lazarus, covered with sores, lying at the rich man’s gate, longing to satisfy his hunger with what fell from the rich man’s table. Dogs were licking his sores. Perhaps the dogs were also snatching the pieces of bread the rich man’s guests used to wipe their greasy hands — bread napkins, tossed under the table. Perhaps Lazarus was too sick, too weak to jump up and grab even a morsel.
Jesus doesn’t tell us if Lazarus died of starvation, or if one of the sores got infected, or if it was one of those nights when temperatures outside the gate dropped into the upper 20’s. Lazarus died and he was carried away by the angels to be with Abraham. The rich man also died, but no angels came to carry him away. He died and was buried. We may imagine that it must have been a lavish funeral in one of the city’s choice cemeteries, with an opulent reception, but that kind of detail doesn’t get any attention in Jesus’ story. Both men died, as all of us eventually do, and at the moment of death, suddenly their relationship was reversed.
Lazarus’ suffering was over, he reclined in the seat of honor at Abraham’s table, and the rich man was in agony in the flames of Hades. 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.” Have mercy on me, he said, and we wonder if Lazarus used to shout or whisper those words at the rich man’s gate to deaf or distracted ears. And did you notice? The rich man spoke of Lazarus by name. So he knew him, he recognized him, and now we wonder how long he might have known his name without acknowledging his presence and his need. And he didn’t say, “Lazarus, would you come over and help a brother out?” He asked Abraham to send him — still he could think of Lazarus only as socially inferior, somebody to be sent on an errand.
Abraham told him, “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.” Who was it that fixed the great chasm?
I suggest that it was the rich man himself. The great chasm between him and Lazarus is nothing but the reverse manifestation of the one that existed in their earthly lives — only now their separation is permanent. The time to bridge the yawning abyss with a little attention and kindness has run out. The gate where Lazarus begged and waited, the gate that kept him outside, was and is and forever will be the very gate that keeps the rich man out of Abraham’s banquet.
In Anton Chekhov’s story, Gooseberries, one of the characters says,
Apparently, those who are happy can only enjoy themselves because the unhappy bear their burdens in silence, and but for this silence happiness would be impossible. It is a kind of universal hypnosis. There ought to be a man with a hammer behind the door of every happy man, to remind him by his constant knocks that there are unhappy people, and that happy as he himself may be, life will sooner or later show him its claws, catastrophe will overtake him – sickness, poverty, loss – and nobody will see it, just as he now neither sees nor hears the misfortunes of others. But there is no man with a hammer, the happy man goes on living and the petty vicissitudes of life touch him lightly, like the wind in an aspen-tree, and all is well.[7]
We don’t know if Lazarus bore his burdens in silence. We don’t know if the rich man ignored the poor man at his gate, or if the poor man’s presence and need had blended into the background of the rich man’s life, together with the dogs and the people on the sidewalk and the traffic noise. We don’t even know if the rich man was happy. All we do know is that he was well-dressed and well-fed and that Lazarus was neither, and when the great reversal came it was too late to do anything about it.
In a way, the rich man was saying to Abraham, “Behind the door of each of my brothers, there ought to be a man with a hammer, to remind them by his constant knocks that there are people in great need. Send Lazarus that he may warn them.”
And Abraham replied, “They have Moses and the prophets; they should listen to them.” The commandments are clear: Do not be hard-hearted or tight-fisted toward your needy neighbor.[8] The words of the prophets are indeed constant knocks at the gate: Share your bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into your house.[9] The commandments speak of obligation. The prophets proclaim the word of the Lord with urgency, and when their words fall on deaf ears, they “lament over people who can see nothing about which to lament.”[10]
Woe to those who are at ease in Zion, who lounge on their couches, and eat lambs from the flock, who drink wine from bowls, and anoint themselves with the finest oils, but are not grieved over the ruin of [my people].[11]
The rich man in Jesus’ parable doesn’t have a lot of confidence that his siblings will heed the scriptures. “No, father Abraham,” he pleads; “but if someone goes to them from the dead, they will repent.”
Will we? Are we listening to the man with the hammer? Are we reaching across the great chasm that separates us one from the other? Do we hear Mary’s song with joy and hope and join her in singing it? Do we want to see every valley lifted up and every mountain and hill made low?[12] Are we letting God guide our feet into the way of peace, across bridges of mercy and compassion and difficult, demanding justice? Or are we happy enough with the way things are?
Poverty, hunger, and homelessness are very complicated issues, but they are also very simple: open the gate. Because lying at the gate is not a bunch of issues and problems; lying at the gate is a human being with a name, a person made in the image of God. The man with the hammer wants us to pay attention and repent. He wants us to refuse to sit in the isolation which horded wealth creates. He wants us to realize that, as one of America’s martyrs wrote from jail, “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.”[13] The gate between me and the neighbor waiting at my threshold is the very gate of heaven.
Jesus calls us to repent, to turn and walk with him on the path of faith and compassion. His love lifts us out of our fear and pride. His love gives us the courage to let our neighbor in. His love, embodied in countless daily acts and gestures, bridges the great chasm between us.
Jesus told us the parable of the rich man and Lazarus so we would rewrite its ending with our lives. Imagine, one morning the rich man stepped out of his gated existence and said, “Good morning, Lazarus. Come on in. I just made some biscuits and a fresh pot of coffee.”
[1] Luke 1:46-55
[2] Luke 4:16-21
[3] Luke 18:22
[4] Greg Carey https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/ordinary-26-3/commentary-on-luke-1619-31-2
[5] Barbara Rossing https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/ordinary-26-3/commentary-on-luke-1619-31-4
[6] Luke 6:20,24
[7] Anton Chekhov, Gooseberries, 1898 http://www.online-literature.com/anton_chekhov/1290/
[8] Deuteronomy 15:7
[9] Isaiah 58:7
[10] Donald Gowan, NIB, 398.
[11] Amos 6:4-6
[12] Isaiah 40:4
[13] Martin L. King, Letter from a Birmingham Jail, April 16, 1963
http://www.stanford.edu/group/King/popular_requests/frequentdocs/birmingham.pdf