Who's your Lazarus? #SCC

Link to today's readings - 26th Sunday in Ordinary Time [Cycle C] 
September 29, 2013

Reflection

Jesus was a masterful story-teller, integrating imagery from the surrounding culture that would resonate as both familiar and accessible to His audience.  But the content of these stories was not simply well-worn truths repackaged in a more imaginative form… The underlying message was often quite provocative or even counter-intuitive.  Many of Jesus’ most famous parables communicated a lesson that directly contradicted an accepted maxim or well-established norm of His day.  At times, Jesus employed nuance and metaphor to convey these radical messages; in other instances, He eschewed subtlety, taking transparent aim at certain groups or beliefs.  The parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus, which some scholars have suggested is better translated, “the Greedy Man,” is an example of the latter.

The accepted understanding of wealth in first-century Mediterranean culture was that, like health and other forms of prosperity, it reflected favor from God towards an individual or group.  This worldview is perhaps nowhere more explicitly on display than in the Book of Job, Where Job has all of his possessions taken away from him, and Job’s friends immediately question what he has done to incite God’s ire.  When Job insists upon his innocence, these same friends berate him for his stubbornness—of course he had done something to offend God—why else would God have left him poor and sick? 

This would have been the same attitude held by Jesus’ hearers when he described Lazarus—who presumably found favor with God, based on his very great personal wealth—and his counterpart, Lazarus—who, contrarily, must have sinned quite egregiously to deserve both financial destitution and physical ailment.  Instead of affirming this interpretation, Jesus completely reverses it, holding up Lazarus as the example of one who enjoys favor with God and the rich man as the one who had committed the sin.  The original hearers undoubtedly would have gasped in disbelief, and more than a few probably would have written Jesus off as deranged.

But what Jesus was challenging was the notion that our gifts—material, physical, and  otherwise—are our own, and that they are somehow the just reward for our efforts.  Jesus’ contemporaries would have viewed health and prosperity as the result of one’s voluntary fidelity to God’s law.  Sin—that is, a failure to adhere to the terms of the Covenant—led directly and inexorably to poverty and illness, as the Prophet Amos is prognosticating to his own audience.   

Jesus instead depicts an alternative reality in which sin is erased by the unconditional love of the Father (The Prodigal Son), and material prosperity is not so much a reward for one’s merits as it is a freely-given, unmerited gift from God (The Parable of the Talents) that we are entrusted to use shrewdly for the benefit of the larger community (today’s parable).  This notion of wealth as gift that intrinsically entails a correlating responsibility to use it to help those who have less is one that ought to continue to speak to us today.  Perhaps, in our modern milieu, it is even more pertinent than ever. 

By and large, we tend to think of material success as the result of our individual efforts—hard work in school, on the job, in life.  And while financial gain almost invariably necessitates industrious efforts (recipients of trust funds notwithstanding), a more comprehensive understanding of socio-economic dynamics exposes that much of success is “grace,” in the sense that, through no merit of our own, we are born into certain types of families; endowed with varying amounts of innate talents; afforded  incommensurate educational and social opportunities; and empowered by fortuitous external circumstances like living in time and place in history wherein people are free to pursue whatever profession they may choose.

It may be tempting—and certainly it is easy—to translate the parable to a modern setting, imagining the rich man to be a Wall Street CEO dressed in an Armani suit, and Lazarus to be a homeless beggar lying—like his ancient counterpart—just outside the building where the CEO oversees his corporate empire.  The metaphor would be apt—but it would also be inadequate to the task of communicating the broader message Jesus is relating: it is not simply the financially  well-off who are called to use their resources for the betterment of others—it is each of us, insofar as we are uniquely gifted and blessed. 

In your own life, as a (relatively) poor student walking to grab a slice of pizza, you may notice a homeless person lying outside the restaurant, but think to yourself, “I can barely afford to buy my textbooks, let alone pay my cell phone bill!  I can’t afford to give this guy money…”   And that may well be the case.  Nevertheless, you also undoubtedly are blessed with immense personal talent and social opportunity—including an intellect that allows you to succeed academically at a prestigious institution like the University of Michigan.  Too, you likely are blessed in other ways, relative to your peers.  Maybe you are a skilled listener, you boast a

superior ability to manage life’s many minor crises, or you possess some athletic ability.  

Jesus challenges us to consider the many ways each of us is “rich,” and who might be our personal “Lazarus.”  Maybe it is the socially awkward guy down the hall who struggles to make friends on your floor.  Perhaps it is the emotionally needy girl in your friend circle that can’t seem to keep herself together and whom everybody avoids for that reason.  The Lazaruses—those sitting right outside the respective doorstep that are not as blessed as we, intellectually, emotionally, athletically, socially—they are the ones we are called to minister to. 

Reflection Questions

1) In what ways are you “rich?”  To what extent would you say the good things in your life are the result of grace—unmerited gift from God—and to what extent would you say that you have earned these successes through individual effort?

2) What does this wealth mean for your relationship with those around you?  What kind of ways might you use that wealth of resources to improve the situation of those in your community?  (Is it even your responsibility to do so?)

