A warning—not to the rich but to the complacent

The last few weeks have been particularly heavy for American society in faith and in politics. Violence has stained our soil from the death and injury of children praying at mass in Minneapolis to the assassination of a politically active young man on a college campus in Utah. This Sunday’s Gospel compares the heavy load that Lazarus lived because of his poverty with the supposed lightness of a rich man who lived in daily comfort. How does this warning against complacency speak to a society faced with the growing polarization of its citizens?

This Sunday’s Gospel highlights three polarizations. The first is the gulf in life-condition between the rich man and Lazarus. One “dined sumptuously” each day, while the other longed for “the scraps that fell from the rich man’s table” (Lk 16:21). 

A second polarization appears in their final places of eternal rest. Angels carried Lazarus to the bosom of Abraham, while the rich man sat in torment in the netherworld. Attempting to close the gap, the rich man hoped to narrow the distance between his station and the place where Lazarus now remained after death. “Between us and you,” replied Abraham in this parable, “a great chasm is established to prevent anyone from crossing who might wish to go from our side to yours or from your side to ours” (Lk 16:26). 

The third polarization is one of faith. The rich man, faced with the consequences of his life-choices, now believes the religious message he had been taught, and is concerned for his brothers. Abraham does not hold out hope for their conversion, telling the rich man in clear terms that if they did not listen to the guidance of Moses and the prophets, “neither will they be persuaded if someone should rise from the dead” (Lk 16:31).

How are we as readers in faith able to close the gap of the three chasms expressed in this Sunday’s Gospel? A good place to look is the start of the passage, in which Luke describes the unreflective comfort of the man who dressed in purple and ate lavishly. His comfort was the problem. The picture Luke presents of the rich man is a warning against a way of life that values self-interest and complacency above anything else. During his life he never saw Lazarus, and after death only noticed him when, in torment, he demanded that Lazarus bring him water. While the rich man was probably always a “somebody” in his life, but in Luke’s telling, only the poor man, Lazarus, receives a name in Jesus’ parable. Ignored by humanity, Lazarus had dignity in God’s eyes and reaped the fruits of divine grace after death.

Placed in context, this Sunday’s Gospel follows the previous Sunday’s parable of the dishonest steward. In both cases, there is no crisis of faith, only one of self-interest. For the dishonest steward, self-interest led to a life of careless exploitation of his neighbors. For the rich man of this Sunday’s parable, self-interest leads to a disregard of his neighbor, Lazarus. In both cases, the Gospel uses these lives of self-interest to point to the importance of a life based on love of God and love of neighbor. 

Love, in both cases, is a verb. It was the inaction of the rich man and the dishonest steward that got them into trouble. It was their disregard of their neighbor’s needs that caused their fall. May Christ’s disciples today embrace actions of love in a time that so easily inspires hate, anger and polarization.