Our Gospel text is a familiar one. It’s another parable from Jesus. This one is positively cinematic. The details are vivid and, frankly, terrifying. This is a parable that nightmares are made of.
Before we get to the characters and the plot, who is watching this movie? Who is Jesus’s audience? It’s not entirely clear, though the few verses that are sandwiched in between this morning’s text and the text from last week give us a clue. Jesus has just spent time talking with the Pharisees, those religious leaders, who were lovers of money. Jesus has told them that they cannot serve both God and money. Verse 14 tells us that the Pharisees ridiculed Jesus for making that assertion. They just don’t get it and so, as he often did, Jesus told them a story to help them see it better.
We have 3 characters in this movie: “a rich man,” a poor man named Lazarus, and Father Abraham. The wardrobe and makeup departments have been hard at work here to show us the chasm of wealth and circumstance between the rich man and Lazarus. Because being “rich” is not just about how much money is in his bank account, but a host of other advantages that he has: housing, food, education, good health and access to health care, status, respect, power.
The rich man is dressed in purple and fine linen. We don’t know what exactly Lazarus is wearing, but I’m imagining torn rags that can show his open sores. The rich man lives in a gated community; Lazarus is without a home, laying outside the gate. The rich man feasts lavishly not just on special occasions but every day; Lazarus is hoping for scraps to fall to satisfy his hunger. The rich man is the consumer. And Lazarus is being consumed. Even the dogs are licking at his sores.
I don’t think any of these details are accidental. Neither do I think it is an accident that the rich man remains anonymous and the poor man is given a proper name – Lazarus. In fact, this is the only parable that Jesus tells in which he names one of his characters. The name catches our attention, in part because as Bible readers, we are familiar with the name Lazarus, from John’s Gospel – as a beloved friend of Jesus, whom Jesus raised from the dead in another very cinematic story. But we have no reason to think that this is the same Lazarus.
As he so often does, Jesus flips the script here. Usually, the rich and powerful are the names that we know. I won’t name names, but I’m sure as you sit here, you can think of some “rich man” characters in our world today. But in Jesus’s story, he doesn’t name names. Maybe because he wants to draw our attention to Lazarus. And maybe also, for his audience of Pharisees, if he started naming names, the list would be very long.
But naming Lazarus does draw our eye to him. He’s in the spotlight. We see him as a living, breathing, hurting child of God. We see him and his needs. We think about how someone, likely his parent or parents, gave him that name. We understand Lazarus in the particular, rather than the general.
It’s also harder to ignore or not see someone when we know his or her name. Not impossible, surely. After all, Jesus implies that the rich man knew Lazarus’s name. When the rich man is tormented in Hades, he uses his name – he asks that Lazarus be sent to him to serve him. It seems like the punishment the rich man has received still hasn’t taught him the lesson that he is called to serve, not to be served. The rich man is still blind to his own selfishness and to the needs of others. He sees himself as superior and Lazarus as inferior. Perhaps he even rejects the humanity of Lazarus.
Names are powerful instruments in the process of bringing us from blindness into sight. We as a country are in a time of opening our eyes, of waking up to centuries of oppression. You may be familiar with something called the 1619 Project, launched recently by the New York Times. It’s an effort to reframe the birth of America, not in 1776 but in 1619 – the date when the first Africans were brought to colonial America – Virginia specifically – as slaves. Two pirate ships – the White Lion and the Treasurer arrived within a few days of each other in August 1619 at Point Comfort on the James River, not far from present day Hampton, Va. And one of those people who was kidnapped from her native Angola and disembarked in Virginia after months of harrowing travel, was named Angela. As some have remarked, it’s doubtful that that was the name her parents gave her but rather one that her kidnappers named her. But it is still a name, a way to particularize an evil that is beyond comprehension. We can begin to see better when we name the people through the centuries who have been oppressed by evil and injustice.
Over the past 10 weeks, I’ve hosted a series for the BJC podcast on Christian nationalism. In episode 7, I talked with author and historian Jemar Tisby, who has written a book called The Color of Compromise: The Truth About the American Church’s Complicity in Racism. In the book, Tisby tells a number of stories of individuals who were harmed by racism. In our conversation for the podcast about white Christian nationalism, I asked Tisby to highlight a few of those stories. And the first one he told was about Jonathan Edwards – a rich man whose name we know. Edwards is known as one of America’s greatest theologians. He was a revivalist preacher in the 18th century in Massachusetts. One detail about Edwards’s life that has often been overlooked was he was also a slaveholder. Tisby said, “Here we are praising this man’s theology in some circles, and yet his theological anthropology didn’t tell him that you can’t make another person into property.” We actually know the name of the first person he enslaved: Venus. In our conversation, Jemar Tisby really emphasized this point: It really gripped me, he said. It’s one thing to say that this person enslaved other people; it’s another thing to say that this person enslaved a young black girl named Venus.
I think Tisby’s point is much like Jesus’s here: It’s easier to humanize, to exploit, to oppress, and to perpetuate humanization, exploitation and oppression when we think of people without names, without families and stories and identity. Jesus won’t let us do that with this story. His name is Lazarus.
