Dishonesty As The Way Of The Christ

Dishonesty As The Way of the Christ?

Luke 16:19-31
September 30, 2007

“There was a rich man who was dressed in purple and fine linen and who feasted
sumptuously every day. And at his gate lay a poor man named Lazarus, covered with
sores, who longed to satisfy his hunger with what fell from the rich man’s table; even the
dogs would come and lick his sores. The poor man died and was carried away by the
angels to be with Abraham. The rich man also died and was buried. In Hades, where he
was being tormented, he looked up and saw Abraham far away with Lazarus by his
side. He called out, ‘Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus to dip the
tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue; for I am in agony in these flames.’ But
Abraham said, ‘Child, remember that during your lifetime you received your good
things, and Lazarus in like manner evil things; but now he is comforted here, and you
are in agony. Besides all this, 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, and no one can
cross from there to us.’ He said, ‘Then, father, I beg you to send him to my father’s
house— for I have five brothers—that he may warn them, so that they will not also
come into this place of torment.’ Abraham replied, ‘They have Moses and the prophets;
they should listen to them.’ He said, ‘No, father Abraham; but if someone goes to them
from the dead, they will repent.’ He said to him, ‘If they do not listen to Moses and the
prophets, neither will they be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.’”

I suspect all of you know of the name of Herod, the name of the puppet ruler who
haunts our New Testament in different places—you find him in the beginning of Jesus’
story, and then later on there his inhumane order to kill all the children in Bethlehem.
Later, he will order the death of John the Baptist, but we get our fullest picture of him as
he presides as one of the judges of Christ, in our Gospel narratives. He is ambiguous
about this man before him, this Christ, as he was about John the Baptist, and he seems
reluctant to pull the trigger on the both of them, maybe because there is still a
superstitious bone left in his body—you don’t want to mess too much with guys who
might actually end up being connected to God somehow. But that doesn’t seem to get
too much in his way, because both Christ and John get thrown under the bus for
political purposes—I mean, you don’t rule as a puppet king for over 40 years without
knowing how to survive in the cut throat world of Roman politics. What is so interesting
about Herod is not so much how he kept his death grip on power, but the story of how
his fingers were eventually pried from that power, from that grip on the lives of the
people of Galilee and Perea. It is the missteps that get him in trouble and that
eventually lead to his downfall, to a great reversal in the fortunes of the man called
Herod Antipas.

When Herod’s father died in 4 BCE, the Roman emperor Augustus divided up his
kingdom among his three of his five brothers and Herod was the lucky one who got the
land where Jesus’ hometown was located. Herod was known as a shrewd politician,
and was noted as being a great builder of cities—Tiberius, on the coast, was one of the
great monuments to his fascination with building things, as well as the Jewish Temple in
Jerusalem, which had been under continuous construction for decades, while he ruled
with the power allotted him by Rome. But the thing about Herod was that he had a
weakness for the ladies, especially the young ladies, as that famous story in our New
Testament tells us about how John the Baptist got his head lopped off reminds us. He
eventually divorced one of his wives, a daughter of a neighboring king, in order to
marry his own niece—remember, it was John the Baptist’s complaints about this that got
him imprisoned in the first place. Well, the king whose daughter had been so insulted
by this divorce responded by the invading a part of Herod’s kingdom. People in his
kingdom saw it as a punishment for his murder of John the Baptist, but this didn’t stop
Herod’s greed for more power, and so he appealed to the Roman Emperor Caligula to
be made a king, a step up from his title as a prelate of the Empire. Well, Caligula did
just the opposite and deposed of him completely—Caligula took away his territories and
gave it to one of his own nephews, banishing Herod and his niece wife forever from the
place he once ruled. It’s a stunning reversal of fortunes, if you think about it—to be on
the top of the world, or at least on top of the small world you live in, in one second, and
then be erased from the picture altogether in the next. You’re a winner at one moment,
and a complete loser the next—not a fine way to end the story, but important, I think,
because it points us to the truth of this parable, which is that there are inevitable
reversals that come into our lives, and the question before us is where we ought to be
when those grand and terrifying and beautiful reversals happen to us.

But first, let’s look at this interesting little parable, one that is not told in any other of the
other three Gospels. And like last week’s text, this one is difficult to unravel—the
parable is challenging and to be frank, it’s constructed in such a way that it tends to
mislead us into focusing on parts of it that are simply not the point of text itself, not the
point of the parable itself. You often find this parable as being cited as one that gives
us clues about what happens to us when we die, as if it was about the afterlife and what
it might look like, either fire or clouds, whatever—but Jews of the first century are not as
obsessed with the afterlife as we are nowadays. You sometimes hear Christians speak
as if the Gospel of Jesus Christ was about fire insurance, as if it was really about
making sure we don’t burn in the world to come. Keep in mind that Jews of this era don’
t have the same obsession we do with the world to come, and the same goes for our
brother here, our Jewish Jesus—the world before them, the world as it was lived right
now, kept them busy enough!

