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Parable of Lazarus & The Rich Man By Rev. Charmaine Braatvedt Sunday 30th Sept, 2007 Luke 16: 19-31 Many of you may recall the terrible trauma caused by Hurricane Katrina to the people of New Orleans. What shocked many of us was that the federal, state and local government were desperately slow in their responses to the crisis. Many disturbing stories filtered out of New Orleans in the days and weeks and months that followed, that seem to indicate a lack of compassion and care for the poor of New Orleans. One such story involved a group of refugees who attempted to leave the city on foot. The police had told them that they should go to the greater New Orleans Bridge where buses were lined up to take people out of the City. The crowed did as they were told but as they approached the bridge, armed sheriffs formed a line across the foot of the bridge leading into the town of Gretna and as soon as the crowd got too close, the police began firing their weapons over their heads. The sheriffs informed the crowd that there were no buses waiting and that they should go back to where they had come from. When a spokes person in the crowd questioned why they couldn't cross the bridge on foot anyway, the police responded by saying that the West Bank, of which the town of Gretna was a part, was not going to become another New Orleans and that there would be no Superdomes in their City. These seemed to be code words for if you are poor and black, you were not crossing the Mississippi River that day and you were not getting out of New Orleans that way. All day long, families, individuals and groups who attempted to cross the bridge, met with the same negative response. Thousands of New Orleaners were prevented and prohibited from self-evacuating the City on foot. Meanwhile, the only two City shelters sank further into squalor and disrepair. Throughout, the official relief effort seemed to be callous, inept, and racist. This resulted in much unnecessary suffering and many lives were lost that did not need to be lost. The world looked on aghast as the shame of the greatest Christian superpower in the world was exposed in the media for all to see. Today Murray read one of Jesus’ hard parables for us. John Fairbrother recently explained parables to me in this way. They are like a good joke, if you need to explain the punch line you lose the whole point of the joke. You either get it or you don’t and if you over analyse it you start to lose the truth or relevance of the metaphor! There is great truth in this I think. The word "parable" comes from the Greek word meaning "to place beside," or "to draw up alongside." Jesus used parables to unfold great truths. He placed a simple story alongside a profound truth, and thus the profound was illustrated by the simple. Typically in parables, substantial truths are discovered in the midst of circumstantial fiction. The story of the rich man and Lazarus is one of a group of parables addressed particularly to the Pharisees who were a highly privileged group of people. It is a little unusual as parables go because · This particular parable is only to be found in the Gospel of St Luke and. · It is the only parable to name any of its characters. Now I believe that the naming of Lazarus is significant because it personalises the level of concern Jesus has for the poor. The rich man is un-named and I think this is because the rich man is meant to represent anyone who has been richly blessed with money, talents and resources. Jesus takes a familiar folk-tale, which was popular with those in the rabbinic tradition and which came from Egypt originally, and adapts it to reveal an important truth, to those who wish to be enlightened about the right use of the gifts that God has given us. As such, the story is more pictorial and representative than a literal story about what will ensue in the after-life, albeit set in an imaginary context of the hereafter. Put differently, I don’t think that Jesus is endeavouring to disclose particulars of life beyond the grave. Rather, I believe he is telling a story to convey a moral truth about the right use of wealth. That being the case this becomes a richly layered story, which raises a number of questions about
I don’t know about you, but personally I find all of these questions a little disturbing and they cause me to shuffle nervously in my seat. Of course this is exactly the purpose of a parable! Parables are designed to disturb our complacency and to prod us to be brave and to choose the better way mapped out for us by Jesus. They are designed to challenge us to allow the truths of the Gospel to change and transform the way we choose to live our lives! A case in point is Albert Schweitzer, the great Nobel prize winning humanitarian of the 20th Century. It's interesting to note that in his testimony he declared tha it was precisely this parable that inspired him to give up his great and lucrative career in Europe and move to Gabon in West Central Africa, where he founded a hospital using his own money. So, let’s take a closer look at this challenging story. In this parable Jesus shows us how this rich man failed to use two golden opportunities he had in his life:
Like all tragedies this story illustrates a disappointing aspect of the rich man’s character. His downfall comes about because his character is fatally flawed. He was a man who was seriously lacking in generosity and compassion when it came to his wealth and to the way he chose to live his life. His flaw was not that he was wealthy, but that he used his wealth selfishly and failed to use it for the relief of the beggar who lay at his gate. He had an opportunity to use his resources to befriend Lazarus, to make a difference in his life, but he was too callous to care! He was also a man who failed to embrace the compassionate nature of the God He worshiped. He lived his whole life in the false security that just being a son of Abraham was enough. In today’s terms, the parallel would be that just coming to church or calling oneself a Christian does not make us Christ-like or Christ followers. Clearly the rich man did not take seriously the Biblical teaching that the heart of God is with the poor and that if we are to be in unison with God we need to