Readings of the day: Jeremiah 5:7-10; Psalm 1:1-2, 3, 4, 6; Luke 16:19-31
How many of us have heard sayings like, “That’s
just the way it is”? How many of us wonder whether it is possible for us, alone,
to change entrenched individual and, with even more difficulty, social habits
that draw us away from right relationship with God? How many of us, despairing
of being able to change these habits, have ever been tempted to give up trying;
to accept that this is “just the way it is”?
Today’s Gospel story of the Rich Man and
Lazarus from Luke reminds me of a song I have loved since I was a boy, “The Way
It Is” by Bruce Hornsby and the Range.[1] “The
Way It Is” speaks about the American Civil Rights movement, its effects now,
and social issues still to be resolved. The final chorus of “The Way It Is” features
the line, “That’s just the way it is. Some things will never change. Ah, but
don’t you believe them.”
The message in Luke’s story of the Rich Man
and Lazarus is similar. The “rich man” is “dressed in purple garments and fine
linen and [dines] sumptuously each day.” The poor Lazarus is “covered with
sores” and “would gladly have eaten his fill of the scraps that fell from the rich man’s
table.”
“That’s just the way it is. Some things
will never change.” Jesus says little about the moral character of the rich man
or of Lazarus. We hear that Lazarus ends up at “the bosom of Abraham” while the
rich man ends up “in the netherworld… in torment.” So we assume (not wrongly)
that Lazarus, unlike the rich man, pleased God enough to be in heaven. But,
from what we hear in our Gospel reading, Lazarus does nothing exceptionally
good, and the rich man does nothing exceptionally evil.
And yet the rich man has an opportunity
in this life: Use his wealth to lift even one person, Lazarus, out of misery,
or despair of his ability by himself to change the lot of Lazarus and so many
like him. Can we imagine this line on the tongue of the rich man: “That’s just
the way it is. Some things will never change”?
“Ah, but don’t you believe them.” Who is
Lazarus today? Will we ask if he is African American, Caucasian, Hispanic, First
Nations, or Asian; if he is a U.S. citizen or at least has valid immigration or
refugee papers; if he is among the working poor, or at least trying to find
work, or on disability? Will we give up, faced with the number of people in
need not far from us: “That’s just the way it is. Some things will never change”?
Or will we go forth from this place, God’s house, and perform one act of mercy;
of kindness toward one person in need, without asking first how this person
came to be in need?
God, I think, does not ask us individually
to solve every need in the world. But God invites us not to be indifferent or
to give up: “That’s just the way it is. Some things will never change.”
“Ah, but don’t you believe them.”
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