Tearing Down the Gate

Luke 16:19-31

“If you’re talking about the afterlife, you’re missing the point.” In my preparations for this week’s sermon I listened to a sermon podcast that Ben likes to reach for, and this phrase from the episode on Lazarus and the rich man has really stuck with me. If I’m talking about the afterlife in my sermon this week, I’m missing the point. That’s a somewhat unusual take on a passage that at first glance seems to be very much about the afterlife. We have a good guy and a bad guy, and we know which is which because one of them ends up in Hades, the Roman equivalent to Hell, and the other ends up in the bosom of Abraham, a Jewish image of heavenly rest. All of the dialogue in this parable takes place in the afterlife, and there seem to be some pretty strong themes of eternal reward and punishment. So if the afterlife isn’t the point of this parable, what could it possibly be?

Let’s rewind to the brief bit that takes place among the living. “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 rich man has no name in the story, but we know he is wealthy beyond imagining because of the clothing that he wears and the food on his table. He wears purple, a color whose dye was extremely rare and costly to produce in the ancient world, and all his clothes are of fine linen fabrics. Essentially, we are being told to picture the ancient Near East version of designer clothing and high thread counts. Not only is this man rich- he is ostentatious, with his wealth on display with every stitch of clothing he wears. On top of his designer clothes, the rich man feasts sumptuously every day. To feast, to fill a table with multiple courses of flavorful and varied foods and to eat past fullness, was a luxury reserved for special occasions by even the wealthy in the ancient world. Families and communities would come together to create lavish wedding banquets for new couples and to fill the bellies of the bereaved in the wake of funerals, combining resources and stretching ingredients as far as they would go. So to feast every day? This guy must be unfathomably rich. And wasteful. To expect the household to produce such excess of food would require more ingredients than most families would consume in a lifetime. He would have to have enough land and laborers to produce this much food, and enough money to import what couldn’t be grown locally. He would have to have enough servants and wives and daughters to sustain such a workload, while he himself enjoyed the fruits of their labors day in and day out. Perhaps he is a hard worker himself, perhaps not- that fact does not seem to be relevant to Jesus as he tells this story.

Lazarus, on the other hand, is a poor man with some kind of chronic skin condition. Perhaps his condition has been caused by his exposure to the elements and lack of access to medical care and hygiene, or perhaps his economic status was caused by this disabling condition. We know less about what Lazarus does, and more about what he wishes he could do. He longs for the scraps, the crumbs that must inevitably fall from an overfull feasting table. He longs to be relieved from his hunger, even by a small margin. He lays outside the gate of the rich man, who passes him by without offering him so much as a morsel. The only compassion Lazarus receives in life is from the stray dogs who come and tend to his wounds. We know nothing of his faith, or his righteousness. We only know that Lazarus is hungry, and alone, and very nearby there is someone who could change his life with a word.

The rich man cannot claim ignorance, cannot claim that he did not see the man wasting away at his gate. Jesus tells us that the rich man knew Lazarus by name, he recognized him in the afterlife and tried to assign him a task based solely on that familiarity. The unhoused Lazarus made a home outside the gate of the rich man’s estate, perhaps in hopes of surviving on scraps or perhaps because he hoped the proximity to such wealth and power would protect him from harm at the hands of others. I wonder if the rich man ever called the guards to remove Lazarus, or if he ever erected a No Trespassing sign. Were this scenario to take place today, as it does every hour of the day across this country, Lazarus may be arrested for panhandling or loitering.

I think this is what they meant when those podcasters said that the point of this story is not the afterlife. The question of Heaven or Hades is a great way to avoid thinking about the tangible, relational, economic realities of our common life. Wondering who will end up where gets us off the hook of looking at how we ourselves live and how we treat our neighbors, especially the ones who don’t live in the next house over but rather outside at the gate. The parable is not about whether rich people can get into heaven or if hell exists. The parable is about the two men on either side of the gate.

The rich man had the kind of wealth that could have changed Lazarus’s entire existence in one afternoon, without blinking an eye or even changing anything about his own lifestyle. He could have literally swept the leavings off the floor under the table, like Lazarus prayed for, and that would have been a miracle to the poor man outside the gate. He could have done that barest minimum, and perhaps Lazarus would have lived long enough to find a cure for what ailed him. More than that, the rich man could have invited Lazarus in to sit at his table, to feast with him, to bath and dress in fine linens and sleep someplace softer than the hard earth under the sky. He could have employed him, if Lazarus was able-bodied enough to work, and paid him a livable wage. He could have found him physicians to treat his sores, and give him shelter while he healed. All of this was within the rich man’s power and privilege to accomplish. But he chose to stay on his side of the gate.

There are many people like this rich man in our world today, more than there have ever been before. But most of us don’t live in that economic bracket of head to toe designer clothes and daily feasts. Most of us still look for the sale and budget carefully and have known seasons of life when it’s been hard to make the ends meet. It feels impossible, when we look at the gaping chasm of the world’s needs, to make any kind of impact at all as regular people. But the vast majority of the time, we aren’t faced with the chasm. We are just separated from one another by a gate.

This parable comes in a long line of parables that Jesus tells the crowds while under the watchful eye of some elites who aren’t happy with where he’s resting his head. Jesus is dining with Pharisees and tax collectors and sinners, he’s teaching women and Gentiles, he’s healing everyone who asks. He’s choosing to reach out and touch the poor man outside the gate, and he’s choosing to sit at the feast of the rich man, and he’s telling both of them about a better way. Jesus opens the gate wide again and again in his ministry, until finally he breaks it down altogether. The Church that was born from the rubble was a place where the wealthy divested from their property so that the poor and the orphaned and the widowed would be cared for forever. This Church was and is meant to be a place without a gate dividing the haves from the havenots, a place where making ends meet is always a group project and no one is ever left alone with their wounds exposed. When the world tries to tell us who is invited to the table and who must stay outside the gate, we must answer back that Jesus has freed us from such divisions. Pay attention, and recognize where our tables are overladen and our neighbors are facing emptiness. Identify the gates you erected, and tear them down. Jesus will be waiting to lead you on the other side.