(Another challenging liberal sermon!)

Sept. 30, 2007
What Will Convince Us?
By Harry T. Cook
Luke 16: 19-31
The heat is on. You can feel it already from the rich man’s side of the great abyss. If According to Luke were to be adapted as the libretto for a Wagner opera, this passage would be its “Götterdamerung.” It is the culmination of all Luke’s commentary on economic and social injustice which theme is first sounded in Chapter 1 verse 52: He hath put down the mighty from their thrones, and hath exalted the humble and meek. With the rich man in the pit and the miserable beggar now cradled in the bosom of Abraham, the vision of Magnificat has been realized in pretty stark terms.

Luke begins the parable with a graphic description of two lives lived side by side in time and place. All that separated those two lives was a door — the rich man behind it dressed in the purple and fine linen of royalty or near-royalty at a table groaning with food.

Just outside the door — but surely out of the view of those inside — is another human being living under quite different circumstances. He waits by the door for a handout. He is unclean. His body is covered with open sores. He is hungry. Here Luke uses the same language as he has only one chapter earlier used of the prodigal son. The prodigal shared his dinner with the pigs, or they with him. Lazarus must share his with vagrant dogs that also wish to lick his sores.

This picture cannot remain unaltered. And so Luke alters it. He has the great equalizer alter it. Both Lazarus and the rich man die. In the moment both are dead, they are for that instant finally equal. Not a point to miss. Also not to miss: Luke gives the beggar a name El-zar in the original tongue (or “God comforts”) while he leaves Mr. Big nameless.

After a lifetime, one presumes, of privilege on the one hand and abject destitution on the other, both he and Lazarus are reduced to corpses. Under the flowing purple robes is the same decomposing flesh that is under the beggar’s tattered rags. Ah, but now justice must roll down like waters to right the imbalance of plenty and want. This monstrous grievance must be redressed.

And so the ever-imaginative Luke looks beyond what must have been a common sight in the First Century urban world — the beggar at the stoop — to a fantastic vista taking in both Inferno and Paradiso in one broad sweep. As to the former, Luke may have had in mind the subterranean garbage dumps of Jerusalem that burned by night and day year after year and gave hell a graphic referent. The dumps were called Gehenna.

One might expect to find the beggar in Inferno and the unnamed rich guy in Paradiso, if indeed the saying To those who have, more will be given; and to those who have nothing, even that will be taken away is true. I’ll bet that the rich man in Luke’s imagination was a good man who paid his taxes to both temple and city hall, and not really a deliberately cruel Ebenezer Scrooge type. He just didn’t pay attention.

Now he wants to be in the bosom of Abraham, too, and is being denied. Realist that he is, he knows he’s sunk, so he asks that an emissary be sent to his brothers to keep them from the same fate. The answer is: It’s all in the Book. They have Moses and the prophets; let them hear them. Much good did the rich man’s lessons from the Book do him. So he says, “Send someone from the dead. That’ll get their attention.”

The answer: “I don’t think so. If they don’t heed Moses and the prophets, they won’t heed a messenger from the grave, either.”

Is it not astounding that Luke could write so much church history before there was much church history to write? Luke absolutely nailed generations of latter-day Christians who have had Moses and the prophets in the Book all this time, not to mention the profound ethical teacher named Jesus who was said by his early followers actually to have risen from the dead.

Luke was right. None of that has really gotten the attention of enough people on the inside of the door to the wretched state of those on its outside. The dichotomy of Lazarus and the rich man endures to this day, perhaps in different aspects but with the same effect.

In the run-up to a possible heresy trial, I may soon be examined by higher-ups in the diocese as to why I neither believe nor teach the doctrine of the resurrection of Jesus. Among other things I will say is that it clearly hasn’t made that much of a difference to Christians and Christianity across the sweep of two millennia.

I will quote Luke as he imagined Abraham saying to the rich man across the abyss: If they do not listen to Moses and the prophets, neither will they be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.

Exactly.

© Copyright 2007, Harry T. Cook. All rights reserved. This article may not be used or reproduced without proper credit.