Bridging the chasm: Rich and poor, law and gospel

Luke 16:19-31

One of the hardest parts of preaching is trying to give you appropriate context to the scripture we are reading. Most of you haven’t studied the Gospel of Luke extensively—maybe you have done a Bible study on it—or maybe you’ve never read a word from Luke’s Gospel apart from Sunday mornings at church. It’s hard enough if you read the Bible every day to piece together the context, let alone if you never read it at all. But no matter what you know you need to know this: Context matters. You wouldn’t pick up a copy of Gone with the Wind, read a paragraph, and imagine you’ve got the picture. So how much more important is it with the Bible? We need to constantly be wondering: Where is Jesus in his ministry? Who is he talking to? Where has he been… where is he going? Is this story part of a bigger series of stories?

These are important questions to ask, because Jesus was not the brothers Grimm or Aesop. Their stories were distinct and universal; you can pick up a single Aesop fable and easily understand the moral. On the other hand, Jesus’ parables were specific and contextual. He told the parable of the Good Samaritan immediately after being rejected by the Samaritans. He points to Jerusalem immediately following the Transfiguration, saying that Jerusalem is where something big is going to go down. The context helps us to understand the meaning; everything after the Transfiguration is downhill to the cross and everything should be read accordingly.

One last example of contextual reading for you: In our men’s Tuesday morning Bible Study leading up to Lent we read through the book of Romans. Romans is the perfect example of a book that has to be read in whole; if you read it in part you will miss the point. If you read verses from anywhere in the first few chapters of Romans it is easy to see that Paul’s purpose in writing this book must be to convict people and strengthen the importance of the law. However, if you read anywhere from about chapter 8 on in the book of Romans it’s easy to see that Paul wrote Romans to obliterate the law. If you read all of it you will find something infinitely more interesting: Paul laid out the importance of the law to give weight to our sinfulness. Then he obliterated the law under grace’s power. But you cannot get there from reading only a single passage.

So it is with readings like today’s. The rich man and Lazarus: A parable of Jesus that, if we’re honest with ourselves, should scare us half to death, especially when read on its own. This parable better get us thinking, “What does it mean to be rich?” How much money does it take to be rich?

I read a Time magazine article this week that there is a number at which Americans consider themselves, personally, to be rich: It’s $5 million. It takes having five million dollars in the bank for the average American (who admittedly at that point is definitely not average) to consider him or herself to be rich. That might sound like an extraordinary amount, but that’s because the concept of richness is ripe with comparison. If you have no money somebody with a little money seems rich, and odds are most of us think we have only a little money, but compared to 2.7 billion people in the world who live on less than two dollars a day we live like kings! Even the poorest person in Kittson County doesn’t approach those 2.7 billion people, which should make us wonder: Is this parable really terrible news? Are we damned, like the rich man, because we haven’t given enough away to the 2.7 billion Lazaruses on our front door.

This is where context comes in. This is where we have to understand Jesus’ approach to the law or else we’re going to get this all wrong and we’re going to hate this story because it feels impractical, and then, worst of all, we won’t do anything about it because we’ll feel overwhelmed by the enormity of the task. If you believe that Jesus is telling this story to scare you into being good you are half right. Jesus does want you to love your neighbor—this is most certainly true!—and he does want you to give out of grace for all that you have been given. But Jesus also knows that we will not live up to the standards he sets.

If this parable were at the heart of the Gospel I would struggle to preach, honestly. I want to tell you: Be good people. Do good things. Serve the poor. Give away to those in need. You should—you better! But I also know you all because I know myself, and I know myself well enough to know that I don’t always give things away; I don’t give everything away, which means I don’t give enough away. And because I know myself and I know enough about the rest of you I need a story that consists of more than the law that the rich man is destined to damnation because he didn’t get it, because sometimes I know I don’t get it and then I might wonder: Am I the rich man after all? And if so then am I truly lost like him as well?

You see, this story of the rich man and Lazarus requires a second story, because it is a partial story awaiting resolution. Jesus is setting us up for the good news to come by bringing us to a place where we know we cannot do what he demands of us. This story requires us to read also a similar story from Luke 18 of another rich ruler who comes to Jesus and asks the same kind of question about salvation. This story feels the same… until it isn’t. Let me explain. This second rich man has followed all the commandments—every single one of them, he says—from the time he was young to this day. So, he was rich, yes, but he did everything God commanded of him. Still, we discover that this is not enough. He needs to give it all away… but he knows he can’t.

Two rich people… two people like you and me… and they get only the law and damnation. Jesus is crystal clear: There is no limit to the amount of sacrifice required to make ourselves holy like Lazarus. There is no limit. Everything—that’s what’s required of you. Jesus requires not a little, not a lot, not even most of what we have—he requires everything.

Jesus was harshest kind of rabbi, the one who said “The law must be followed! No exceptions!” This doesn’t really square with most of our images of Jesus, because it’s only a partial picture. But it is true. Jesus didn’t lessen the demands of the law; he strengthened the law so that nobody could read a story like this one today and come away thinking they were faithful. The demands were too much.

These stories beg us to look not for the Jesus who tells us to be good or to do good things, but instead these stories help us to desperately cling to the Jesus who dies on the cross so that the chasm between heaven and hell that he talks of in today’s reading is bridged by amazing grace. We need not only the Jesus who tells the rich ruler that it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle; we also need the Jesus who meets the disciples’ question, “Then who can be saved?” with the clear and grace-full response, “For mortals it is impossible but for God all things are possible.”

We need the whole story. Jesus condemns us fully because he knows we need to be condemned; we need to know there are real repercussions for our lack of attention to those who are in need. We need to know that not only are those people who have a lot more money than us rich in God’s eyes but so are we, and we haven’t done enough with it because the criteria is everything. Every penny along with the possessions we own, the food we eat, the water we drink, and the air we breathe. The criteria for richness is being alive. Are you alive? Then you are rich—rich beyond your imagining—no matter how little money or health or even time that you have. You have life.

We need Jesus to show us the enormity of the stakes so that we have something to live for, but then we also need Jesus to turn around and tell us the amazing truth that, at the end of the day, when we’ve tried and failed and tried again we are saved not by virtue of our trying or our succeeding but because of Jesus-himself who did it for us. Not only is that the best hope we have; it’s the only one, because we aren’t making the smallest dent in that chasm between heaven and hell without Jesus. How we live matters because of how badly we need one another, but how we die matters because of Christ’s death for us. End of story.

You know what question Jesus is not begging us to ask: “What happened to the rich man?” But since you’re all thinking it… since this is the primary question that trips us up… I’ll give you the best answer that seven years of religious study plus five years of pastoring can give: The rich man lives, because the rich man is you and me. And Lazarus? He’s you and me, too. We are both. Saints and sinners. Broken and redeemed. On the foot of the door begging for more and holding our noses up at those who desperately need our help. We are rich beyond imagining and we are nothing without Jesus. You need the whole story to get it, but it’s all there right in front of us.