Seeing Lazarus (4th Sunday of Lent; Luke 16:19-31; March 26, 2017)

Seeing Lazarus

4th Sunday of Lent
Luke 16:19-31
March 26, 2017

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, Iowa

They didn't have zoning ordinances in the ancient world. The various social classes were pretty mixed up. Every class was found everywhere, even in the "better neighborhoods." In fact, we what we might call a "house" in the ancient Greco-Roman city was really a whole complex that included spaces for the family, their slaves, and their clients (and sometimes their clients' clients). They all lived in what was more or less the same building. Wealthy families were in frequent contact with slaves, freeborn folk, and those who had been slaves but had been freed at some point. They were all bound together by laws and conventions.

But then, of course, once beyond the gates, rich people were confronted with an unregulated mass. There were other people's slaves and clients. There were the destitute, people with so little to offer that even selling themselves into slavery wasn't an option. There were day laborers, beggars, and, in most cities, an unsavory element of runaway slaves and thieves. The ones with a little money might live in the tenements that cursed every city with odors of garbage and sewage and the miasma of disease. This general picture would have been true even in the small cities of Roman Palestine.

So, without proper zoning ordinances to keep the undesirables out of sight, it's no surprise that the rich man in our story had to trip over Lazarus every time he left the house, every time he went to visit his friends, every time he left to attend the town assembly. Every time he came home late at night there was Lazarus, lying on the sidewalk.

Still, even without zoning ordinances or anti-vagrancy laws, the rich man had another and really a rather brilliant way of not having to deal with Lazarus: he simply stopped seeing him.

I know exactly what this is about. I grew up in a suburb of Rochester, NY. In those days downtown was still a place people went to shop. The main public library was downtown. So was the largest bookstore in the county. I was drawn to these like a moth to a flame. Saturday would often find me taking a city bus downtown for the day. I wasn't the only one. A slice of the city was there, too. Some worked in the stores, some were there to shop. There was a lot of bustling going on downtown. I have never been much of a bustler myself, but I do like to watch it.

In this way I was first exposed to beggars, men almost all of them, the wreckage of humanity who had fared badly in life's storms and had washed up on the sidewalks and alleyways of the center of the city. They would ask me for money to buy food. I didn’t know what to do. My Dad told me that he used to offer to buy them lunch. This sorted out the people who were wanting to buy alcohol and only once had it resulted in his actually buying a man lunch. But that sounded pretty scary to me as a twelve year old. When a beggar asked me for money it put me in a very uncomfortable place. On the one hand I was a nice kid who was raised to be kind. On the other hand, I just couldn't see myself responding as my Dad. So I simply learned to non-see them.

Oh, their images appeared on the retinas of my eyes, but not in the visual cortex of my brain. They took up space and sometimes they made noise that, if I concentrated on it, I could make out as speech. But I saw them only as physical objects. I learned not to make eye contact with them. Otherwise my defenses would have failed. I learned to non-see them.

That's what the unnamed rich man learned to do, too. He may have had more practice than I did in non-seeing people, but he had a disadvantage, too. Did you notice in the story? Lazarus was not some nameless derelict. This man knew him. I wonder, where did he know him from? It's not as if they went to same parties.

I’m thinking maybe their relationship must have been business. Lazarus could have been a tenant farmer, renting a small plot of land from the rich man, where he grew a little barley, maybe, or a few grapes or olives. It was hard work and hardly produced a living. It wasn’t the sort of work that anyone aspired to. Little boys when asked what they wanted to be when they grew up didn’t answer, “I want to be a tenant farmer just like my Dad!" Peasants got to be tenant farmers when they lost their own land and had to rent land instead. In good years tenant farming was barely a living. The landlord got a portion of the harvest and, no matter how careful Lazarus was to hide as much of it as he could, he gave up more than he could spare. That was in good years.

In bad years, Lazarus would have to go to his landlord to get the money to buy seeds. At the end of that year he would owe his rent plus the interest on the loan. Sooner or later the tenant farmer would find himself owing everything he could grow. A year’s work and nothing to show for it— out on the street with the tunic on his back and nothing else. If Lazarus had a family, it was at this point that he lost it. If he was lucky he found places for his sons and daughters, otherwise he would have had to sell them into slavery or simply shove them out the front door. If he was lucky his wife’s family would take her back, although, really, why would they?

So maybe the rich man watched all this happen, watched Lazarus get further and further behind until he was finally broken--or broke, as we usually put it.

Then Lazarus’s choices became desperate. He could work as a day laborer for a while. (We read about those folks in the gospels.) They earned—when they were working— just enough to stay alive. Maybe the rich man gave him some work, when he had any to give, of course.

But he didn’t always have work to give, so Lazarus didn’t work every day. Which meant that he didn’t eat every day. He grew weaker. He got sick easily. He suffered from the diseases of malnutrition, so, among other things, cuts, scrapes and bruises didn’t heal very well, sometimes not at all.

Finally the day came when Lazarus was too sick to work. The only thing he could do then was beg. Begging, he was no longer dying slowly. He dragged himself to his landlord’s gate and there he hoped to shame the rich man into showing mercy. But the rich man wouldn't show mercy to a man he had decided he could not see. As Lazarus grew weaker he could no longer even defend himself from the street dogs.

