The more that the world seems to work for us, the more that we are carried along by the rushing forces of habit and luck and hard work, the harder it is to shake us from our path, to overcome our inertia and shed us of our momentum. If something comes along and tries to nudge us just a little, we may well not even notice. Should someone try desperately hard to awaken us to the errors of our paths, we will dismiss it as insanity.
This nameless rich man feasts sumptuously at his table, dressed in good and lovely clothes, all the while there are dying beggars lying at his gate. The rich man is sure that he knows what the world is and how it works, he knows that reality is what happens around his table, what feeds and nourishes him. This might as well be the whole universe.
The truths around such tables do not do anything to destabilize the way things are. You can celebrate your host, and enjoy tearing into the abundant feast. You can eat so lustily that heaps of scraps fall from the table and feed the dogs. The conversation turns to the state of the world outside, and it decries those who lower themselves to begging, when they ought to be working towards feasting, instead. You can pity the lowly, or condescend to them with charity, but they are aberrations and anomalies, and not signs of anything of significance.
Except that the world of wealth is nothing but illusion. The nature of an excess of money and abundant food is only and always to pass away. Wealth and food will rot, and that which you cannot use in life will do you no good in death. We cling to these futile things, but they are not worth clinging to. It is like trying to hold onto the peak of the wave for stability in the midst of a great storm. The rich man, perhaps like most of us, can only place his faith in failing things.
***
If someone ran up to me in the street and told me that I should set everything I think I know aside, and repent and turn towards what they have seen, I might just stop and listen. I would listen with a benevolent and superior condescension, trying to hear exactly what is wrong with them, and shoring up my sense of my own fragile sanity, and my grip on my reality and beliefs. If this stranger then proceeds to tell me that they have died and know the truth of how things are, and what life is really about, I will almost certainly fail to believe them, and most days I may not even be affected by them at all.
We call this ego strength, and it is an essential part of the foundations of personhood. We call it a psychological defense, and it is a necessary tool for being able to go about the business of living in a chaotic and noisy world. If they press us to change our ways and we press back, we call it the courage of our convictions, and laud ourselves for our upright and well-considered belief.
It takes a lot to shock us, to make us stop and wonder. We can’t really go around being open to becoming absorbed in the chaos of every life that crosses our path. We can’t be perpetually locked in destabilizing encounters with the Holy. We probably aren’t able to be affected by all the brokenness of the world. We must, though, have some cracks in our walls. Our gates have to be somewhat more permeable than that.
The rich man’s brothers have Moses and the prophets. They have become habituated to looking past beggars whose rotting wounds are licked by dogs as they wait to die in the streets. They cannot save anyone, but no one can save the rich man’s brothers, themselves, if their hearts are so hardened that they are not affected by anything, anymore.
***
We live in a beautiful place. In this beautiful place, at the edge of many properties, and sometimes even right at the gates, there are people who are wounded and suffering. There really are, and yet there are people who will fly into a rage if you try to tell them so. They are prepared with a good and well-considered set of defenses: that those who suffer choose to suffer; that those who are unwell have brought it on themselves; that those who are lost have refused the good path; that those who are afraid should get a job.
There are children on this island who live in impossible squalor while mansions sit empty, waiting to be beautiful when the absent owner arrives. I do not mean that such places should be opened to everyone without a roof over their heads, but it would look a lot more like the Kingdom if it were so.
There are people here who are in deep despair and all alone, while surrounded by those whose wealth keeps them painfully isolated from their own humanity, and that of the whole world. There are people whose lives seem to have lost meaning, and who fear they have lost their souls, while spiritual leaders rest and feast in grandeur around exclusive tables for the worried well.
We live in the same hurting and fractured world as the rich man and Lazarus, and collectively we are about as far from the bosom of Abraham as it is possible to be. We are used to looking past so much suffering. We are accustomed to justifying such evil things. We want so much to live in a world of good things that we can actually manage to ignore or give our assent to the worst things, whether by neglect, or indifference, or simply a desire to focus on the positive.
We hear about drug trafficking rings and dead children and we bury lonely friends and we still know how to put on a good face that invites tourism and keeps up property values. We declare that this is paradise.
If this is paradise, then we have received our good things in this life, and the eternal imprint of justice and peace will be with those who waste away, half-ignored and dying at the gates.
***
It would be debilitating to go too far the other way, and to collapse into despair at the brokenness of the world, or to destroy ourselves in the course of saving those who are very hard to help at all. We are right to know that, but it is foolishness in God’s sight to listen to such worldly wisdom alone.
We have to let ourselves be challenged and changed now and then, and I don’t know how to say exactly what it means to do that. I am awful at it, personally. I like my comfort. I like my good things. I like privacy and dutifully paying my debts and going to work and going home. I am not ready to fling open the gates, but I know on what side of the great chasm that deposits me.
I do not know how we become such creatures of the Kingdom that we can stand to wallow in the lowly joys of suffering people, and to let ourselves feast around the tables of the damned. All I know is that the whole world is the first testament of God, even before Moses and the prophets. Christ is begging us to look out at how things really are, at how the world really works. We are invited, even implored, to let ourselves look directly at the things that will destabilize us. We are called to let our beliefs be broken, if it will draw us closer to loving as God loves.
***
Those who have come back from the dead have a great deal to tell us about what hells exist in our paradise. It is worth stopping and listening to what is really going on, beyond the banquets of the great and good. It is not easy, and it need not be forced, but we can let our eyes and hearts be opened to a little suffering, here and there, that might just call us out of our loneliness and fear and isolation, and closer to the arms of all our ancestors, closer to the love of God, a little closer to the Kingdom, and the Cross, and to God.
May you let your heart be broken open, when God is calling you to your salvation. May we work together for the building up of the Kingdom, even in such lovely and painful places as our homes. May we confess the truth of our lives, and not only that which is easy and good. May we be brought to wholeness, each and all, and be together saved from those things which pass away. May we be with one another as God is with us.