TWENTY-SIXTH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME C

[cappie]

Our God – who is faithful and just, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love – doesn’t work through coercion, shaming, or fear, the Lord knows those methods may produce short-term change. However, in the long run, they generate deep resistance to the freedom and joy and the life that is really life that Jesus offers. Coercion, shaming, and fear work against Jesus’ invitation to transformation, to repentance, to changing our hearts and minds. So instead of seeing these readings as a big warning to those of us who are rich, as some have interpreted Jesus’ parable, the Spirit invites us to “ bestow your grace abundantly upon us,” as our collect says, so that we (maybe)“heirs to the treasures of heaven through Jesus Christ our Lord.”

The tragedy of the Rich Man is less about him burning in Hades and more about the way he had constructed his life to be cut off from reality, from feeling compassion in the face of suffering, from the joy of sharing what we have, from the satisfaction of being able to see dignity and even beauty in the faces of those whom we might instinctually turn away from seeing, like a man with a dog licking his open sores.

Jesus is retelling a classic folktale of his era.   And he uses a classic storytelling technique about an imaginary future to provoke a change in his listeners.

Jesus  regularly uses images of the future to shake us up and help us become more conscious of how we are living now. He speaks about the kingdom of heaven, not as a destination where your soul goes after you die; it is, rather, how God intends this world to be when we have our priorities right and follow God’s will for our lives. Remember that line, “on earth as it is in heaven?”

On the one hand, Jesus’ parable affirms the moral of the folktale: Don’t be like the Rich Man…or else! But, on the other hand, a parable is a parable because there is always more meaning than just the plain sense. So perhaps some of “the more” in this parable is that God’s Kingdom has a special affinity for the least, lost, last, and lonely. And Lazarus certainly is among the least and last, but maybe the Rich Man is among the lost and lonely.

The Rich Man lives behind a wall with a gate. We know very little about him but that he dresses sharply and feasts sumptuously every day. The Rich Man, who is ironically nameless, knew Lazarus by name but didn’t help him.  

Maybe most of us have a little of the Rich Man in us. After all, we’re often glued to our screens, staring at social media or our bank balances or strings of texts related to our family’s emotional drama. All of that buffers us from noticing and being available to what actually is. Charles Taylor, a Catholic philosopher respected both within the academy and the church coined the term the “buffered self.” Taylor contrasts the buffered self with the porous self, a person who is open to the transcendent, to being encountered by reality that may be surprising, uncomfortable, and, of course, beyond our ability to control. With the buffered self, the Holy Spirit works overtime to get our attention, to pull us out of ourselves.

So, to stay with the imagery of the parable, while his death and confinement in Hades might have poked a few holes in the Rich Man’s buffer, I suspect that the chasm between him and Lazarus will remain until he can see the full humanity of Lazarus, until the scope of his concern for others’ wellbeing extends beyond his kin.

But  while his brothers may be so buffered they won’t be able to say “yes” to repentance, to the fullness of God’s grace, to opening themselves to the miracle of someone rising from the dead, hope abounds. Because that chasm that separates the Rich Man and Lazarus in Hades is bridged by the One who spans the chasm between heaven and hell: Jesus. Of course, Jesus came to bring good news to the poor, to the last and lost like Lazarus. And he came to set the captive free, like the Rich Man captive to his wealth, likely lost and lonely, unable to engage reality.

Jesus invites us through this teaching to let our guards down, keep our gates unlocked, our ears unplugged, our eyes wide open, so that our souls may become less buffered and more and more porous to the flow of Spirit’s generosity.