There was a rich man who was dressed in purple and fine
linen and who feasted sumptuously every day. And at his gate lay a poor man
named Lazarus, covered with sores, who longed to satisfy his hunger with what
fell from the rich man’s table… [Luke 16:19ff]
…and what follows is the tale of
the rich man and Lazarus the very poor man.
They both die. The rich man is
tormented in Hades because of his life of self, while the poor man, it says,
lies in Abraham’s bosom. This is what
Jews call a midrash, a graphic commentary on the law, and to me it reads like a
cautionary synagogue tale. The rich man
says well, if you can’t send Lazarus with some water for me, at least send him
to warn my brothers about the perils of wealth. And Abraham replies: They have Moses and the prophets… if they don’t heed Moses and the
prophets, they’re not going change whatever happens.
Now, in order to have informed
and credible faith we need space to ask questions. The day is surely gone when faith was taken
to mean virtuous subservience to biblical or any other authority. And some questions certainly do arise about
this Jewish tale. Did Jesus actually
tell this story? It seems to be uncomfortably
out of step with the general spirit of his teaching. This tale is found only in Luke. There’s not a hint of it elsewhere. But it does make sense in the Jewish context…
Abraham’s bosom… fortunes being reversed… Moses and the prophets… If Jesus told this tale, then perhaps he was wryly
recounting a story they all knew anyway as Jews.
In the Jewish sense, Moses and
the prophets, the Law and the Prophets, in Hebrew the Torah and the Nevi’im… are
the two pillars of Jewish love and response to God. The Law of Moses and the teachings of the prophets
regularly warn that wealth carries obligations.
You care for the widow, the orphan and the stranger. In the Law this is not negotiable. You are not to be scrupulous to harvest the
grain from the corners or right to the edges of your fields – you leave grain
for the poor. Every seven years you
remit all debts. Moses and the prophets
were quite enough to alert this rich bloke to the peril he was always in, and
they will suffice to warn his rich brothers.
That is the Jewish teaching in this tale.
Jesus says rather more, however,
although you don’t find it echoed in this story. He himself identified himself with the flawed
and the failed, the sinners and the needy.
He bridged what the story calls the great
gulf fixed. He directly challenged
the religious élite and the power of wealth.
He taught it is a matter, not of social status, privilege and power, but
of the heart… Where your heart is, there
your treasure will be also… to invert his equation. Our life and prayer are a
bridging of what that story calls the
great chasm fixed, between us and them, between privileged and needy,
between power and poverty, between appearance and reality, between safety and
love – to say nothing of black and white, male and female, deserving and
undeserving... We can’t live, as it
were, on the other side of a great gulf from other people. So far as it lies with us, which normally
isn’t very far because we are not among the great and good, in our silence and
stillness we consent to the changes in us brought by the Spirit of Jesus. And our hearts are changed, and to that
extent our world is changed.
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