26th Sunday in Ordinary Time

Readings: Amos 6:1a, 4-7; 1 Tim 6:11-16; Lk 16:19-31

Where did the rich man go wrong?
How did he end up in torment?
It doesn’t seem to be simply that he was rich.
It doesn’t even seem to be that he 
was self-indulgent and gluttonous,
dressing in purple and fine linen 
and feasting sumptuously every day.
And, at the root of things, 
it doesn’t even seem to be
that he failed in his duty to help Lazarus,
for behind this duty was a deeper call
and so a deeper failure:
a call to imagine himself as Lazarus,
to imagine himself out of his luxury
and into Lazarus’s poverty,
to imagine himself as hungry and helpless.
Though Lazarus lay at his gate,
he failed to imagine his way across
the seeming chasm that stretched between them.

We tend to associate imagination with unreality:
flights of fancy that relieve the pressure
of the drudgery of the real world.
And sometimes imagining ourselves as another
can be to indulge in a fantasy:
myself as someone
fabulously wealthy
or twenty pounds lighter,
or with a full head of hair.
This sort of imagining can be either
an innocuous diversion from reality
or a dangerous delusion.

But there is another way of imagining
of ourselves as another:
to imagine myself as that co-worker
that I and everyone else finds annoying,
or to imagine myself as someone 
whose life and experiences have led them
to a set of religious or political convictions
that I find odious,
or to imagine myself as a person 
who must live with a series of bad choices
and who cannot seem to get their life together,
or to imagine myself as one
whom fortune has not favored
and whose life is scarred by tragedy,
or to imagine myself as someone
of a different race or class or gender.
Here I imagine myself as another
from whom I am separated by some gap,
a stranger who stands on the opposite side 
of a yawning chasm of separation.

The philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch 
wrote, “We use our imagination 
not to escape the world but to join it.” 
She distinguished between 
the kind of fantasy
that takes me out of the real world
and into a world in which 
I am rich, skinny, and hirsute,
and a use of the imagination
that opens me up to what is real,
an imagination that breaks me out 
of the confines of what Murdoch calls
“the fat, relentless ego,”
and reconnects me to those 
whom I would see as other.
Imagination is what makes love possible,
for, as Murdoch says,
“Love is the extremely difficult realization 
that something other than oneself is real.”

The rich man cannot love Lazarus 
because he cannot see Lazarus,
even though he lies at his gate;
and he cannot see Lazarus
because he cannot imagine himself 
standing where Lazarus stands—
one perhaps who has made bad choices
or whom fortune has not favored,
one who longs to eat mere scraps,
one who stands on the opposite side
of what the theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar
calls “the screaming chasm between rich and poor.”

St. John Chrysostom, in the fourth century,
said regarding this parable of Lazarus and the rich man
that the rich man “had within his grasp so great a treasure, 
such an opportunity to win salvation,
[but] he ignored the poor man day after day.”
We might at first think that Chrysostom is speaking
of the rich man’s wealth as the treasure
with which he might have purchased salvation 
by using it for good.
But in fact, it is Lazarus himself 
who is the treasure.
The treasure is other 
who stands across the chasm—
the chasm between rich and poor,
between white and black,
between citizen and stranger,
between Jew and Greek,
slave and free,
male and female—
beckoning me to come out of my self
and into the mystery of love,
if only I can imagine myself
on the other side of that chasm,
if I can only see the treasure 
who lies at my gate.

But, alas, the rich man’s imagination fails,
and he finds himself in eternal torment. 
His torment is eternal because he remains locked
within the confines of his fat, relentless ego.
Even now he can’t see Lazarus as anything more
than an extension of himself:
one who might quench his thirst
or carry a message to his family,
a family whom he probably also sees 
as just one more extension of himself.
And so he hears, “between you and us 
a great chasm has been fixed.”
The rich man’s fate gives narrative form 
to Luke’s version of the Beatitudes,
which come with accompanying woes.
In the afterlife the chasms of our world—
between the rich and the poor,
the hungry and the full,
the weeping and the laughing—
are eternally fixed and the poles are reversed,
so that the poor are rich and the rich are poor,
the hungry are full and the full are hungry,
the weeping laugh and the laughing weep.
And those who have failed to find themselves
in the poor and hungry and weeping
are left to dwell eternally in their separation.

Of course, the depiction of the afterlife in the parable
is not a prediction, but a warning and an invitation—
an invitation to imagine 
not simply what might lie beyond death,
but what it might be like to be someone else,
to break out of the confines of our ego,
to be saved from our separation.
The conclusion of the parable suggests
that Moses and the Prophets are given to us
to expand our imaginations.
Their words are given to us an invitation
to see ourselves is the stranger and alien,
the poor and the weak,
the annoying and the odious.

But how can we do this?
The ego is a prison we ourselves construct,
but which we are powerless to deconstruct.
Its construction is the work of sin in us,
but its deconstruction is the work of grace.
The Holy Spirit comes to us as the fire 
that enlightens our imaginations,
melts the boundaries of our ego,
and shows to us the reality 
of the other who lies at our gate. 
The Spirit knits us together into one body,
giving us imaginations that are the ligaments
binding us together across chasms of difference.
The Spirit illuminates out hearts so that we may love
those who seem to us most unworthy of our love.

Come Holy Spirit,
fill the heart of your faithful,
and kindle in us the fire of your love,
so that God, who is merciful,
might have mercy on us all.