The Unbridgeable Gap (Luke 16:19 - 31)

      A cab driver dies and goes to heaven, and when he gets to the Pearly Gates, St. Peter looks him up in the Big Book and says “Get yourself a silk robe and a golden staff, and go on up into Heaven.”  A preacher’s next in line, and he’s been looking on with great interest – if a cabby gets a silk robe and a golden staff, what would he, a man of God, get?  And St. Peter looks him up in the Big Book, and says “Ok . . . we’ll let you in.  Grab that cotton robe over there and that stick, and you’re in.”  And the preacher’s astonished, and he says “But I’m a man of the cloth. You gave that cab driver a gold staff and a silk robe . . . surely I rate higher than a cabby!”  St Peter just stares at him and says  “Look.  We’re only interested in results around here.  When you preached, people slept.  But when that cabby drove, people prayed.”

      We’ve all heard stories like that, haven’t we?  Stories about folks dying and going to heaven, maybe two nuns and a priest, or a priest and a rabbi . . . and they meet St. Peter at the Pearly Gates, or they run into Aristotle or Plato or Cary Grant, and the point is, we know they’re just stories.  They’re part of our common folk-lore, told mainly for amusement . . . well, in Jesus’ day, there were also folk-tales floating around about what happens after you die, and in today’s parable, Jesus retells one of them, only with a decidedly Christian twist.  And because it is a parable, we can’t draw any conclusions from it about the nature of Hades, even whether it exists or not, or the nature of any punishment, or anything.  It’s a tale told to make a point, and that’s our task today—to ferret out just what that point might be.

      One more thing: as you listen to my retelling of this parable, I invite you to put yourselves in the shoes of the first century people who heard it . . . not the Pharisees to whom it was originally told, but Luke’s audience some fifty years after the crucifixion.  Pretend that you’re in a house church somewhere in Palestine, as Luke reads these words aloud to you, and listen to the story again:

      It proceeds in three acts.  Act One is a tableau, a snapshot of the way things are for the rich man and Lazarus.  The rich man is almost ridiculously well off . . . he’s robed in purple, which was available only to the super-rich, and may indicate he was a member of the Royal family . . . he feasted sumptuously every day, every day was a feast day to him, and you can picture him at his table, stuffed into purple robes and fine linens, stuffed with food so he’s almost bursting at the seams, his whole life is sumptuously stuffed, stuffed, stuffed . . . and in our tableau – like in a warped Christmas pageant – in our tableau, outside the gates that shut out the riff-raff, that close him off from the outside world, lies a poor man named Lazarus, whose very name is evocative, it comes from Eleazar, which means “God helps” . . . and Lazarus lays at the rich man’s gate, covered with sores – and our 1^st-century religious mind shouts unclean! unclean! – and he longs to eat the food cast off from the rich man’s table, to taste the bread used to wipe the grease off the rich man’s mouth . . . and Lazarus is too weak to beat away the dogs that roam the Jerusalem garbage heaps, and they lick his sores . . . and so here’s the scene, here’s the tableau: the rich man, stuffed with sumptuous-ness, sated with food and drink and money, and just a few feet away, separated by table and gate, Lazarus, belly protruding from malnutrition, flies and dogs feeding on his body’s open wounds.

      Act Two.  Lazarus dies, and the angels carry him tenderly aloft, caressing his seeping body – he’s not unclean to God’s messengers! – and dare we guess how he dies?  Could it be starvation, or some infection in his sores . . . or does he freeze to death one night, as the homeless sometimes do, while the rich man takes a hot bath, and retires to satin sheets?  Or maybe the dogs . . . well, the parable tells us little, and it says even less about the rich man’s death . . . whereas Lazarus is borne up by angels, when the rich man dies, he is simply buried.

      Act Three. We’re in Hades, where the dead are gathered before judgment, but the rich man’s already getting a little taste of his, he’s already being tormented, but he can see Abraham far away with Lazarus at his side – the Greek says “in his bosom.”  And we know that Abraham’s bosom is just about the best place for a good Jew to be, and oy vey!  Are we astonished!  Because as good citizens of the first century, we naturally believe that anything good in life is a result of God’s favor, and anything bad is a result of God’s displeasure, and the rich guy certainly had plenty of good stuff, and the poor man certainly had nothing but bad, so the rich man must have really pleased God, while the poor man must’ve have really irritated God . . . but here’s a major reversal of our expectations, it’s downright shocking, to tell you the truth, because we as good citizens of the first century, we expect the rich guy to continue to receive the goods – he must have earned it, after all—and Lazarus to continue to receive the boot.

      And the rich man may have thought so too, because he calls out to Father Abraham and says “Have mercy on me, and send Lazarus to cool me off,” and we note that even with this shocking reversal of fortune, he still expects the poor man to step and fetch it, to bring him his Big Mac and fries.  But Abraham says “Child” – for the rich guy is a child of Abraham – he says “Child . . . during your lifetime you received your good things, and Lazarus evil things . . . but now, he’s comforted, and you’re in agony.” And we begin to get it . . . we begin to remember other teachings of Jesus . . . like  “Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you will be filled . . . but woe to you rich, for you have received your consolation.”