There is a third main character in this parable that we haven’t gotten to yet: It’s Father Abraham– the patriarch of the Jewish people. When Lazarus dies, he is taken by angels to the bosom of Abraham. Jesus has gone topsy-turvy on us yet again. The last shall be the first; Blessed are you who are poor for yours is the kingdom of God. Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you will be filled. The rich man’s fate also reminds us of Jesus’s warnings from the 6th chapter of Luke: woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation; woe to you who are full now, for you will be hungry.
The rich man begs Father Abraham for deliverance from his agony but for him it is too late. And so next he begs for his brothers – five of them – that they be warned before it is too late for him. He asks that Abraham send Lazarus to warn them. Again, this rich man really doesn’t get it – he still sees Lazarus as a pawn for his own use.
But Abraham rejects that plea too with this zinger: “They have Moses and the Prophets. They should listen to them.” This is one of those moments when Jesus lays down a real show stopper. Because recall that Jesus is really speaking to the Pharisees with this story. The Pharisees knew the Jewish law as well as Jesus did. They know what they need to do.
The phrase “Moses and the Prophets” can also be read as the law and the prophets. That might ring in your ear because we hear it in Jesus’s 2-part love commandment. Jesus said the greatest commandment is to “Love the Lord your God with all heart, and all your soul and all your mind.” And then Jesus adds a twist, another way to see that commandment in our earthly context, with a “second one like it.” You shall love your neighbor like yourself.” On these 2 commandments, Jesus said, hang all the law and the prophets.
We can understand the story of the Rich Man and Lazarus in contrast to another well-known parable from Jesus: That is the Parable of the Samaritan, the story of love as seeing plus action. While the Rich Man shows us what happens to love to when we don’t see the humanity of others, the Samaritan shows us what it means not only to see the needs of others but to do something about it.
In that parable from the 10th Chapter of Luke, we have characters much like the rich man in the priest and the Levite. We also have a character like Lazarus: a naked, beaten, half-dead man on the side of the road. Like the rich man, the priest and the Levite both technically see the man, but they pass by on the other side of the road. But the Samaritan, the Gospel tells us, came near him and when he saw him, he was moved with pity. He sees this man as a fellow child of God. He recognizes his needs and he attends to them – pouring oil and wine on his wounds and then bandaging them; putting him on his donkey; taking him to an inn and paying for his care. Showing him mercy.
We live in a time and a place where we have a lot of Rich Men and we have a lot of Lazaruses. If we are honest with ourselves, we likely have much more in common with the Rich Man than with Lazarus, at least as it comes to our resources and advantages in life. Just our status as American means we are rich by worldly standards. But even in our own communities, in this very city, we know that there are Lazaruses laying by the gate, hoping for the scraps from our extravagance to satisfy their hunger. Sometimes, maybe often, it is their physical hunger, the need to have healthy food to fuel their bodies. But also their hunger is for a more equitable system where their needs are seen as important as ours. Where Maria has the same opportunity for a quality public education as Mary does. Where Fatima and Mohammed have the freedom to practice their religion, including the freedom not to practice religion, and it is protected with the same attention and vigor as the freedoms given to me and to you. Where Trayvon’s life matters as much as George’s life does.
Tonight, our Jewish brothers and sisters will begin the celebration of Rosh Hashanah – the Head of the Year – the New Year. I’m looking forward to joining my husband Robert and his parents for the service at Temple Emanu-El this evening. According to Reform Judaism, Rosh Hashanah is a time of prayer, self-reflection and repentance; a time to review our actions during the past year as we look for ways to improve ourselves, our communities and our world in the year to come. It ushers in 10 days known as the “Days of Awe,” leading up to Yom Kippur, the highest holy day in Jewish Life and the moment in Jewish time to dedicate mind, body and soul to reconciliation with our fellow human beings, ourselves and God.
In Jesus’s parable, it was too late for the Rich Man. But it wasn’t too late for his five brothers. They had Moses and the Prophets. They knew what they are called to do – to love God and to love their neighbors.
And thanks to this parable that has survived for our hearing today, so it is for all of us. We have yet another opportunity to wake up from our slumber, to turn from blindness to sight, to see Lazarus, to act with mercy.
I’m struck by the timing of all this – that our lectionary would share today’s text with us and Jesus’s call for us to remember what the Lord has commanded of us through the law and the prophets, on the eve of the Jewish New Year. As I join my family tonight and listen to the call of the Shofar to wake up, I will think of this parable from Jesus. I will think about how much like that rich man I am, about all the times that I have stepped over those that I could have helped or passed on the other side of the road. And I will pray that I might really see Lazarus when I encounter him next in my life.
For in this life as followers of Christ, we know that love is seeing our neighbors as fellow Children of God and showing them the mercy that we show ourselves and our closest loved ones. This is the high calling that Jesus has given to each of us. May we love and support each other along the way; may we forgive and ask for forgiveness when we fail; and may we try again.
Amen.