But the earliest hearers of this parable would also have recognized this kind of story—
there are parallels stories in both Egyptian and Jewish mythology that seem very similar
to Jesus’ story here, and so the whole Father Abraham thing, the rich man and the
poor man—these are common motifs in the ancient world and so that would have felt
familiar to many of Jesus’ earliest listeners. What is unfamiliar to them is, however, is
the naming of the poor man in the story, rather than naming the rich man—did you
notice that only Lazarus of the two main characters is actually given a name, an
identity? And both in our world and in the one that this parable is given, the name of
someone is important—it gives us rooting and place and connection to the world. But
the rich man in our story is anonymous and thus his identity is a secret—he gets
lumped in with the other rich people of the world who don’t care much for the Lazarus’
of this world. People have wondered if this Lazarus of John 11, the one who was raised
from the dead by Jesus, whom we’ll soon be studying in our John Bible study, but there
is no evidence to back that up, really. We don’t know why he is named Lazarus—only
that he has a name, an identity. Maybe it is because God sees him completely for who
he is, maybe its because Jesus wants us to sympathize with him, and having empathy
for a complete stranger, a nameless stranger, is a hard thing to do. And one important
more thing—this is the only time that Jesus ever, EVER, named a person in a parable
that he uses to teach with—so, it must matter tremendously to him that we see Lazarus
as completely human, that we empathize with him, that we stand with him, because he,
like us, is a person with a name, no matter how little he may have in this world. In this
world, it is the rich who have names—Bill Gates, Donald Trump, Oprah Winfrey—but in
the kingdom of God, in the realm that is not yet here, but is yet being born in our midst,
it is the poor, the nobodies, that have the names worth knowing…the great reversal
continues.

But there is something else that I want to point out about this little parable, this unique
story about how God sees the world. I want us to look carefully at why Lazarus and this
rich man are in the places they are now at. I think most of us assume that the rich man
is in hell because he is a greedy, uncaring, unjust man, but if you look at the text, it
really doesn’t say that he was any of these things. Sure, Lazarus was hungry, but it
doesn’t say that he doesn’t give generously to the poor, or that he hasn’t given
generously from his table to people like Lazarus. No, if you look at the text, it says that
the reason why the rich man is suffering is because he once lived a life of great
pleasure—and the reason why Lazarus is in the bosom of Father Abraham, well, it was
because he once suffered terribly, though, I want to point out here, he did not
necessarily suffer directly at the hands of the rich man. The rich man was spoiled and
pampered in this life, and that is why he is going to suffer in his next life, and vice versa
with Lazarus. What was wrong was the inequality between them and that has made all
the difference in eternity, at least according to this parable. Now, I don’t know about
you, but as a someone who lives a fairly rich life compared to 90% of the world, this
little parable makes me kind of nervous. What does Jesus say about a rich man and
the eye of the needle? What does he tells us in the previous chapters of Luke about
selling everything we have to follow after him and his way? It doesn’t seem fair to be
judged by my bank account, rather than the quality of my life, but that is what is actually
being said in this parable and in the texts we’ve struggled with during the past few
weeks. These are hard words, difficult words, for us, we who live in the wealthiest
nation in the world, where even the poor among us live far better than the people of
third world, at least live far better in terms of material wealth. It is the great reversal
again, the turning around of the way it has always been—that is what Jesus has come
to bring about and the question before us is this: on what side of the great divide, the
great reversal, will I be on, when the Lord of life comes to take me home? Will you and
I be standing with Lazarus or will we be with the rich man, standing with him?

And I think that is the question the parable is trying to get us to ask. This story is not
about heaven and its not about hell, and its not even about money and wealth and
leading a pampered life. Well, it is sort of about the latter, but ultimately its about
whether or not we will choose to stand by Lazarus or we will choose to stand by the rich
man, who failed to see that the gulf between him and Lazarus was one day going to be
his destruction, his downfall. It seems to matter to God that all of God’s children should
have traveling shoes, that all of God’s children should be included at the table of life,
that all of God’s children should have the basics, like food and water and a bit of hope
in this life. And we have to ask ourselves—who will we stand with and beside? Will it
be the nobodies, the least of these, the people like Lazarus who don’t usually have
names, or will we choose to stand with the winners of this world, the people who made
it, so to speak? Now, if we actually asked that question of ourselves, how would we
answer questions like the ones we’re facing right now in this world, questions around
immigration, and gay rights, and civil rights, and expanding the children’s health
insurance program, a topic being debated right now in Congress? If we don’t ask our
politicians how they plan to help the Lazarus’ of this world, we are sure to find ourselves
on the wrong side of the great reversal that is sure to come, that always comes,
because the kingdom of God may not yet be fully here, on this earth, but, friends, it is
coming and where we are standing when it does come will make all the difference on
the day of judgment. Who did we stand by, who did we walk with, who did we speak up
for? Those questions will be asked of us, each of us, before the gracious throne of
God.

But enough of that important question. I want to ask you why think I might have told
that particular story about Herod Antipas, who would have been a small footnote in
history if it had not been for a certain Jesus of Nazareth who happened upon the
territory he ruled some 2000 years ago. Well, it may be that the writer of Luke has
Jesus tell us this story in order to remind his readers about the great reversal that
happened upon a certain tyrant who ruled the land during Jesus’ day—a man, who like
the rich man in this parable, who had a name, a well known name, and who had five
brothers, and who had every right to wear purple, as the rich man in the parable does,
as he was minor royalty himself. To the earliest listeners of this parable, Jesus may be
pointing to the coming fall of Herod as a sign of the coming upheaval, the great turning
around, the u-turn of the universe, of the world being born in the aftermath of this
Jesus of Nazareth. Again, the question for you and me is this: where will be standing
and whom will we standing with when the great reversal comes to me, to you, to this
world? I know where I want to be and I knew where I want us to be, but that is always a
choice each of us must make in our own hearts, and in those moments when a certain
Lazarus stands before us, and a certain rich man, a successful man, stands before us,
both asking us who we wish to travel with on this side of eternity. Amen.