pentecost 18 year C

Jeremiah 32: 1-15 NRSV text
Psalm 91: 1-6; 14-16 NRSV text
1 Timothy 6: 6-19 NRSV text
Luke 16: 19-31 NRSV text

 

The parable of Dives and Lazarus is told in terms of wealth, poverty, compassion, judgement, heaven and hell, resurrection, the Law and the Prophets, and faith – in other words, it addresses some of the “big questions”! Its very scale is meant to indicate the importance and gravity of what Jesus is saying. Money is power. It is the means either of giving Life or creating a living hell. It is a subject that Jesus addresses again and again – in fact, he speaks far more often about money than he does about heaven and hell! And yet there are many Christians who regard the issue of wealth, poverty and power as “private” matter. They get upset when preachers address these issues directly and accuse them of “preaching politics instead of the Kingdom”! You’ve got to wonder whether they’ve understood a word of what Jesus was on about – or which Bible they’re reading!

“You cannot serve God and wealth!” says Jesus in 16:13. Note the verb: “You cannot serve wealth”. In other words, wealth can be an object of service in the same way that God can. That is what Jesus is criticising: serving wealth. It is possible to serve wealth instead of using wealth in the service of the Kingdom and of others. Wealth can become not only an end in itself, but something that captivates the heart, soul, mind and strength. If service of God is about the love of God, then what Jesus is saying is, “You cannot love God and love wealth at the same time. The two are incompatible objects of devotion. You have to choose: love of God or love of wealth”.

Why are the two incompatible? The love of wealth blinds us to the needs of others. It kills compassion – and compassion, according to Jesus, is at the very heart of God. It is compassion that means that Yahweh hears the groans of the Hebrew slaves in the brick pits of Pharaoh above all the other noise on earth. It is the compassion of the Samaritan in the parable that is commended because compassion drives him to “be neighbour to the man lying by the side of the road” – and thus prove to know what it means truly to love God with heart, soul, mind and strength! The Kingdom of God is the reign of the Compassionate God, whose compassion unleashes salvation.

Getting God wrong (Luke 16: 14-17)
“You cannot serve [love] God and wealth”, says Jesus. Luke immediately goes on: “The Pharisees, who were lovers of money, heard all this and they ridiculed him” (16:14). Do you see what is going on? Here is one of the roots of the conflicts between Jesus and the Pharisees: it is an argument about the character of God. Jesus is saying that the Pharisees get God wrong because they have their priorities wrong – they have the wrong object of their hearts’ affections. They are idolaters, in other words. And they have the wrong object of affection because they have not understood the Law and the Prophets.

It’s a vicious circle. The Law and the Prophets disclose God as the God whom Jesus loves and worships and proclaims – the God of the Kingdom. The Pharisees do not receive and accept Jesus because they do not know how to read the Law and the Prophets. They get the Law and the Prophets wrong because they have set their deepest desires on the wrong things – and so are blinded to the truth.

For Jesus, there is a deep, intimate connectedness between the love of God and the love of neighbour. Neighbour love is the hermeneutical compass-bearing that guides one in the love of God. There is no conflict between love of God and love of neighbour. The connecting link, for Jesus, is compassion – a compassion that is at the very heart of God. Not so for the Pharisees. Because they do not look at it in these terms, they constantly find themselves having to choose between loving God and loving neighbour. They object when Jesus heals a woman on the Sabbath. Or they pass by on the other side of the road when an injured, dying man poses the threat of ritual contamination.

Their priorities are all wrong. They “prize the wrong things” (says Jesus in verse 15), and what they prize is in actual fact “an abomination in the sight of God”.

Two things demonstrate absolutely clearly how wrong they are: firstly, they are blinded to the suffering of others, and secondly, they are blind to the fact that Jesus is God’s Messiah. They accuse Jesus of being a Law-breaker, when in fact, he is the culmination of the Law and the Prophets (look at v16). Why are they so very blind? It’s the same point we find ourselves asking about the Church again and again: ”Why were good Christian people so blind to the evils of the Slave Trade? How could they think that Apartheid was the expression of God’s will for South Africa? Why was the Church so active in promoting and justifying great evil, and enthusiastic in prosecuting and persecuting those who challenged it?”

The answer then is the same today: they had a huge vested interest in preserving the status quo that delivered them wealth and power at the expense of others! Somewhere at the heart of preventable evil and suffering are two inter-related facts about human nature that are causally connected: love of money and absence of compassion.

