The Great Divide
Twenty-Sixth Sunday of the Year. Fr John Bernard Church preaches on the parable of Lazarus and the rich man.
It is often said that if you want to communicate an idea effectively, find an image or tell a story. If the Son of God is the measure of effective communication, then this is clearly good advice. The story of today’s Gospel is a perfect illustration of an idea that stands at the very heart of Christ’s preaching: the great reversal.
Repeatedly in St Luke’s Gospel, Jesus stresses that in the Kingdom of God everything will be turned upside down: the mighty cast down, the lowly lifted up, the hungry filled, the rich sent away empty. The idea is put most explicitly in the Lukan Beatitudes (6:20-25), in which the four blessings and four woes mirror each other. The hungry and poor will receive great things, while those presently rich and satisfied can expect no comfort.
In today’s Gospel, Jesus puts this teaching into narrative form. His story dwells on the details, ensuring the contrast between Lazarus and the rich man is as stark as possible. Each is an extreme version of what they represent: Lazarus’s abject poverty and life of desperate woe is contrasted with the rich man’s abundant wealth and life of immense comfort. The result, after death, is just as Jesus had described in the Beatitudes: Lazarus now enjoys the comfort of Abraham’s bosom, while the rich man languishes in the flames.
With the framing of ‘reversal’ in mind, it seems the key moment in the parable is death. It is at this point, Jesus says, that the fortunes of each are switched, from comfort to torment, and from alienation to communion. But what does this mean for us? Are we to go out, make ourselves miserable, and then wait for death when our fortunes might be reversed? Unsurprisingly, the storytelling of the Son of God is a little more subtle than this.
When the rich man first calls out to Abraham, he is informed that a great chasm has been fixed between them, one that shall never be crossed. This is not, however, the only boundary in the story that is never crossed. The other is the gate of the rich man’s house. The two boundaries are closely related. The rich man’s daily decision to ignore the cry of Lazarus, the failure to invite him within his gate, has now been cemented in place. His repeated alienation of the poor man has culminated in his own alienation from God’s blessings. In death, the decisions of his life are made definitive.
Christ gives us a stern warning here, against creating impassable chasms in our own lives. It is why he speaks with such passion about a love that reaches across every possible divide: Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you (Lk 6:27–28). Jesus constantly challenges us to expand who it is we see as our neighbour. As Pope Benedict puts it, the rich man is a warning that ‘an incapacity to love […] then becomes a burning and unquenchable thirst’.
The parable, however, is not just a warning but also an encouragement. If we look again to the Beatitudes, we see that the person who emerges behind the description of the blessed life clearly resembles Jesus himself: he who was poor and had nowhere to lay his head; he who wept over Jerusalem; he who was hated and excluded to the point of death. The blessedness proclaimed in the Gospel is no reward for being miserable, it is simply what constitutes life in Christ.
The ‘great reversal’ that Jesus proclaims throughout the Gospel is not a singular moment, like the flick of a switch. It is, rather, the transformation of a whole life. Just as the rich man’s daily failures alienated him from God, so too our every act of love is already a sharing in God’s own life. Every decision to expand the reach of our love, especially to those we find hardest to embrace, is already a movement into divine communion. And it is these decisions, we pray, that will be made definitive for us at the hour of our death.
Readings: Amos 6:1,4-7 | 1 Timothy 6:11-16 | Luke 16:19-31
Image: Works of Mercy with Dives and Lazarus, via Wikimedia Commons
