Thursday, September 11, 2008

The Rich Man and Lazarus, Part 19 of 28

Text: Luke 16: 19-31

IDEA: There is spiritual as well as material inequality.

PURPOSE: To get listeners to understand that it is a poor trade to gain the whole world and lose their eternal souls.

Let me read you a story. It’s a parable that tells us about what happens after death. That grabs our attention. All of us have wondered what, if anything, lies beyond the grave. But this story does more than satisfy our curiosity. While it answers a few of our questions about what lies beyond the funeral home, the story may also make us very uneasy. It’s a story about two men, two destinies and five brothers. But it is also a story that talks about us. That’s unsettling.

It’s important to remember that this parable came from the lips of Jesus. Philosophers, scholars, theologians may speculate what, if anything, lies beyond the grave. But that it all it is. Speculation. But Jesus doesn’t speculate. He is the One who “came from God and went back to God.” Jesus is just as much at home in the realm of the unseen as the seen. He is as familiar with what lies beyond the curtain of death as you and I are with what is here now.

If you shrug off the teaching of this parable as absurd, remember it was spoken by the one person who is Wisdom itself. If you dismiss it as heartless and cruel, then keep in mind that it was spoken by the Savior who hung on the spikes of a cross because He loves us very, very much. These are the words of Jesus.

If you were merely listening to a story that I had made up, you would be shrewd to be skeptical. After all, what do I know? But Jesus is too wise to be mistaken and too honest to deceive us. When He had his last conversation with His disciples just before He went to His execution, He said to them, “Let not your heart be troubled. In my Father’s house are many mansions. If it were not so, I would have told you.” What He was saying, of course, was “I would not allow you to believe what is false, even though it made you feel comfortable. I would not allow you to rest on a lie, even though it might seem harmless. I tell you about my Father’s house, not because it feeds the deepest wishes of your heart, but because it is really, actually true.”

Jesus won’t lie to us even if a lie would make us feel good. He certainly wouldn’t lie to us to upset us. So by listening to this parable we can learn much about the afterlife, and even about our present lives, that is true.

The story is a drama in three acts. The first scene gives us a glimpse into a typical day of two men who lived in the same community. In fact, they lived next door to one another. Jesus simply sketches the scene without commenting on the character of either man. The first man was phenomenally wealthy. As you approach his home, it resembles a lovely palace. You enter it through a huge ornamental portico. Inside, the rooms are hung with the finest tapestries, and the rugs on the floor are the choicest art of an oriental loom. There are courts of breathtaking beauty where water sprays from silver faucets and sings its lovely music.

Today, like every day, there is a banquet going on inside this great mansion. The elite of the town are there as invited guests. The host, the owner of the magnificent dwelling, receives each one graciously. He is the best dressed of anyone in the group. He is cultured, refined, elegant, and rich. In fact, that’s all we really know about him. He was rich. We know nothing about his friends, his contributions, or for that matter, even his conspicuous vices. Undoubtedly, he was admired, even envied, in the community not because of who he was but because of what he had.

His house, his wardrobe, his table reflect his enormous wealth. Everything shows his impeccable taste. In fact there’s only one blot on the beauty of this scene. At the outer gate of this palatial home there lies a bundle of rags. If we bother to look we see the rags stir a bit. It’s a sick beggar shifting to make himself less miserable on the cobblestones. Someone had thrown him at the entrance of the rich man’s home, and he lies there the object of the sneering contempt of the passersby. The rags really don’t cover him. His back is a mass of untreated sores. They are the result of some skin disease resulting from chronic malnutrition. He is constantly hungry.

If you glanced back at the people eating at the rich man’s table you would notice that they don’t use knives or forks or napkins. The guests eat with their hands, wiping their fingers on crusts of bread which are afterward discarded.

Those crusts of bread used as napkins were the diet of the poor man. The mere sight of the garbage from the rich man’s table brings saliva to his mouth.

No one pays much attention to the beggar. His only companions are dogs, scavengers of the streets. They sit about him on their haunches and lick his sores. The animals are starved and friendless, but at least those dogs have the others in their pack. The poor man is alone. He sits there dehumanized, his dignity gone.