Jesus doesn’t give all this detail in his story because his first hearers didn’t need it. Neither did Luke’s readers. They watched this happen all the time. It could have happened to friends or relatives. It might even have happened to one of them. Did you know that in the early church congregations raised funds to buy the freedom of their members who had had to sell themselves into slavery? It's true.

Anyway, I suspect that the rich man watched it happen to Lazarus.

Maybe that’s how the rich man knew Lazarus’s name when he himself died. I’m sure he couldn’t understand what had happened. One minute he was laughing with his friends, the next he was choking on a bone from a roast peacock. Everything went dark for a minute and then he awoke to discover that he himself was roasting.

In case you are disturbed by the disturbing picture painted of the afterlife, please remember that the notion that the righteous poor would experience the good life (if we can use that word), while the wicked rich would be punished with flames, was one of a number of ideas current in those days about what awaited people after they died, not something that Jesus made up. Jesus simply took a theme that he found lying around and wove into his story. I wouldn't set a lot of store by Jesus' description.

Anyway, the rich man knew Lazarus. And, apparently, they had a zoning ordinance in Hades, because, while he could see Lazarus, he couldn’t get to him. There was a barrier, a “crevasse” Abraham calls it, that separated them. I think it was there for Lazarus’ protection, to keep the rich man from thinking that he could still order him around. “Abraham, tell Lazarus to fetch me some water!” “Abraham, tell Lazarus to go warn my brothers!” Old habits die hard, I guess. Just who in Hades did he think he was, anyway? Do you notice that now it's the rich man who is doing all the begging?

I guess the rich man's strategy for dealing with Lazarus didn't work out so well. Non-seeing Lazarus while at the same time stepping over his emaciated body hardly gave him the excuse that he needed. He could hardly say, “Gee, Abraham, I had no idea that things had gotten that bad for Lazarus. I knew things were tough. He’d come around looking for work and then he didn’t come around any more. I didn’t know what had happened to him. It’s too bad, rotten luck, but I didn’t know.” He had no excuse.

This could all have ended much differently for the rich man and it would have cost him so little in the big scheme of things. The leftovers from his table would have fed him better than he had eaten even during the good years. Giving Lazarus a corner in a third-story room so that he could sleep in safety would have cost him nothing at all. But first the rich man would have had to see Lazarus, and this he refused to do.

I think his text has haunted us.
In fact, I suspect that, whether consciously or not, our response to poverty has been shaped by this little parable.

We’ve listened to the story of the rich man and Lazarus. We’ve seen that the rich man had some covenant obligation to the man he knew by name dying on his doorstep. Without thinking it through, we’ve concluded that we can avoid that obligation by getting the destitute out of sight and making sure that we don’t know any of them personally.

We spend a lot of money, both public and private, on various issues around poverty, but I notice that it’s just enough money to salve our national conscience, but not enough to really change the situation for the poor. As Shane Claiborne observes, we are managing poverty, not ending it. And lately I've noticed there is a lot of anger toward poor people. They are blamed not only for their own poverty, but even for the uneasy consciences of those are lucky enough not to be poor.

We have certainly put a good deal of energy into rendering destitution invisible. We don't see many homeless folks in Decorah because this isn't a good place to live if you are homeless. There are no soup kitchens and no shelters. There is no place to get your clothes washed, no place to get warm, no place to stay dry, no place that the cops mostly leave alone where you can sleep if you can scrounge a cardboard box. We don't see them because they are not here.

In the cities where they do live, they aren't seen either, but that's because people see past and through them. And that is how they come to lose their humanity. We all need to be seen, to be noticed in our particularity and in our shared identity as human. We need to be seen. To be seen is to be real. Without it we start to fade away. If we are unseen long enough we will disappear.

But notice what happens in the story. The man with all the advantages, the rich man, the one who thinks that he can throw his weight around even in Hades, the one who refuses to see the human being at his own doorstep, is a man who has no name. He is simply called "the rich man." Oh, in some versions of this story he is called "Dives." Dives is not a name; it's a Latin word that means: rich man. The man who refuses to see loses his own name, his own identity. He becomes a function, an object. And he did it to himself, everyday. Every time he non-saw Lazarus. Every time he stepped over him on the way out of his gate to go and see his rich friends. Every time he didn't hear Lazarus beg for a scrap of bread or a denarius. Each time, he dwindled and became less until finally he was no one at all.

Lazarus on the other hand found himself in bosom of Abraham. I don't know what that means exactly, but it must be good.

So now, what do we do? Well, for one thing, I'm not twelve years old anymore. I don't have to be scared of beggars. So when I'm in the city as I am sometimes, I can learn to see the people I've non-seen for years. We can all learn to do that. We can learn to see the invisible people behind the counters, the one's who ring up our purchases and take our lunch orders. We can learn to see poverty where we've tried to ignore it. We could even start seeing the towns around us as part of our community, places like Protovin and Freeport, places without which Decorah would not exist populated by people without whom Decorah would not run. We can open our eyes. We can open our hearts.

And someday we too will find ourselves in the bosom of Abraham. I don't know what that means exactly, but it must be good.

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