The Rich Man and Lazarus

If we were to have heard this morning an announcement of a new global pandemic, what would your reaction have been? “Ugh – not again! Another Christmas ruined!” Better visit the grandparents now; Should we slip in a rousing rendition of ‘we’ll meet again’ at the end of church; then get ready for some more ‘me-time’.

After a couple of years of panic, disruption, boredom and death we’re now mentally quite well prepared. To have suggested in the hey-day of the noughties – that we’d shortly be facing public lock-downs, missing essentials in supermarkets – Remember when you couldn’t buy flour – Daily death tolls, Would have seemed eccentric. Frightening. Change when it comes is usually unimaginable. So it’s easy in early September to say –Right – we have to be frugal – no heating till November. In Summer you simply forget how cold feels. The pinch comes in mid-October – oh yes. A cold house at 6am is unpleasant. 

The death of the Queen, despite her age, caught everyone by surprise – It was, it seems, impossible to imagine singing God Save the King, until you’d got through it a couple of times. Human beings are ever resistant to change. I’m running out of lightbulb jokes but this one I liked: How many Anglicans does it take to change a light bulb? 7. One to phone an electrician. 6 to tell you how much they liked the old light bulb better. Ah, the perils of being a vicar.

Today’s parable is not what it seems. It’s often taken for a colourful picture of the afterlife, with the rich man suffering for his cheerful but thoughtless worldliness and the poor man finally getting the good things he deserves. That sort of divine balancing out that we learnt at Sunday School.

But Jesus’ parables are stories. Not truths. I’ll shock you here. There was no good Samaritan. No prodigal son – They were figments of the Almighty Imagination. The parables are there to change how people think and act; not to give them new facts.

 And, actually, we’re not told that the rich man was especially bad, or that the poor man was good. They are both Jews – both seem friendly with Abraham – and we have no reason to suppose one was more pious than the other. This parable is not about salvation.  We’re told, though, “Jesus told this parable to those among the Pharisees who loved money.” Jesus is trying to change the way people see and use wealth. So he goes straight in for shock tactics. His audience is well off. They have their dinner parties. There’s certainly no shortage of poor, hopeless people in the first century. Nothing, they said, that a Roman mini-budget and some trickle down-denarii couldn’t fix.

So the line is: WHAT IF. What If your positions were reversed. And let’s take the worst case scenario. Eternally reversed. All the want you see in that person you walked by each day was yours. Forever. As a sermon that’s pretty punchy.

Now the rich man sees the error of his ways. He’s asking – and this matters – He’s asking Lazarus to come down and help him. Abraham’s response is given kindly – he calls him teknon – child or even ‘my child’. And then this strange sentiment – ‘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.’

As I said, this isn’t a description of the afterlife. It’s a parable. Just a story. All Jesus has done is to say to his rich audience: ‘imagine in eternity your place is swapped with someone very poor’. And here is the key point of the story: Between the you and us – Between the rich man and the poor man Lazarus, a great chasm has been fixed so that no one might cross between.

Jesus is really saying: You have not, cannot cross that chasm to meet the poor man who lives at your gate. You are simply unable to see the needs of your neighbour. To love your neighbour. To grasp that your neighbour is a person of equal value to you, Who no more deserves his state than you do yours. That is your failure in life. Do not presume that this present situation will remain in the next.

We actually have a similar parable told in our own context. Freaky Friday first hit the big screen in the 70s and some of you will remember a young Jodie Foster earning her stripes, but actually it’s universally agreed that the Lindsay Lohan/Jamie Lee Curtis noughties version is better. Essentially – sorry spoiler alert – the teenager finally understands the horror of parenthood and adulthood, and vice versa and everyone walks away a little bit kinder. If you saw the Jim Belushi movie Filofax, you’d get an even closer parallel. So – to me – the question of the parable –Back to Lazarus and the rich man – The question Jesus is provoking –Is can you cross that great chasm? Can you understand your teenager? Can you love your neighbour? And he’s framed it really in a sort – “bet you can’t” way. Because people struggle to change. They struggle to see the world in any way that is not the way it is now. Most of our ethical failures begin with a failure of imagination.

Essentially, it’s a question of empathy. As our favourite lawyer – tickets still available at the Gielgud – As our favourite lawyer said: ‘you never really know a man until you stand in his shoes and walk around in them.’ It’s a play on the idiom: ‘Before you judge a man, walk a mile in his shoes’ Which keen observers will note puts you a mile away from the scene of the crime in a new pair of shoes. But empathy is really very difficult, very uncomfortable and very costly. It’s unsurprising Jesus calls it ‘a great chasm’.

And here the parable takes us a step further. The end of the parable – we notice – won’t mean anything to its hearers. It’s a message for us reading Luke’s Gospel after all these events have occurred.

The rich man – thinking of his brothers – see he’s not such a bad guy– Begs Abraham to let him return to warn them. Abrahams’s response is: “If they do not listen to Moses and the prophets, neither will they be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.” There’s an acknowledgment – it doesn’t matter what you do what you say – people are largely fixed in their views. It takes a sledgehammer to change someone’s mind. And even the resurrection was not enough to convince all Jesus’ contemporaries.

But there’s more. That clang of the word ‘resurrection’ should wake us to the echoes of the Gospel itself in this story. Jesus as a rich man – as God – makes himself poor – crosses that great chasm. In doing so as the poor man made rich – he can cross that great chasm that separates us from wholeness and God, and, unlike Lazarus, bring relief to the dead. In doing all this he has warned his brothers. And yes, some are not convinced even when someone rises from the dead. But that is what he has done. And that is what Luke here is testifying to in his Gospel. It is the example of Christian service and humility, and the revelation of God’s love.

Now Luke’s is a Gospel of reversals. From the start Jesus is proclaiming good news to the poor, release to captives, liberty to the oppressed. Even before he’s born Mary is proclaiming that God has scattered the proud, put down the mighty, and exalted the humble and filled the hungry.

Jesus said ‘let the little children come to me’ Children are very quick to change, to adapt; They do not believe themselves better than others. From the moment they start squawking ‘it’s not fair’ they have a keen eye for justice. Sometimes we do need to become more like children to see the kingdom of heaven. And as we come to this baptism in a moment we should be reminded that it is when we are become like Henry that we are most ready to meet Christ.

For us, to hear and believe the Gospel is to be changed. To see the world differently. In some respects then – faith is about imagination. Can we imagine a world where people are treated equally? Where the distribution of resources, education and opportunities is fair? Where the values that Jesus taught – summarised adequately in ‘love your neighbour’ – take precedence over self-protection and excess.

It’s usually the case that under greater hardship, the divide between rich and poor increases. It is well established that social inequality breaks society. There will be more Lazaruses this winter. We will be challenged to walk in other people’s shoes, and allow ourselves to be affected by them; however poorly, to love them. We – in our situation – may find ourselves doubting whether anyone will come to drop crumbs for us.

The one whom we follow crossed that great chasm. He exchanged riches for poverty. And he crossed from death to life. Let us be prepared to change; Prepared to see the world differently; Ready to love our neighbour. Amen.