Notice that Jesus does not condemn the rich man because he is rich or because he eats well or sports a lavish wardrobe. Nor does Jesus plant a halo on the beggar’s head because he sits on the street in filth and sickness. He simply puts the scene before us without comment. We are forced to look at these two men. Physically, they exist next to one another. In their lifestyles, of course, they are far apart. One is healthy, and the other is sick. One is wealthy and the other is a beggar. One eats sumptuously every day; the other exists on the scraps thrown from the others table.

Underline the fact that the beggar sat at the gate of the rich man’s home. That means that the poor man was the wealthy man’s responsibility. He was the rich man’s opportunity. I don’t know what responsibility lay at the gate of the rich man across town, but the responsibility for this sick beggar is clear. The call for help was there every day. Here was a chance for the man of means, a great opportunity. Sitting at his gate was a safety vault in which he could have made a deposit for eternity.

But he missed it. He was too busy with his lavish lifestyle. It’s not that he was cruel to him. He didn’t call the police and have him driven away from his door. It wasn’t that he did anything to harm the beggar. He just left him alone. The rich man had amassed a fortune, and he didn’t do it thinking about some poor wretch sitting at his doorstep.

But here was one thing that this poor man possessed that the rich man did not. Something so obvious that you can easily miss it. Something so small that it might not seem to matter. The poor man had a name. His name is, “Lazarus.” Since he is the only character in any of Jesus stories who was given a name, that must be significant. If you think about it, you only need a name if you are known to somebody. To call someone by name distinguishes that person from the masses of men and women. The waitress in a restaurant, the cabin attendant in the airplane, the fellow who shines your shoes may touch you, serve you, be next to you, but you don’t know them. You don’t even know their names. When you speak to them by name, they become people.

A name makes us significant. To call the beggar by name, Lazarus, meant that he mattered. If you remember the opening to the comedy, “Cheers,” you probably remember the song that introduced it. The great thing about that Boston bar was that “Everybody knows your name.” A name relates us to others. To know someone’s name means that we have separated that individual from the masses of other people around us.

Notice, too, that the rich man in Jesus' parable is given no name. (Over the years people have tried to give him a name. Sometimes he is called Dives, but that is simply the Latin word for rich.) Actually he has no name. That doesn’t mean that he had a blank space on his birth certificate. His mother and father knew his name. The people in his city knew his name. But in this story that Jesus told, this wealthy man who had everything doesn’t have a name. He was just rich. That’s all. He is a nameless, faceless millionaire.

But the poor man has a name. Most of the people in the community would not have known it or even cared to know it. To them he was a nameless beggar. But someone knew him personally and in spite of his condition cared about him. The name “Lazarus” tells us who that person was. The name means “God is my helper.” It was God who knew the beggar personally, and in spite of his condition, God cared about him.

The name “Lazarus,” “he whom God helps,” tells us something else about that man. A destitute man like this might have nursed bitterness and envy. He may have sat outside the gate of the rich man’s home plotting revenge. Like many people in his condition, he might have cursed God and blamed God for his misery. But by calling the man “Lazarus” Jesus indicates that this poor man did none of these things. In spite of his sickness and poverty, he was a man of faith. That’s the kind of man or woman that God values, folks whose hard times have not brought bitterness and resentment or self-pity, but faith.

That’s the opening act. Here are two men at the opposite of any social scale you would construct. In this parable, one man has massive wealth but no identity; the other chap has nothing but a name. He is known personally to God. Now ask yourself an obvious question. Which of these two men would you have chosen to be? The Pharisees to whom Jesus told this story were lovers of money so it isn’t hard to decide the character they would identify with in the story. Or the people who buy into the “health and wealth” gospel would clearly have made their choice.

But as you hear the story where are you? Which you have rather been? A person of wealth or a person of faith? There is, you see, such a thing as spiritual inequality. It is every bit as pronounced as material inequality. The purpose of this story about life after death is to make us think of life before death. Very often rich people are spiritual paupers, and poor people are spiritually rich. Jesus said, “Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” And "what good is it for someone to gain the whole world and yet lose his whole soul?"

So this parable which lifts the curtain to what lies beyond death isn’t really about the future at all. It’s about now, today, the world where you and I live and about beggars sitting at our gates, and about faith, and about whether we have any, and about whether or not God knows us, and whether or not we have a relationship with him, and whether God knows our name.