Compassion, poverty and suffering (Luke 16: 19-21)
Jesus tells the parable of the rich man and Lazarus against the Pharisees to illustrate the truth of his statement, “You cannot serve God and wealth”. It is a parable about the character of God, set in the context of a conflict over how to read the Law and the Prophets. Like the parable of the Good Samaritan, it turns on the issue of compassion (the heart of God and therefore of the Kingdom) and the ways in which love of wealth blind us to compassion and replace God with an idol.

“Lazarus”, significantly, means “God has helped”. The very name therefore indicates whose side God is on according to Jesus. This is a story of the God who takes sides in the struggles over power, because these are life and death struggles. They are struggles that determine whose life is (illegitimately) “heaven on earth” and whose is “hell on earth”.

The rich man is very rich. He is dressed in purple – he aspires to royalty-like recognition, influence and adulation. His property is a walled mansion, with a gate to keep out undesirables. He has used his wealth to create a virtual world for himself of affluence and sumptuous feasting – and it is created at the expense of those who are shut out in poverty.

In the parable, Lazarus lies at the gate of the mansion. Inside, the rich man lies on his couch at table; outside, in a parody of the feast, Lazarus lies in the dirt because he has grown too weak through malnutrition and starvation to move. The picture Jesus paints is one with which we are depressingly familiar: starving people, too weak to brush off the flies that cover their eyes and sores, or to shoo away the dogs who come and lick at their sores as though they are carrion, already dead. Lazarus’ is a living death.

Note that, in Jesus’ mind, Lazarus’ poverty and suffering is the direct result of the rich man’s callous indifference and over-abundance. Lazarus is “at his gate”. He can do something to alleviate the suffering and save Lazarus’ life. He doesn’t have to do much. Lazarus isn’t greedy. He doesn’t want what the man has. He only “longs to satisfy his hunger with what fell from the rich man’s table” (v21).

Jesus is incredibly contemporary in his analysis of the causes and structure of poverty in this parable! There are two things here that we have only learned for ourselves really since Karl Marx. The first is Marx’s insights into the workings of capitalism: somewhere, there is a zero-sum equation that says, “There is enough to go round – but not enough for some to have more than their share. They can only do that by ensuring that others have less than they need”. In other words, poverty is caused by some having excessive wealth, because they can only have it at the expense of the poor. Poverty is the creation of those who “love money”. It is their fault.

The second thing is just how easy it would be to rectify the situation! The rich man needn’t do much – all he has to do is to give Lazarus the crumbs from under his table. Yet he’s unwilling even to do this. Poverty, as Bono never tires of reminding us, isn’t expensive. Global poverty amounts only to 1% of the global GDP. And yet, as we found out during first the Jubilee 2000 campaign and then in 2005 over the Make Poverty History campaign, there is an unwillingness to do even that in order to alleviate the suffering and starvation of two thirds of the planet’s population. Poverty is not an economic problem: it is a moral problem, caused by lack of compassion.

This is what “love of wealth” does: it blinds us to the suffering of others. We in the north and west use wealth to create a global economy that works for our benefit, cranking up our own standard of living at the expense of those in the east and the south. We create our own micro-words of ease and plenty, shutting out the “beggars” so that they have no access to the means by which they can improve their own lives, and shutting us safely away from having to confront the fall-out and the victims of our own greed. We want to feast without a conscience; to eat without being given indigestion by pictures of those who do not have enough to sustain life for the next 24 hours.

God “helps” Lazarus because God is the God of compassion. The Kingdom of the Compassionate God is a place of open-doored, open-gated hospitality and welcome for Lazarus. It is a place for the loving and the compassionate, and for those who have never received the love and compassion they deserve. It is heaven for those whose lives are a living hell.

The Great Reversal (Luke 16: 22-26)
I remember several sermons and Bible studies on this passage that were about heaven and hell – the nature of heaven, the reality of torment, the finality of judgement. What they missed entirely was the whole issue of wealth, poverty and suffering! It was as though Jesus was making some sort of authoritative statement on the nature of the after-life, and he could have used pretty much anything as the subject-matter to get someone into heaven and someone else into hell.

Jesus doesn’t use the parable to describe the details of the after-life! This is a story, and the details are not so much description as they are symbol. Jesus wants to talk about the Great Reversal of the Kingdom – that compassion means those who are last in terms of the world’s priorities are first in the Kingdom.

In Jesus’ world, riches were frequently seen as a sign of God’s blessing – particularly if the rich person was also pious! In other words, people subscribed to the theology of that ghastly, godless verse in Cecil Francis Alexander’s hymn, All Things Bright and Beautiful (which picks up this parable): “The rich man in his castle/the poor man at his gate/God has made them high and low/and ordered their estate”! How wrong can one be???

