It's not too late [Luke 16:19-31 - Proper 21C]

The Rev. Jeremiah Williamson

Luke 16:19-31

It’s not too late

This was the story he was born to tell.  It was in his DNA.  His mother sang this song to him in the womb – a song of a world turned up-side-down, a song of hope for the poor and forgotten, a dream to be dreamed by those covered in sores, for those dying on the side of the road.  The lyrics lived in his soul: “God has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly, has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty.”  It was Mary’s Song.  And now it was his: his story to tell.  A story of salvation, perched at the edge of the apocalypse.

Jesus’ story, his parable, is the story of two men: one powerful and one lowly, one rich and one hungry.  And because this is a parable, and because Jesus’ parables tend to often employ hyperbolic language to draw the listeners in, to peak their interest, the extremes here are very extreme.  The chasm fixed between these two characters was fixed long before they arrived in Hades.

Every detail of Jesus’ parable reinforces the distance between these two men – two men who are actually physically quite close to each other, within a stone’s throw.  And yet, though separated by no more than a gate, the lives they lived on earth could hardly be more different. 

Jesus’ original audience would have recognized this immediately.  They would have understood the exaggerated opulence of the rich man and the devastating poverty of the poor man.  It is a little tougher for us because some of the images do not pack the same punch in our own context – so much later and so far away from Jesus’ world.  For example, purple clothes?  You can buy a purple shirt for a few bucks at any big box store.  Dog licks?  Many people love them.  A dog licking a poor man?  That could easily be the featured scene in a heart-warming viral video about the unconditional kindness of canines.  This is decidedly not what Jesus was going for.    

Jesus wanted his crowd to see and understand that these two experienced very different lives on earth, really as different as one could imagine.  Jesus starts with the clothing.  The rich man dressed rich.  He wore his riches like a neon sign: you couldn’t miss ‘em.  One look and you knew this guy was just absolutely loaded.  Fine linen was expensive to produce in those days.  Only the elite wore fine linen.  But even that material was no match for the poshness of purple cloth.  Purple dye was extremely expensive.  Only the elite of the elite could afford such a luxury.  This guy, he wore the purple over the fine linen.  The fine linen was his base layer.  He was so rich it didn’t even make sense.

Lazarus’ appearance was quite the opposite.  He wore sores.  He wore the skin of the unclean, of the socially marginalized, the skin of the untouchable.  To many who passed him by, Lazarus wore the curse of God.  People couldn’t help thinking, even if only in the back of their minds, this man must have done something very bad to deserve his lot in life.  While at the same time looking through the gate at the guy in purple and saying under their breath, “That guy is so blessed.”

And it wasn’t just the clothing, it was the food.  Jesus’ story takes place in a sustenance-level agricultural world.  Food was not nearly as easy to come by as it is in our nation today.  And so a feast was a very big deal, saved for a very big occasion.  You might remember the story of the Prodigal Son.  When the father throws a feast, kills the fatted calf, to celebrate the return of his lost son at the end of the tale, the older son loses his mind because a feast was so rare and so costly that he knew it was then unlikely that he would ever have the opportunity to be the guest of honor.  This rich man, in today’s parable, feasted sumptuously every day.  That was just impossible.  Your standard rich person could only afford to kill a calf very occasionally.  This guy: every. single. day.  The character Jesus crafted was simply too rich to be true. 

And Lazarus, again, is desperately poor.  He’s got no food.  He longs for table scraps.  And he doesn’t even get them.  And not only did he not eat, he was being eaten alive by dogs, which in that world, at that time, were not pampered pets, but social pariahs that roamed the streets and scavenged for food scraps.  The picture of this man having his wounds licked by dogs was not intended as a sweet scene.  Jesus meant for his audience to understand that Lazarus was living in the depths of despair.  It was insult to injury.

The clothing and the food paint a stark contrast.  So do the accommodations.  The rich man, he has a gate.  Gated communities, while a symbol of wealth, are not terribly rare today.  In the ancient world, a gate meant a compound, an estate.  Given the rich clothing and the daily excess, that this rich man owns considerable property is no surprise. 

Lazarus has no home.  He lives on the street, likely dumped at the gate, thrown out like garbage.  And since he is unable to escape the assault of the wild dogs, he was probably crippled.  And so, in that world, entirely reliant on kindness – kindness that he is never shown.

And then they die.  Both of them.  Because not even extraordinary riches can buy off death.  And in this story, in the afterlife everything flips.

At this point, I think it is probably worth mentioning that we are still in a parable.  This is likely no more an accurate description of the afterlife, than Charles Dickens’ Christmas Carol is an accurate description of one’s typical Christmas Eve.  It’s a story.  Jesus is still telling a story to an interested audience.  And while I do not know what life will be like on the other side, I doubt it’s just dead people shouting conversations across a Grand Canyon.  But I don’t know, so maybe you will get to cuddle up, as the King James version says, in Abraham’s bosom for all eternity.   

One of the more surprising features of this parable is that the rich man never seems to realize that things have changed.  He seems to only notice that he is now living in a warmer climate.  He still operates from an impression of privilege.  Never once does he directly address Lazarus.  Instead he talks to Abraham as an equal, appealing to the great patriarch to direct Lazarus to do the rich man’s bidding.  The rich man still thinks himself superior to the man who once died, ignored, outside his very gate.  And he has errands for him to run – now that he has the use of his legs.  The parable shows us that despite this eternal reversal, the rich man shows no sign of repentance, no evidence of epiphany.

For the rich man there is no happy ending.  And for the poor man, Lazarus, eternity shows him the consolation he never received during his earthly existence.  And the story ends.  Jesus tacks on no pithy moral takeaway for his audience.  The story is simply over. 

It’s a striking story with a powerful ending.  But what’s the point?  Why tell this parable?  Earlier in this chapter of Luke’s Gospel, we are told that in Jesus’ audience there were “lovers of money.”  And so that’s fine.  But still what is the point of telling this story?  Is it meant to publicly shame Jesus’ listeners?  Did Jesus just want to make some rich folks sweat?

At the end of the story, Jesus turns his attention to these five nameless, faceless, siblings.  Most of the parable concerns the rich man and Lazarus; by the end of the story we know them fairly well.  The final verses are about these brothers, brothers about whom we know basically nothing.  And while the characters representing extreme wealth and extreme poverty are difficult for anyone in the audience, then or now, to really relate to, these brothers are a different story.  All we know about them is that they have access to the Scriptures and they are alive.  And so they are much more relatable.

It is too late for the rich man in the story.  He ignored the biblical call to love his neighbor, to care for the poor, to show mercy to those in need of mercy.  But it was not too late for his brothers; they could still heed the call of Moses and the prophets.  They still had a chance: to change, to make a difference.  And so did Jesus’ audience.  And so do we.  Jesus told this story, not to shame his listeners, but because it is a story of salvation – the story of how our world will be saved: through love and mercy.  Shame might convince someone to temporarily change their actions, but shame will never change hearts and lives.  But love will.  For those alive enough to listen, there is still time to open our hearts and our hands to those in need.  Jesus told this story, to us, for us, because it is not too late.  It’s not too late for us to change, for us to make a difference.  Jesus told this story, the story he was born to tell, because as long as there is breath in our lungs, and love in our hearts, we can make a difference; we can make this world a more beautiful, a more merciful, a more compassionate place.