A sermon for Provoking Faith in a Time of Isolation
The online Gathering of Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church
14 March 2021
The Rich man and Lazarus by James Tissot.
Public Domain: From the Online Collection of Brooklyn Museum.
Our gospel reading for this morning,
the troubling and
difficult parable
of the rich man and
Lazarus,
raises for us the issue of the extent to which
actions committed in
this life
have eternal
consequences.
In many ways it is a deceptively simple story,
which seems to owe its
origin
to the Egyptian story
of Setme,
who
observes the elaborate funeral procession of a rich man
and the
absence of any procession for a poor man
who
is being carried to the graveyard.
Setme thinks the rich
are much better off,
but his son
expresses the desire that Setme, at his death,
will
experience the funeral of the poor man.
Setme is initially
devastated that his son seems to be wishing him ill;
but then his
son takes him on a tour of the realm of the dead,
and Setme sees an
elegantly dressed man seated close by the god Osiris.
It turns
out that this is the poor man, dressed in the rich man’s clothes,
and he is being
honoured because his good deeds
had
been more numerous than his sins
and
he hadn’t been compensated during his earthly life.
The rich man, however,
had more sins than good deeds,
and is seen
being punished by having a hinge-pin
from the
gate to the realm of the dead impaled in his right eye.
The lesson from the
Egyptian story seems to be
that
whoever is good on the earth,
will
find that underworld is good to them.
Whilst
whoever is evil on the earth,
will
find that eternity goes badly for them.
This conviction that wrongs will be righted,
and imbalances
redressed, in the afterlife
Was also common in Greek and Roman mythology,
with the idea of some
kind of judgment after death
resulting
in punishment or reward in eternity
being found in both
Plato and Plutarch.
Interestingly, the Jewish view was less clear-cut,
and there are a variety
of traditions within the Hebrew scriptures
as to how the Jews
thought cosmic justice might work.
What we need to be very alert to is that our contemporary understanding
of ‘hell’,
with all that it means
to us,
owes far more to Greco-Roman mythology
and to some of the
developments of theology in the middle ages,
than it does to either the Jewish tradition
or to the teaching of
Jesus.
In the Hebrew Bible,
there was a tradition,
originating from the book of Deuteronomy, which asserted
that those
who are good will have good lives
whilst
those who are bad will have bad lives.
And the logic of this was that
if someone was having a
bad life,
they must in some way
have deserved it.
Whilst those who had many good things in life,
were free to enjoy
their blessings that came from God.
However, this rather simplistic cause-and-effect theology
certainly wasn’t the
only attempt to understand the relationship
between
behavior, and reward and punishment.
The book of Job, for example,
is an exploration in
narrative form
of why it might be that
bad things happen to good people,
and the conclusion of
Job is that the eponymous hero didn’t deserve his fate;
rather his
troubles were sent to him to test his faith.
However, he still eventually receives an earthy reward
for his
faithfulness through his difficulties,
with a new wife and
family and possessions given to him
at the end of the story
to compensate him for
those that had been taken from him.
It’s actually fairly late in the Jewish tradition
that the idea of reward
and punishment occurring after death
starts to become part
of the thinking.
And even by the time of Jesus, it is a far from universal belief
that God judges and
then rewards or punishes people after death.
For example, the Jewish group known as the Sadducees
were well known for not
having a belief in the afterlife at all (Lk 20.27).
Whilst the Pharisees had a fairly well developed understanding
of an afterlife that
comprised either reward or punishment.
There are three key words which it’s worth knowing about
if we’re going to try
and get to grips
with the background to
the story of the rich man and Lazarus,
and these are Sheol, Hades, and Gehenna.
The first of these, Sheol, is an Old Testament, Hebrew word,
which is used to
describe ‘the place of the dead’
It occurs 65 times throughout the Old Testament,
and mostly does not
appear to mean anything more than ‘the grave’, or just ‘death’,
rather than
to any understanding of ‘life after death’.
What we know of Sheol from the Old Testament is that it is down, dark,
and silent.
It is the unknown void
into which people pass
and from which they never
return.
When the Hebrew Bible, or the Old Testament as we call it,
was translated into
Greek,
The Greek word Hades was used for the Hebrew word Sheol.
And this brought with it into the Jewish tradition
all of the Greek
connotations that the word Hades had already acquired.
In the tradition of Greek mythology
the name Hades was
primarily used to refer to the god of the underworld,
who,
together with his brothers Zeus and Poseidon
had
defeated the Titans to rule over the entire cosmos.
Zeus got to rule the
air, Poseidon got to rule the sea, and Hades got the underworld.
In time, Hades also
came secondarily to refer to the underworld itself
Within the Greek mythology,
it was possible for
people to make visits to Hades,
with
Heracles learning the secret entrance to and from Hades.
And so it was that the Hebrew concept of Sheol,
the place of silence
and darkness,
started to acquire the characteristics of the Greek underworld Hades,
where people could have
adventures,
and where exciting or
terrible things happened.
This fusion of Sheol with Hades
led to the development
of the idea within Judaism
of the
afterlife as a place of punishment and reward,
with Hades being
somewhere
that both
the righteous and the unrighteous might go.