In the parable, Lazarus dies and is carried away by the angels to be with Abraham. This is one instance where we’re not helped by modern translation. The Greek literally says, “…the poor man died and was carried away by the angels into the bosom of Abraham”. Similarly, when the rich man looks up, he “sees Abraham from afar and Lazarus in his bosom”. Being “in Abraham’s bosom” is clearly about intimate welcome and relationship. But the colloquialism has a more important point in the context of Jesus’ parable. The image of “being in someone’s bosom” is drawn from the meal table: you recline at the table, on your elbow, with your head in your hand and next to the chest of the person on your left.

In other words, what Jesus is saying is that the beggar, who lay dying at the gate while the rich man lay feasting, is now reclining at table with Abraham at the Great Feast, on Abraham’s right, as the honoured guest! It’s part of the Great Reversal.

By contrast with Lazarus whose death is welcome into the banqueting hall of heaven, and who is carried there by the angels, “the rich man died and was buried”. The man who had feasted so royally is now reduced to a royal feast for worms. He is in Hades – the realm of the dead. Moreover, he is in torment.

It’s interesting, isn’t it, that the rich man recognises Lazarus? The implication is that Lazarus had not been unknown to the rich man in life – rather, he was both known and deliberately excluded, just as we use wealth to create havens for ourselves (whether nations or neighbourhoods) where the poor and dispossessed are shut out. Their respective states after death expose the truth of their lives. The rich man’s wealth was not a sign of God’s blessing: it was part of Lazarus’ right which had effectively been stolen and kept from him. The rich man lived at Lazarus’ expense, and refused to consider what his greed was doing. He had no compassion on Lazarus – in fact, he had taken steps to ensure that he didn’t have to endure either the sight or the presence of Lazarus. He had been the world-maker, and had shut Lazarus out.

In God’s world, Lazarus is the beloved, honoured guest. And just as Lazarus’ life had been a living hell of torment, the rich man is now suffering what he had condemned Lazarus to for himself. Moreover, says Abraham to the rich man, there is an unbridgeable gulf between the two “sides” of comfort and torment. It is a God-created gulf, and therefore genuinely unbridgeable; in life, the gulf between the rich man and Lazarus had been fixed by the rich man and was “unbridgeable” only because the rich man refused to show compassion.

Realisation, regret and remorse (Luke 16: 27-28)
The gulf, or chasm, is significant: in life, the rich man had deliberately surrounded himself with a wall so that he could not see Lazarus at his gate. Here, in Hades, the point is precisely that he is able to see across the separation. He asks for Lazarus to come and ease his suffering – presumably because he assumes that Lazarus can see his torment and will have compassion on him!

It’s part of the belated realisation of what he has done: he refused to take notice of Lazarus’ own torment; he refused to have compassion. Yet he assumes that Lazarus, being in God’s Kingdom, will necessarily have the sort of compassion that he himself refused to have.

The rich man is not incredibly evil. He doesn’t whinge about his lot, or complain about injustice. He doesn’t quibble with Abraham’s accusation about his conduct, or try to slough of responsibility. In fact, having realised his error, his overriding concern is for his five brothers. Now, we may want to point out that his new-found concern stretches only as far as his own nearest and dearest; the point is, though, that, having lived his life looking out for Number One (and looking away from Lazarus!), his own torment is less important to him than the fate of his brothers.

The problem: love of money, not lack of education (Luke 16: 29-31/1 Timothy 6: 6-19)
What does it take to convince people of the truth? We assume that education is the answer to things like global poverty: if only we show enough footage of human suffering, and make people realise how bad things are, how they are involved and how they can change the way it all works, then people will say, “Goodness! If only I’d known! That’s terrible!” and then do the necessary.

The end of the parable returns to the theme of understanding God and of serving God rather than money.

The rich man supposes that Lazarus’ return from the dead will have sufficient shock value and be so spectacular that it will persuade his brothers to heed the warning. Abraham’s response is sobering: “It won’t work. They’ve got the Law and the Prophets. What more do they need? The warnings are all there, as clear as daylight. The problem isn’t that they cannot hear – the problem is that they don’t want to hear! They’ve got to much invested in their standard of living. They love money – not God! Believe me, if someone does not want to hear, you’re not going to convince them – however spectacularly you present the arguments!”

Luke here has two things in mind. The first is, of course, Jesus’ own resurrection: the resurrection will not convince those who do not want to hear about the truth of who Jesus is and what God is doing in him. The second is the conflict over Jesus’ exorcisms: those who have the most to lose in Jesus’ vision of the Kingdom are keenest to attribute his power to Beelzebul. The point is this: problems like poverty are deliberate human creations. The difficulty of solving the problems is that those who have the necessary power and wealth do not want to give it up. They are more alive to their own wants and needs than they are to the suffering of others. Disease, starvation and despair hold less weight in their priorities than the opportunity to over-eat, to drive swanky air-conditioned cars that provoke envy, to buy leisure time and to climb the ladder of influence and power.