3) Who are the Lazaruses in your own life?  Who are the comparatively less-gifted, unappealing people that you pass all the time… but never pause to engage or assist?

We're all a bit Prodigal #SCC

Sept. 15, 2013 - 24th Sunday in Ordinary Time [Cycle C]

Sunday Readings Click Here

(This reflection originally appeared in September 2010 as part of the weekly Scripture-based Small Church Community program at the University of Michigan.) 

Nearly every Christian can recite the Parable of the Prodigal Son from memory; its message is as potent and pertinent for contemporary audiences as it would have been for Jesus’ original listeners.  But exploring who those listeners would have been—and what sort of predispositions would have been operant in their worldview as they heard these stories—can help us even better understand the core truths of Jesus’ message. 

It is important to note at the outset that Jesus was in the presence of both Pharisees and “sinners.”  In ancient Jewish society, sin was considered to be a contagious phenomenon—one could become unclean and infected simply by associating too closely with the wrong sorts of people.  For this reason, lepers, cripples, and the mentally ill were all forced to live outside the main walls of a given town for fear that their disease—and all diseases were thought to originate in a moral failing of some sort, whether one’s own or of one’s family—might make the larger community unclean.  Thus, Jesus’ willingness not only to interact with “sinners” and lepers and the unclean, but actually to dine with them (sharing a meal with someone being the chief external symbol of unity among individuals) was to make a public statement that would have shocked the sensibilities of His contemporaries.  It is no wonder the Pharisees are complaining about Jesus’ habits—imagine what people would say if they saw the local Bishop hanging out by a brothel on weekends! 

The Pharisees, for their part, often get a bad rap, but Jesus here demonstrates that His ministry was not only to those OUTSIDE the community, i.e. the sinners, but to those who considered themselves well within the graces of God.  The Pharisees were pious to an extreme—their knowledge of the Law was unparalleled, and many were upright, holy individuals.  But it was this same intimacy with the rules of the religion that led many to develop an exaggerated sense of self-righteousness, as though their knowledge of the Law made them somehow ethically superior or morally unimpeachable.  They began to use the Law not to bring people closer to God, as it was intended, but as a way of condemning and drawing lines of division between who was holy and who was not.  It is this latter behavior that Jesus repeatedly points to as being singularly problematic and antithetical to the true essence of the Law—i.e. helping people cultivate a deeper relationship with God and live in closer relationship with one another.

Shepherds were manual laborers who lived out in the fields with their flocks; they were often quite dirty and poorly educated.  So when Jesus holds up the shepherd in pursuing his lost sheep, He is offering a surprising paradigm of virtue.  It would be akin to a modern day preacher holding up the diligence of a janitor in staying after-hours to ensure every single grease stain were cleaned up off a kitchen floor—even if he weren’t getting paid.   

The audience might have expected Jesus to hold up a well-educated Scribe or a devout Pharisee as an exemplar, but instead Jesus chooses two of the lowest classes of individuals in His society—a manual laborer and a woman.  (Recall that women were not allowed to own property, to vote, or to testify in court.)  This would have stunned His listeners!

All of which was to set up the Parable of the Prodigal Son, in which He deftly crafts His message to have maximum impact among both of these groups, the sinners AND the Pharisees.  To the sinner, the persons literally living on the outside who probably felt as though there were no way for them ever to become part of the community again, Jesus is articulating a message that there is absolutely nothing so horrible that they could ever do that God would not forgive them for.  The sin of the son would have been horrific to Jesus’ audience—asking for one’s share of the inheritance was equivalent to saying (and meaning), “I wish you were dead,” as he would only have received his inheritance once his father had passed away. 

Jesus deliberately chooses one of the most extreme sins conceivable and goes on to say that the mercy and love of God is so great that not even that could prevent forgiveness and full reconciliation.  Moreover, the Father is depicted as having run out to greet his son—in terms of honor and social protocol, this would be equivalent to the CEO of a corporation fetching coffee for the interns on the way into work in the morning right after the interns had made a decision that cost the company to lose billions of dollars.   God is shown as not only forgiving us, but eagerly awaiting our return so that He can run out to embrace us with open arms and a loving heart.  How much consolation this should give the sinner in us!

...And how much it should challenge the Pharisee in us.  Most of us are relatively holy people, knowledgeable of the tenets of the faith and righteous in our attempt to live it.  But we are likely also guilty at times of feeling morally superior and judging those who live in some form of sin.  This parable challenges that part of us to be as unconditionally loving and forgiving as the father.  It reminds us there is no room for resentment or bitterness in the community of faith, and that we are called to be part of the celebration any time someone among us is brought back into relationship with God.  It has been said that the Church’s mission is to bring comfort to the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable.  Insofar as we are sinners, afflicted by our failings and believing ourselves unworthy to be called children of God, this story should bring us comfort.  And inasmuch as we are comfortable, self-satisfied that we are morally upright persons who would never commit the sort of sin being described, this same parable should afflict us, discomfort us, and challenge us to be more like the father who rejoices, and less like the older brother who complains.