A Certain Beggar Named Lazarus

Our Chapel reflections over the past couple of months have centered on the comings and goings of God with us made visible in the Word and Spirit of God. They reveal the meaning and purpose of our humanity and shape our ethical thinking and doing.

How we think about the world, as we have seen, changes how we think and deal with one another. The Passion and Resurrection of Christ is about the redemption of the world which is gathered to God as opposed to seeing the world as something alien, indifferent, and hostile. That, in turn, changes how we see one another. The recurring theme has been about a change from fear and resentment of the world and one another to our joy and care towards one another. So, too, with how we think about God; it affects how we think and deal with one another.

Words and metaphors open us out to a deeper understanding of reality and of ourselves; and nowhere, perhaps, more profoundly than in the parables of Jesus. The parable read this week in Chapel is the story of Lazarus and Dives, a beggar and a rich man. Dives means the rich man. It is beautifully told and catches our attention, I hope. How we think about God affects how we think about one another. Our indifference to the one is also our indifference towards the other. This is what the parable shows. It is not simply about the great and glaring gaps of inequality between the abject poor and the extremely wealthy, as disturbing as such things may be. It is more about how we see one another and how we act accordingly.

A certain rich man, a certain beggar. Yet only the beggar is named. He is Lazarus. He lays at the gate of the rich man’s house, “full of sores and desiring to be fed with the crumbs which fell from the rich man’s table.” In Luke’s telling and moving phrase, it is only the dogs who attend to him: they “came and licked his sores.” We are reminded of another story where the Canaanite woman says that “even the little dogs eat of the crumbs which fall from their masters’ table.” Here Lazarus is served by the dogs but is not granted even the crumbs which fell from the rich man’s table. In short, Lazarus is ignored and overlooked; as if he doesn’t even exist. Only the dogs acknowledge him.

It is a telling indictment of a culture of indifference or avoidance towards those who are regarded as beneath our notice or a threat to our vision of ourselves in our comfortable complacencies. The parable is about a reversal of the situation. The rich man turns out to be poor towards God and thus at a far remove from God and heaven while Lazarus, poor with respect to the things of the world, is rich in the things of God “carried by the angels into Abraham’s bosom,” an image of heaven. The parable imagines a dialogue between the rich man in hell and Lazarus in Abraham’s bosom. The dialogue turns on the question of our attention to God and to one another, upon the ultimate good of our humanity as found in God and only so with one another.

How will we learn to care? The parable points to the Scriptures, to “Moses and the prophets”; in short, to the Hebrew Scriptures. For they, too, teach us about repentance and the radical life of God. It is one of the themes of the Passion and Resurrection and of Pentecost. The high things of God are made known to us by Word and Spirit in and through the Scriptures that bring to light the qualities of our lives in community. It is really a question of our attention to what we are being taught which affects our relations to and with one another. Repentance or metanoia is about our thinking upon or after the things of God made known to us. But what if we are indifferent to such things?

Learning how to pay attention is one of the great challenges of our age. It is not exactly a new problem. The monastic traditions understood only too well the forms of distraction. The problem of the rich man is not his wealth but his indifference to his fellow human being. As such he negates or denies his own humanity. The parable, too, offers a strong critique of thinking that the meaning and worth of our lives is measured simply in material and economic terms. It recalls us to a sense of ethical responsibility towards one another that belongs to the true meaning of human life. We don’t live only for ourselves. We live for one another but only in living for God whose life is given for us. In other words, our relation to God conditions our relationships with one another. Being mindful of the one leads to our being mindful of one another.

The strong sense of the ethical in the parables of Jesus is about the love of God and the love of neighbour; they are intimately and essentially intertwined. To ignore one is to ignore the other and to find ourselves bereft of all that is good. Thinking that our good is to be found in our material well-being, “clothed in purple and fine linen” and “far[ing] sumptuously every day” turns out to be our undoing because it negates the common good of our humanity. Thus, our indifference to one another is just as destructive of ourselves as using one another for our own ends. Both belong to the failure to attend to the teachings that belong to religion and education.