26th Sunday in Ordinary Time

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

VIDEO

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 the 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 in 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 our hearts so that we may love
those who seem to us most unworthy of 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.

26th Sunday in Ordinary Time

Readings: Amos 6:1a, 4-7; 1 Timothy 6:11-16; Luke 16:19-31

VIDEO

Luke’s Gospel contains many 
of Jesus’ most memorable parables:
the unjust steward and the rich man,
the prodigal son and his sullen older brother,

the man fallen among thieves 
and the Samaritan who helps him.
But today’s Gospel reading is the only parable
in which a character is given a name: Lazarus.
Why might this be the case?

The name “Lazarus” is Aramaic, 
which was the language spoken by Jesus,
and is a form of the Hebrew name Eleazar,
which means “God saves.”
So it is certainly a fitting name for the poor man
who receives from God a heavenly reward.
But Jesus could also have given symbolic names
to other characters in his parables.
The shepherd who goes seeking the lost sheep
could have been named Adriel,
which means “flock of God,”
or the prodigal son’s older brother
could have been named Mara,
which means “bitter.”
But Jesus chooses not to give them names,
perhaps so that we would be more inclined to see them 
as representative kinds or types of people
with whom we might more easily identify.

Yet Lazarus is named.
Perhaps more significant 
than the meaning of his name 
is the simple fact that he has a name at all.
For to have a name is to have an identity
that is more than simply being
a kind or type of person.
To have a particular name is to be unique
and not reducible to an identity category 
like “shepherd” or “older brother.”
To be an individual person and not simply a type
is to be recognized as capable of acting in ways
that are not “typical” or “predicable”
but are surprising and free and often delightful.
To have a name is to become irreplaceable.

This is important in the parable
because the rich man’s sin 
is that he fails to see Lazarus as anything more
than one more poor person he steps over
on his way to another sumptuous meal 
in his purple garments and fine linen.
Though he seems to know Lazarus’s name,
this does not lead him to see Lazarus 
as an irreplaceable individual,
but simply as one more poor person
who is no concern of his,
unless it is to be his servant.

The funny thing is,

by his actions the rich man shows himself

to be nothing more than one more rich person,

behaving in typical rich-person ways:
stepping over the poor as he proceeds
to indulge his appetites and satisfy his desires.
It is the rich man who is locked into actions 
that are typical and predictable,
who has reduced himself to a mere category type
and, in a sense, made himself replaceable,
since there are many of the same type
who are ready to step into his shoes 
and act in the same way.
And when both he and Lazarus die,
and Lazarus is in the bosom of Abraham
and the rich man is in the fires of hell,
the rich man seems unable
to break out of that category type.
Even as he begs for mercy he still presumes
that the poor man should act as his servant,
bringing him water to slake his thirst 
and taking messages to his brothers.
His punishment is unrelenting
because he cannot cease acting in the way
that led him to his sad destiny.

In the Christian tradition, 
the rich man comes to be referred to as Dives,
which might seem like a name,
but is simply the Latin word for “rich.”
His individual identity has been completely lost
and he is nothing more 
than a parody of a human being.
Perhaps this is what hell is:
to cease being an irreplaceable individual 
with a name known by God,
to lose one’s capacity to act in ways 
that are surprising and free and delightful,
to be condemned to following the script
that we once chose for ourselves
but now determines our every action.

Of course, Jesus does not tell this parable
simply to inform us about the afterlife.
He tells it to get us to examine our own lives now.
As Abraham says to the rich man,
we don’t need a miraculous visitation 
from the realm of the dead
to tell us what God thinks of our self-indulgence
and our neglect of the poor.
We, like the rich man and his kind,
have Moses and the prophets,
and the prophet Amos says to us this day,
“Woe to the complacent in Zion!”
Woe to those reclining 
on fancy beds and couches.
Woe to those drinking fine wine 
and getting spa treatments.
Woe to those who see 
the poor one at their gate
as simply a category of human being
that can be dismissed and ignored
as a “panhandler” 
or “welfare queen” 
or “illegal immigrant,”
and not as someone with a name and a story
and an irreplaceable God-given identity,
an identity that we ignore at our peril.

Even more, Jesus is asking us
to look at ourselves and to see
if we have chosen to live our lives in such a way
that we have reduced ourselves to a mere category-type
and lost our capacity to act in ways 
that are surprising and free and delightful.
Do I simply conform to the expectations 
of my social class
or my political ideology
or my generational cohort
or my racial or ethnic identity,
rather than letting God call me by my unique name,
calling me out of any class or ideology or cohort or identity
other than that of “child of God,”
the irreplaceable brother or sister of Jesus
and of all those for whom he died?

Christ is calling us this day
to let ourselves be named by God,
and to learn the names by which he calls
the irreplaceable ones whom we would ignore.
Let this call give us hope that God, 
“the King of kings and Lord of lords,
who alone has immortality, 
who dwells in unapproachable light,”
will, in his boundless mercy.
have mercy on us all.