reach out to the poor in whatever shape or form they present themselves to us, as the sick, the needy, the marginalised, the unloved and the unclean. God clearly calls the rich, be they materially rich, time rich or rich in talents and giftings to a ministry of sharing. The rich are asked to share their resources with generosity. God’s way is that all forms of wealth are to be shared with an eye to protecting the vulnerable. See: Leviticus 19:9-10, Deuteronomy 15:7-11 and 31:16, Isaiah 58:6-7. God’s way is the way of sharing, of community, of hospitality. It is the rich man’s lack of compassion and generosity that has created the great chasm or gulf between himself and Abraham’s community of which Lazarus is a part. The rich man’s selfishness means that he does not share, he does not commit himself to community and his hospitality is arbitrary. Thus he finds himself outside of the community of Faith symbolised by Abraham’s bosom. He has isolated himself. What would it take to bridge that chasm I wonder? The story makes two further points which are that despite the differences in social class and situation here on earth, Death is the great leveller. See Isaiah 14: 9-11; And that at the end of the day, God is not interested in status and power, but in the state of the human heart. His covenant of love and compassion is incumbent on us all and we ignore it or live outside of it at our own peril. Now let’s be clear here, the issue is not that the man is wealthy, for Abraham himself was a very wealthy man. The issue is that he used his wealth selfishly and ignored the needs of those less fortunate than he was. The story ends on a dark note, once the rich man realises that one consequence of the selfish way he lived his life on earth is that it has taken him outside of the bosom of God’s covenant with his people, he pleads with Abraham to send Lazarus to go and d warn his 5 brothers who are still alive on earth. The answer in Jesus’ story is clear: they have their warning in the scriptures. All we need for our salvation is available to us in the Scriptures. As a hard-nosed cop used to say to speeders who requested a warning before being given a ticket, "the sign is your warning." If people are not persuaded on moral grounds of the reality of God’s call to reach out in love to those who need them, then they are hardly likely to be convinced by apparitions from the grave or signs and wonders of a supernatural nature. The two failures of the rich man belong together: Because his mind was closed to the revelation of God His heart was closed to the demands of compassion and because his heart was closed to the demands of compassion his mind was closed to God. So in a nutshell the parable is told so as to have us reflect on
The Christ follower must have a compassionate heart that seeing a need, instinctively moves to help. This is the way Jesus illustrated through his life and his teaching. Failure to do so is a failure of discipleship, it is a failure of great ethical proportions and it is a failure that separates us with a mighty chasm from the life that God calls us to live. God is gracious, generous and unconditional in his love and the call to each of us is to be the same. Our service to others reflects our loyalty and commitment to God. Let us never forget that Lazarus appears in various guises today. We need to be alert and respond generously to these appearances. This brings me back to the terrible tragedy caused by the slowness with which the Federal authorities responded to the plight of the black people in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina? As many of the poor people in New Orleans tried to cross the bridge into Gretna to find refuge and safety, the rich people of Gretna responded with self interest and closed ranks when they saw hordes of poor black people making their way to their town. They called for the police to step in and stop the refugees from crossing the bridge, thus closing ranks against the poor, the needy, the distressed. Now it could be argued that here was a modern day Lazarus. All those people desperate for help were standing on one side of the bridge, and all those people with lots of money and resources, unwilling to put themselves and their possessions at risk, standing on the other and the great chasm of the Mississippi between them. I wonder where God stood at that time? It's tempting to ask how on earth the good citizens of Gretna could reconcile their response with the call of Christian discipleship. How could they not see that the people streaming out of New Orleans after the storm were Lazarus? It's so tempting to judge that like the rich man they thoroughly blew their chance to make a difference. Incapable of understanding the generosity demanded of them by a compassionate God they failed to greet Lazarus on the bridge. It's easy to stand in judgment of the kind of person who would be afraid of "the poor people" in a time of need like Katrina. Less easy, less comfortable, is asking ourselves what the reversal would be in our community. What surprise does God have in store for us? Who would Lazarus be for us? One of the dilemmas in preaching this passage is that it is hard to identify with either the rich man or with Lazarus. Few of us have so much money that we do not know what to do with it and fewer even are so poor and destitute that we have sores that the dogs are licking. Both Lazarus and the rich man seem quite removed from our daily circumstances. It may be, then, that you and I can most easily associate with the five brothers. We are still living this life. We still have an opportunity to be instructed by the Scriptures and to see the beggar at our gates. If so, then the parable itself becomes a prophetic word to us. Perhaps we are best represented in the story by the rich man's 5 siblings. Perhaps the story is told to "warn us, challenge us, bring transformation in our lives Should this be the case then…………… What are the chasms in our lives and what do they signify? What, exactly, are we being warned of in our lives? Or to put it another way, we are all in some sense brothers and sisters to the people of Gretna. What warning are we to take from their failure? Who are we to see as Lazarus in our community? Who are we to see that we have not seen before? |
