Luke 16:19-31
Reflecting
God’s Upside-Down World
James Sledge November
6, 2022
How many of you have ever given money to
your college for some sort of building campaign? I was thinking about that
topic, and I googled a map of a local school, George Mason. That map had lots
of buildings with people’s names on them, Carrow Hall, David King Hall, Fenwick
Library, Peterson Hall, and Harris Theater to name a few. There was also an
EagleBank Arena.
The Rich Man and Lazarus,
woodcut by Kreg Yingst
I know very little about George Mason, but if it is like many other universities some of these buildings were named because of money or after a benefactor. I’m certain that’s the case with EagleBank Arena.
Most of us don’t have our names on buildings at universities or hospitals, and that’s also because of money, the relatively smaller amounts that most of us give. You need to be truly wealthy, big time rich to get your name on a building.
That is why we should know something is out of whack in this parable Jesus tells before he is more than a line into it. “There was a rich man who was dressed in purple and fine linen and who feasted sumptuously every day. And there was a poor man named Lazarus…” There was a rich man and a poor man named Lazarus.
That’s not how it’s supposed to work. If Daniel Snyder got into an altercation with a homeless person named John Doe, I can assure you the headlines will not read, “John Doe Roughed Up in Altercation with Rich Man!” We all know the headline will say, “Daniel Snyder Accosted by Homeless Man!”
But Jesus’ parable gets this backwards because things are completely different in the Kingdom of God. Everything is turned upside down and inside out, letting us know that the things the world values are not the things God values, and warning all of us who have bought into the world’s way of doing things.
This parable can be a bit troubling for those of us who are well off, and so people often assume that the rich man has done something terrible to warrant his punishment. Yet the parable is conspicuous in how little it tells us about this rich man. We are not told that he is particularly heartless or cruel, or that he mistreats Lazarus. For all we know, this rich man tithes and then some at his church, is a huge donor to charities, and even sponsors a Little League team.
The parable doesn’t tell us much about Lazarus either. We’re not told that he was a particularly good and noble fellow who fell on hard times. For all we know he had an alcohol problem and had lost every job he’d ever had because he showed up late and hungover.
All we know about these two is that one is rich, Lazarus is poor and sick, and their paths crossed. The rich man had occasion to see Lazarus from time to time, just as we all have occasion to see homeless people on the streets, just as we all have passed by that person at the traffic light begging for money.
That’s all the parable tells us, and then the two are both dead. Lazarus is whisked away to be with Abraham and the rich man to Hades. And if we don’t supply our own assumptions about the rich man being particularly bad and Lazarus good, we are left to draw some troubling conclusions.
The most obvious is that rich people are punished and poor people rewarded. And before we dismiss such a suggestion out of hand, we might want to remember some other words from Luke’s gospel where Jesus says, “…none of you can become my disciples unless you give up all your possessions.” Or “You cannot serve God and wealth.” Or “Blessed are the poor, for yours is the kingdom of God…But woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation.”
Certainly Luke’s gospel does say that God gives preferential treatment to the poor, but the parable does give some wiggle room for those of us who hope for something other than a blanket indictment of the rich. The story tells us that Lazarus was in plain sight of this rich man, and there, I think, lies the key to understanding this parable.
Being poor is a sure-fire way to become invisible and anonymous. We see lots of news coverage of rising crime, but rarely do we hear about crime against homeless persons. When I’m at a traffic light and there’s someone with a sign asking for money, often I avoid making eye contact with the person, in a sense, trying not to see them. And by many measures, the better off people become, the more invisible those at the bottom become.
Jesus’ parable cast terrible judgment on such blindness. Jesus insists that our world is at odds with the ways of God. In the Kingdom of God, the poor and the outcast and the oppressed are loved and known by name, while those who lived the good life, who lived the American consumerist dream, find themselves anonymous and condemned for turning a blind eye to the poverty and hardship and suffering all around them.
Jesus’ parable sounds rather pessimistic about all this. The rich man asks to warn his brothers, but Jesus says they should already know, that if they won’t “listen to Moses and the prophets, neither will they be convinced even if someone rises from the dead."
We have Moses and the prophets, and we have Jesus who rose from the dead. Yet we have constructed a world that looks quite a bit like the one in Jesus’ parable, a world where the rich feast sumptuously and the poor and homeless suffer in invisible anonymity.
But we who are in Christ are called to bear witness to a different possibility. In the constitution of the Presbyterian Church (USA), two of the six central purposes of the church are “the promotion of social righteousness,” along with “the exhibition of the Kingdom of Heaven to the world.”[1] We are to point to, model, and work for a world that looks like the new day, the new beloved community that Jesus proclaimed.
In the book of Acts, it tells how the first Christian converts formed a remarkable community where people shared their resources and there was no one in need. Those first Christians are part of the cloud of witnesses who went before us, the cloud of witnesses that we are connected to by the Spirit when we seek to live out our faith in the world, when we point to, model, and work for God’s new day, God’s new beloved community.
Joining the cloud of witnesses invites us to shift our priorities away from those of the world to those of Jesus and the new day he proclaims. And we show our priorities by how we spend our time, by how we put our talents to use, and by how we use our money. In fact, there may be no clearer window into the shape of our faith than how we use what we have.
But I want to make sure you don’t hear me saying that you must change your priorities, you must use your gifts in the correct way in order to get on God’s good side because that’s simply not true. You are already on God’s good side simply because that’s who God is, a God of unconditional love and grace.
Shifting our priorities, using our time and talent and money to point to, model, and work for God’s new day are about learning to live as God’s children. They’re about becoming more like our sibling Jesus, about learning to reflect the image of God in our lives. They are about discovering that our fullest and deepest experience of being human comes not through the ways of the world, but through the strange and peculiar ways of Jesus.
The world desperately needs more people whose lives allow Christ to show through, who live by the crazy, upside-down ways of God’s new day. So let us join that great cloud of witnesses. Let us take our place alongside the beloved children of God.
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