Lectionary readings
If you’re like me, you might be of two or more minds about this story that Luke has Jesus tell in our gospel lesson this morning. Or perhaps, maybe it’s not split minds, but split hearts that produce a tension in the response you and I might have to this story. On the one hand, there is this sense that our basic commitment to fairness, to justice, maybe to just desserts, has been accomplished in this story. Perhaps only those inclined to sociopathy actually enjoy seeing people suffer; none of us wants poor Lazarus to be so afflicted with poverty, illness, and alienation, and our hearts are healed to witness him in the lap of the great patriarch Abraham, who caresses him as a mother tends to her baby. Perhaps, if we’re honest with ourselves, you and I might even admit to a bit of schadenfreude, that German word that wonderfully expresses and codes its meaning in English – to derive pleasure from another’s misfortune. A rich man, whom Christian tradition calls Dives (which means “rich man” in Latin), has lived and enjoyed social privilege all his life, ignoring Lazarus lying at his doorstep. There is something in us as Americans, perhaps as human beings, to root for the underdog, to cheer when the spoiled rich get their comeuppance, when the down and out get a shot at wholeness and happiness.
On the other hand, there’s something in our US culture and psyche that makes me grieve a bit at Dives’ final lot: consigned to Hades, eternally in torment, father Abraham seems sorrowful at the fact that this chasm, this gap between Dives and Lazarus, between Hades and Abraham is too great to bridge. The story ends without redemption or transformation for the rich man, or for those of his kind. He doesn’t get to wake up like Ebenezer Scrooge does in Dickens’s novel, transformed, gleeful, ready to give away his wealth to Cratchit and especially Tiny Tim. We steeped in American culture love almost more than the rags-to-riches story the story of someone who learns the hard way that ultimately the accumulation of things doesn’t really hold the secret to life, but rather that what’s important is our attendance to our fellow human beings. We want conversion, we want redemption, we want transformation. But this morning, we’re left with tragedy. Yes, perhaps we have the justice that Mary was talking about at the beginning of Luke, where the lowly are lifted up and where the rich are sent away empty. But this ending still feels hollow. One person’s suffering is alleviated just as another’s is about to begin. If God’s justice is really about feeling delight in this passive kind of revenge, then you and I might wonder: is this the great good news promised to us by our Savior?
The Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. preached on this very passage five days before he was assassinated in 1968. In the following, King focuses on why the rich man finds himself in Hades, “Dives did not go to hell because he was rich; Dives didn't realize that his wealth was his opportunity. It was his opportunity to bridge the gulf that separated him from his brother, Lazarus. Dives went to hell because he passed by Lazarus every day and he never really saw him. He went to hell because he allowed his brother to become invisible. Dives went to hell because he maximized the minimum and minimized the maximum.” If I read King correctly here, then perhaps what this story reveals is not so much a warning to Jesus’ listeners, those in the 1st century, and you and me today, that the rich and wealthy will find themselves in some horrific hellfire of an afterlife. If I read his reading correctly, what King is suggesting is that Dives started creating his own hell the moment that he walked past Lazarus and couldn't see him as a brother, a fellow human being, and one who was clearly a human being in deep need. Dives didn’t go to hell after he died because of what he did or didn’t do on earth – minimizing the maximum and maximizing the minimum—no, Dives was already in hell when he died, a hell that looked, smelled and tasted fine because he had all the money and privilege in the world to make what he was doing look elegant and pretty, but really was building the hell that he wakes up into all too late.
This then is the tragedy that isn’t the end of the story, but rather the tragedy that begins the story that is revealed at the end of his life. The psalmist in Psalm 14 begins by saying “fools say to themselves, ‘there is no God.’” I think that Jesus is echoing the Psalmist by suggesting where God is in this story: fools say to themselves, I have no need for others. Or to put it in a different way: I have no need for those whom I consider the Other, those not like me, those whose lives are so different from mine that I cannot recognize the humanity, the divine spark, in them. What Jesus says through this story is that it is in this Other, this person whom we do not see, whom we do not want to see as God’s beloved, that God comes to us, where God dwells most presently, beckoning us to respond. For Dives, the destitute Lazarus was God coming as the Other; for some, Lazarus is someone with a disability or illness who threatens our fantasy of everlasting health and ablebodiedness. Lazarus is the one consigned to the margins of the social worlds that you and I inhabit and have built up: those pushed to the edges because of their sexuality, their race, their undocumented status, their particular faith or lack of it. Those whom we know dwell amongst us, but for one reason or another we cannot bring ourselves to bring around our table, but rather keep at arm’s length, their difference so great, their suffering so vast that we’d rather bunker up, close the door, so that we can keep up the pretense that the world that we have built just so will remain that way.
You see, God calls you and me to attend to and care for our poorer sisters and brothers, those in our community that have felt the pang of ostracism, not only because it is the just thing to do, not only because in doing so we alleviate individual and collective suffering—make no mistake, these are good things. God calls you and me to work for justice and dignity for all human beings, which means that we fight for shelter, food, healthcare, for those who have the least. But just as important, perhaps more importantly, you and I are called to look at, engage, and attend to the Lazaruses in our lives because when we truly see Lazarus for who he is—however and whoever Lazarus is in your and my life—then we will have emerged from our hells and begun to walk into the field of God. God comes to us as Lazarus, vulnerable, suffering, and in doing so invites us to tend and care, not just to help the less fortunate, but to transform our hearts into the heart of God. We don’t need Lazarus resurrected to prove to us that this is what God’s realm looks like: Abraham tell Dives that his family should look to Moses and the prophets. And if you and I do so, when you and I embrace what the prophets proclaim, then we will have experienced what Dives unfortunately never does: what Lutheran priest and author Nadia Bolz-Weber, riffing off the prophet Jeremiah, calls a “divine heart transplant,” where God takes our hearts of stone, hearts of stone created by the idolatries of wealth, accumulation, the false sense of fear and security, and replaces them with hearts of flesh that beat for God’s people and for God who comes to us as Lazarus.
The late great poet Audre Lorde once addressed a group of feminist activists and concluded her speech with the following: “I urge each one of us here to reach down into that deep place of knowledge inside herself and touch that terror and loathing of any difference that lives there. See whose face it wears.” Jesus invites you and me to meet Lazarus at our doorsteps, the ones under our noses that we have trouble seeing, and beckons us to see in the one in front of us suffering the God who suffers with and as Lazarus. Jesus calls us to come out of the hells of our self-imposed alienation, our gated communities and gated hearts, so that we can beat warm hearts of flesh to help heal God’s beautiful broken world, and to heal our beautiful broken selves. Like Moses and the prophets, Jesus implores us to undergo divine heart transplants so that as we care for all the Lazaruses in our lives, we might all find ourselves in Abraham’s bosom, on earth as it is in heaven.
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