That is why Paul can write to Timothy and say, “The love of money is the root of all kinds of evil, and in their eagerness to be rich, many have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many pains” (1 Timothy 6:10). Paul knew Luke’s gospel. He probably has in mind here both the parable of the rich man and Lazarus and the story that comes soon after of the rich young ruler who turns and “wanders away”, because he was very rich (Luke 18: 18ff). Jesus doesn’t condemn wealth; he argues for its redistribution. It isn’t wealth but the love of wealth that is problematic. Wealth in the hands of compassionate people becomes and enormous resource for good (cf the story of Zacchaeus).

How might we be freed from the cripplingly seductive power of wealth? Paul says to Timothy that we need to recognise our own mortality: we come into the world with nothing and we go out with nothing. We come in naked from God; we go out to stand naked before God. At the end of the day, what we need in this life is enough to eat and clothe ourselves so that we can live. Any more than that is simply bonus. We need to learn the secret of “living simply so that others might simply live”. That is no easy lesson in an acquisitive culture like ours! We are encouraged to love money in every advert that we see or read, or in every sales call that plagues our time at home.

Those of us who are rich ought to be “rich in good works”. Now Paul doesn’t mean, “It’s fine to be stinking rich; just makes sure you’re good!” He means, very specifically, that wealthy Christians ought to put their wealth at the disposal of others. Wealth is a resource for mission and for the Kingdom. We use wealth to make ourselves little kingdoms in which we are rulers; the only effective counter to this temptation is the worship of the God who is truly sovereign (1 Timothy 6:15-16). Then we will free to be generous, guided by compassion and use wealth for the sake of the Kingdom.

It isn’t education that is needed, however gimmicky and imaginative we can make that process. It’s rather a question of what we love and serve. Wealth has a peculiar ability to enthral an captivate us. It turns us inwards towards our own needs and desires, until they become the slave-driver that blinds us to everything else. It blinds us, too, to the truth of God, just as it blinded the Pharisees to the truths of the Law and the Prophets.

At the end of the day, it’s about conscientisation, not education. Conscientisation is about being made alive to the suffering of other people until we see them as human beings just like us, and realise how it would be if we suffered as they do. It’s about the realisation of our own culpability in their suffering that drives us to do something to change the situation. That is what Jesus calls “compassion” – literally “co-suffering”. It is when we learn to suffer with others that we will be converted to doing something to prevent suffering.

Having a stake in God’s future (Jeremiah 32: 1-15)
Nowhere is the destructive, paralysing effect of love of money seen more clearly than in the issue of global warming. In the face of all the evidence of the imminent trashing of the planet, we argue about whether or not global warming is a reality (in the hope that we won’t have actually to do something about it). How do we explain such incredible, fatal, short-sighted obduracy? How is it that the US government will not cut its carbon emissions? How is that we, who believe in resurrection, are so blind to the fact that we are condemning our own grandchildren to death?

The answer is our own slavery to affluence. We will not face up to what we are doing, not because we do not know, but because we don’t want to know. We are a generation who will feast ourselves sick while we can, regardless of the fact that supplies are running out and cannot be replenished.

The passage from Jeremiah is an encouragement to live differently. Jeremiah is facing the imminent destruction of Jerusalem. Judah’s future is as shaky as Northern Rock’s. Shares are plummeting – and Jeremiah buys a field at Anathoth! It’s a prophetic symbolic act. It’s a statement of faith in the future of Judah under Yahweh. Knowing, as he does, that everything is about to come to an end, Jeremiah wants to proclaim that this is not The End – that there will be life beyond destruction and exile.

How do we live prophetically today? Jeremiah read the signs of his times and knew that exile was imminent. The Church needs to be a body that embraces the global crisis we face with all the prophetic urgency of a Jeremiah. It isn’t just about talking and preaching and educating and cajoling and shouting; what is required is prophetic action that says, “We’re buying a stake in the future. We believe that this world belongs to God, and to our children, and to our children’s children. We hold it in trust, not in ownership!”

“Greening” the Church is vital. It is doing something concrete to combat the destruction of the planet. It is a proclamation that there is another possible future for God’s world – a good future. It’s a statement of faith that proclaims that greed and short-termism; that consumerism and acquisitiveness do not have ultimate power or the last word. It is faithful living in the service of the God whom Jesus proclaimed as Lord of all reality, rather than living in the service of wealth. It is the only option, because Jesus was right: we cannot serve God and wealth.

Amen.

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