Living in Oklahoma City, people keep telling
me how easy it is to find your way because, according to some, Oklahoma City is
laid out on a grid. All I can say is, I can think of at least a dozen confusing
exceptions, and if you live here you can probably name them faster than I can.
Some times in desperation I use GPS to find my
way. The directions often seem wrong to me, but I follow them anyway and end up
not the way I want to go, but the way I need to go. My failure to find my way is
my inability to see the right direction.
The directions
we get from today’s Gospel parable of the rich man and Lazarus sound
terrifying. What the parable gives us though, is a way to see. Jesus tells us a
parable about what is happening now, rather than a parable about what’s going
to happen after we die.
The part of
this parable we usually fail to see is:
“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.”[1]
It helps to
know that the chasm that opened between the rich man and Lazarus must have been
an enormous surprise to Jesus’ audience that day. In Jesus’ time wealth equated
to God’s blessing. Poverty equaled sin, an abandonment by God. I regret to say
many of us still think this way. Those of us who have wealth – even if we fail
to see how wealthy we are – think of ourselves as blessed. And some of us, I fear,
see the poor at our own gate and wonder if God has abandoned them.
The more I read
and study this parable though, the more I believe Jesus tells us about a chasm
we experience here, rather than in the life to come. Thankfully, I am not the
only one who thinks this. Some scholars are seeing this parable differently for
a variety of reasons. One of those reasons is how little scripture really
mentions “Hell” or “Sheol,” or, as it is translated here, “Hades.”
Given that, and
also that this Gospel’s seems to specialize overall in over the top
exaggeration and larger than life metaphors, it helps us understand this
parable is likely Jesus talking about the “now” rather than the “yet to come.”
It’s hard to see anything too literally where Luke’s Gospel is concerned,
especially when he tells Jesus’ parables.
So what if this parable is the now
rather than the later? The parable becomes about how we see and what we see. It
tells us we need to see the poor at our gate now rather than later. The rich
man’s error was not only that he failed to see, but also that he failed to use
his wealth to bridge the gap that separated him from Lazarus.
The gap we have isn’t a gap that
happens after death, it’s a gap that happens here, and now. The gap or chasm
between the rich man and Lazarus in the parable began the first time the rich
man left his gate and saw Lazarus. And the gap continued each time the rich man
went in or out of his house and failed to really see Lazarus. Even in the part
of the parable that seems to be about death, the rich man still treats Lazarus
as someone less than he is. He wants him to be nothing more than a servant to
bring him cool water. And, if Lazarus won’t do that, then he wants him to be an
errand boy to his brothers. The rich man still doesn’t see Lazarus as a human
being, and a human being with his own needs. He sees Lazarus as someone less
than he is; someone to be ordered about, to serve.
Seeing is so important to Luke that
he has given us a parable that isn’t just about Jesus’ audience. Instead, it’s
a parable for both those who heard it then, and those of us who hear it now.
If you think this parable might be
simply a warning about what happens after death, what about that last bit from
Father Abraham? “If they do not listen to Moses and the prophets, neither will
they be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.”[2]
What about us?
What do we see? Do we see less and loss in our own wealth that leads us to
hoarding and keeping rather than loving and giving? We too, just as Jesus’
audience did, have the Law and the Prophets. We too, have seen Jesus’ love and
compassion. What we often fail to see is Jesus asking us to share what we have.
To see others as the human beings they are, rather than to ignore those at our
gate.
This parable is about how we live our
lives right now. Jesus calls us to see people as human beings in our community,
at our own gates, ignoring none, welcoming all. In this way the chasm closes
rather than widens. Our hands that reach out across that chasm are the hands of
those who have seen the risen Lord. AMEN.
The Rev Nicolette
Papanek
©2016
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