The gospel story of the Rich Man and Lazarus fits right in with a recent news item. A photograph album has recently turned up at the Holocaust Museum in Washington. It could be anyone’s collection of vacation pictures. Attractive, smiling men and women lounge in deck chairs. They laugh and flirt with the camera. Someone plays with a dog and teaches him tricks. Another picture shows a man lighting a Christmas tree to formally launch the holiday season. None of these photographs is remarkable at face value. The people are as ordinary as you and I.
What makes the photographs remarkable is the context. These men and women are all Germans wearing officers’ uniforms. The year is 1944, and the frolicking officers are the leaders of Auschwitz, where thousands starved and over one million people were exterminated. The jolly pictures are taken as thousands of Hungarian Jews arrive in cattle cars from the last Jewish community in Europe. It is surreal to look at these pictures knowing what we now know. How could perpetrators of such massive evil look so ordinary? How could they ignore what was going on all around them? I mean, how do you have a picnic as smoke fills the sky from prison crematoriums? How could anyone be so oblivious of their context?
When Jesus tells the story of the rich man and Lazarus, the context is critical. Earlier in this 16th chapter of Luke, the religious authorities make fun of Jesus. They disagree over the meaning of wealth and poverty in Jewish law. The Torah promises that following the law is a blessing from God and leads to further, material blessings. By the time of Jesus this has become distorted to suggest that wealth is a sure sign of righteousness and God’s favor, while poverty is a sure sign of sin and moral failure. Of course this is not true. The Jewish law has very clear requirements about caring for and sharing with the poor. It repeatedly reminds the faithful of their ancestors’ desperate times in the wilderness as a way of identifying with those who suffer from poverty. But in Jesus’ context, just as in some Christian circles today, wealth and success are seen as God’s thumbs up, and poverty is seen as God’s thumbs down. The poor are viewed as outcasts who are spiritually unclean. Jesus hates this. He continually invites both the poor and the rich to share in his ministry.
It is in this context that Jesus tells today’s gospel story. It is an ancient tale, originally told in Egypt and then adapted by rabbis into Jewish culture. Jesus himself is a rabbi, a teacher, and he, too, adapts the tale. He tells a story that is as vivid as a photograph album. In the first picture, here is the rich man in his designer clothes enjoying gourmet food and an elegant lifestyle. He drives in and out of his driveway in a fine car and stares straight ahead.
In Jesus’ photograph album, unlike the German officers’ collection, we get pictures of the camp, too. The next photograph is of Lazarus, starving and wounded. He is collapsed between the rich man’s front door and the driveway where you cannot miss him. It does appear that the rich man cannot see Lazarus but we know better because of the next picture. There has been a dramatic reversal. In this photograph, Lazarus sits happily in heaven and the rich man sits miserably in hell. The rich man recognizes Lazarus and summons him by name like a water boy to run errands. This is when the rich man learns that the chasm he created between himself and Lazarus on earth is going to be his for all eternity. He is the victim of his own accomplishment and we could close the picture book right there.
Ah, but there are a few remaining photographs. Here is the rich man attempting to negotiate with Abraham. Let’s make a deal, let’s send out some memos. He looks for the competitive edge, the scarce commodity that will give him a bargaining position.
But this does not work either. God has offered an abundant creation with enough for everyone, God has given the law for order and justice, and throughout history God has sent prophets to correct and guide humanity onto the right path. Everything has already been done. No deals are needed. The final picture of the rich man shows him staring into a void of his own making.
In this story Jesus clearly implies that we tolerate the great chasm between the rich and the poor at our own peril. He also tells this cautionary tale to warn about the dangers of wealth. Jesus does not condemn wealth, for wealth in itself is neutral. It is what we do with it, the moral choices we make that interest Jesus. He often speaks of hardness of heart, that old biblical expression meaning exactly what it says. Hardness of heart is like moral scar tissue that grows in us and distances us from the suffering of others. Jesus cautions that wealth is especially susceptible to hardness of heart. The rich man rolls up his car windows, he sinks back into the plush leather seat and Lazarus slips out of view. Hardness of heart helps us to tolerate the intolerable. It permits us to ignore our context. Hardness of heart has picnics in the midst of genocide.
Hannah Arendt was a 20th century political theorist and a Jewish European refugee. After the war she studied the Holocaust records and concluded that the great evils in history are not carried out by sociopaths or fanatics but by ordinary people who accept what they are told by the state. Because of this they begin to see their own actions as normal, no matter how heinous. In 1963, Arendt covered Adolph Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem for New Yorker magazine and got a close look at this notorious war criminal. She coined a famous and unsettling term, “the banality of evil.” She used it to describe Eichmann himself. She realized that he did not commit genocide because he delighted in murder but because he followed orders with no thought for those who were affected. He wanted to enhance his career and the extermination of the Jews was just another bureaucratic assignment. Evil does not just come from hatred. It also thrives in the absence of moral imagination.
Now our imaginations are fired by a 63-year-old photograph album slipped out of Germany. We flee from its evil implications like emotional refugees. The people look commonplace, so ordinary that they could be anyone, even ourselves. Our hearts are drawn instead to the alternative pictures and stories that Jesus continually lays before us. Jesus sees deep into the human heart and leads us to be our best selves. Like a good rabbi, he continually teaches us to love God and love our neighbor as ourselves. That is the best conditioning, the best treatment for hardness of heart.
There is room for one more picture in today’s gospel collection. There is a space remaining for those five brothers left behind. They still have time to seek the truth and open their hearts to God. This is where we come within the camera’s range. You and I are the ones whose stories are not yet finished. We have been given everything we need to live into God’s blessings and follow the right path. We have the abundance of creation, we have the scriptures to guide us and the prophets to correct and redirect us. And we have Jesus himself, who came back from the dead to claim and lead us. In Christ our hearts are being changed. The great chasms in our society which we take for granted are becoming intolerable to us as we draw nearer to Christ. He spans the chasm, he gives us bridges to connect with our neighbor. Christ reaches across the void to bring us closer to God and one another. It happens over time, even when we are unaware. The journey with Christ toward God and our neighbor is the work of a lifetime. The path stretches before us everyday in the choices we make and the way we live.
Let us pray for one another as we follow Christ, that our hearts and our imaginations will always be fired by God’s love.
Amen.
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