      And then Abraham tells the rich man something chilling . . . between you and us there’s a great chasm, and no one can cross from you to us, or from us to you . . . he’s telling the rich man that poor folks like Lazarus aren't his servants any more, the roles they played in life have been nullified, they’ve been un-done, but there’s something else, too, for if Lazarus can’t cross that chasm, neither can the rich man, and we can’t help but think of the barriers put up in real life . . . the gate, the stuffed-full table, the purple finery and most of all, all those social strictures about who’s unclean and who’s clean, what kind of behavior is acceptable and what's not,  who’s in and who’s out . . . and we can’t help think of the bitter irony – the rich man could have easily crossed those barriers in life, he could have easily opened the gate and brought the poor man into his home, or gone out to be with him, but now he can’t.  It’s too late, they’re forever separate.

      And the rich man says “Father, I beg you to send Lazarus” –he still can’t keep from viewing him as a servant –  “I beg you to send him to my brothers, to warn them, so they won’t come here to this place of torment, so they won’t get in the same jam as I.”  And Abraham says they have Moses and the prophets to warn them, that should be enough, and we know exactly what he’s saying, for didn’t Moses say “Do not be hard-hearted or tight-fisted toward your needy neighbor” . . . didn’t Isaiah say the worship God desires is for us to “share our bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into our houses?” The commands to feed and nurture and welcome the poor are not new, they’re right there in the Bible—the rich man and his brothers should have known it all along.

      And finally, as our little play comes to a close, while we’re still reeling from the intensity of it all, from its audacious, revelatory power, we see that the rich guy knows his brothers all too well, that they will not follow the law of their ancestors, but he’s gotta try one last time: “if someone goes to them from the dead, they will repent.”  And Abraham’s response is like a cold, hard knife to his gut – “if they don’t listen to Moses and the prophets, they won’t be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.”

      Ouch . . . even if someone rises from the dead . . . well, if that’s not a big, fat hint to everyone living on the other side of the resurrection, I don’t know what is . . . somebody has risen from the dead, all right, somebody with a capital S, and so we’re really in the same boat as all those 1^st Century hearers of Luke’s gospel . . . like them, we’ve not only had the revelation of Moses and the prophets, like the rich guy and his five brothers, we’ve had the teachings of Jesus Christ which, if they’re consistent at all are consistently on the side of the least of these . . .  and yet the poor are definitely still with us, after all that . . . seems like the parable is right, “they” haven’t been convinced even after someone has risen from the dead . . .

      But there’s a crucial question here . . . who are “they”?  Who haven’t been convinced?  Well, we’ve seen the rich guy and poor guys, they’re staples of Jesus’ teaching, embodiments of his categories of the first and last, whose positions will be reversed, and that surely happens in this parable, but the thing about this one is that it’s all about the gaps . . .  Jesus carefully sets it up so that the gap between them is enormous: there’s this super-rich dude over here, this hyper-well-off guy dressed like a rock star, who feasted every day, not just on the high holy days, and he’s contrasted to the scabby, smelly guy who lives outside his gate in the gutters, who holds out his hand as the rich guy glides past every day in his smoke-windowed Bentley . . . it’s this gap between them that Jesus plays up, and when the reversal happens, when the last becomes first and the first last, he has Abraham point it ironically out, he says “between you and us a great chasm has been fixed, so that those who might want to pass from here to you cannot do so” . . . the gap you created in life has now come back to haunt you . . .

      And I wish I could soften the hard edge of this parable, but I can’t.  After all this revelation, after all the prophets’ teaching and Jesus’ teaching and now his death and resurrection, there is still a huge gap between the haves and have nots . . . and if you have any doubt where we middle-class Christians stand, where we are in this parable, a trip to a website called “Global Rich List” dot com will seal the deal . . . I entered Pam and my combined, modestly-middle-class, salaries—and found that we are in the top .19% of richest folks in the world.  Even folks making the federal poverty level for a family of four—about 18,000 dollars—are in the top 5 % . . . it’s fair to say that if you take the whole world – and God made the folks in the Sudan just as much as he did us here in the States – none of us are among the poor . . . and yet, we all have to watch our budgets, don’t we?  In America, we can make $5000, more than 85% of the rest of the world and still not have enough to eat . . . so in the sense that it’s all relative, we aren’t in with the rich guy in the parable, at least as far as this country is concerned . . . so if we’re not with the super, over-the-top rich, and we’re not with the poorest of the lie-in-the-ditch, covered-with-sores poor, with whom can we stand?  How can we identify with this parable?

      Well, there’s one more group here . . . the rich guy – who’s already doomed, remember – wants to send Lazarus back to warn his brothers about all of this, and what does Jesus say?  The law and the prophets 'oughta’ be enough . . . they know what to do . . . and I think that may be where we kind of fit, isn’t it?  We’re here on earth, we know there’s grinding poverty, even 2,000 years and hundreds of million of Christians after our Lord Jesus – that ultimate victim, that ultimate innocent Lazarus – rose from the grave.  You see, Jesus is a witness to it, his whole life is. . . a witness to God’s ultimate concern for the weakest among us . . . and yet 2000 years later, poverty and oppression still haunt our world.  2000 years later, there are still chasms yawning between our poor and us . . . deep canyons of class, race and of social status.  But like the rich man’s brothers – and unlike the rich man himself – the chasms between us and them are not unbridgeable . . . there is still time for us to bridge that gap, to welcome the poor and disenfranchised and oppressed inside our gates of privilege . . . question is, will we do it before it’s too late?  Amen.