So, in Acts 2, Jesus is
spoken of as going to Hades at his death,
returning
from there at his resurrection (Acts 2.27,31).
Sometimes in the later Jewish tradition,
Hades was thought of as
a place not so much of punishment,
but more
like a holding cell,
where people are
detained until some future judgment day.
But sometimes, as in Jesus’ parable,
it is a place where
punishment is already taking place.
The New Testament uses the word Hades only ten times:
four times in the
gospels, a couple of times in Acts,
and four times in the
book of Revelation where it is always teamed up with death.
The third word that we need to know about as a place of judment,
in addition to Sheol
and Hades,
is the word ‘Gehenna’,
a word adapted from the Hebrew ge hinnom,
the valley
outside Jerusalem
which
had been a site of child sacrifice in 2 Kgs 23.10
and became
a pit for burning garbage.
This word, Gehenna, is usually
translated into English as ‘Hell’,
and typically refers to
the place where bad things are burned away.
So, for example, Jesus says it is better to cut off your sinful hand and
throw it away
than it is for your
whole body to be thrown into Gehenna.
And that’s it, as far as Hell is concerned.
We have the dark silent
void of the grave in Sheol.
We have the Greek
mythological underworld of Hades,
and we have the fiery
city rubbish tip of Gehenna.
The problem with the word Gehenna
being translated into English as ‘Hell’
is that just as when Sheol became Hades it inherited all the baggage
of the Graeco-Roman understanding of the underworld,
so when Gehenna becomes ‘Hell’
it inherits all the medieval imagery of Hell
that isn’t part of the
Jewish or early Christian tradition.
Hell, as far as the biblical witness is concerned,
contains no pitchforks, no Hieronymus Bosch, no Dante’s inferno,
no limbo, no purgatory,
In short, no hell as we
often think of it.
And it is within this context
that we need to
encounter Jesus’ story of the rich man and Lazarus.
Jesus is not offering a description of a future post-mortem existence
where the damned and
the saved can see each other across the divide.
He isn’t setting forth a comprehensive account
of what happens to
people when they die.
Rather, he is telling a story
to make a very
important point.
And the key to understanding that point
lies in just who he is
telling the story to.
The clue lies just a few verses earlier, in v. 14:
‘The Pharisees, who were lovers of money,
heard all this, and they ridiculed him.’
Jesus’ story is aimed at the Pharisees:
the one Jewish group that had an especially well
developed concept
of who was going to
spend eternity suffering apart from God,
and who was going to
spend eternity safe within the embrace of father Abraham.
This parable isn’t Jesus systematically setting out
his own cosmological
understanding
of the relationship
between the here and the hereafter.
Rather, he is engaging, as he does in so many other places,
with those who think
they have a monopoly on the ‘right’ answers
to the questions of
life and death.
And Jesus tells this story to show the Pharisees,
that their carefully
wrought certainties
might not be so certain
after all.
The Pharisees were convinced that by their meticulous religious
observances,
and by their careful ethical
practices,
they had earned themselves the right to call the shots
on who was eternally
in,
and who was eternally
out.
And it is precisely this certainty,
that Jesus is seeking
to overthrow in this parable.
The Pharisees were rich, both materially and spiritually,
and they believed they
were rich because they were blessed,
and they believed that
because they were blessed,
they would
spend eternity with God.
They also believed that those who were not like them,
and were poor in body
and spirit,
were that
way for a reason,
and that their poor
state would also continue into eternity.
So imagine the effect of Jesus story,
when the rich and
apparently blessed man finds himself in Hades,
with the poor man Lazarus safe with Father Abraham.
Jesus is taking the clinical and judgmental logic of the Pharisees
and turning it against
them.
The warning could not be more stark:
those who judge others
are at most
risk of themselves being judged;
those who do not exercise
forgiveness and compassion towards others
may not
experience forgiveness and compassion themselves.
There are some of us Christians who are very quick to point the finger
at those whom we are
quick to condemn,
And there is a warning here that we ignore at our peril.
It’s interesting that the rich man doesn’t do anything overtly evil to
the beggar.
This rich man is not a
wicked or a cruel man.
In many ways, he was
probably a very good man.
But, and it is a very big but, he simply fails to see Lazarus:
he is blind to the
suffering of the poor,
he cannot see beyond
his own comfort and his own security.
And his failure to recognise the humanity of Lazarus,
is a failure that
carries eternal consequences.
You see, whilst we may not want to extrapolate from this parable
to a medieval view of
punishment in the afterlife,
neither does it offer us the opportunity
of thinking that our
lives carry no eternal value.
This is no mandate to eat, drink, and be merry
for tomorrow we die.
In fact, quite the opposite.
It seems that the
message of Jesus is very clear.
How we live today
determines, in a very real sense, how we shall be eternally.
If we live life for the rewards of the here and now,
without heeding the
call of God to have regard for the lives of others,
then the contribution of our lives to God’s eternity
might turn out to be
less than we would like to think it is.
We need perhaps to be less concerned with our avoiding hell in the
hereafter,
and more concerned with
the circles of hell that we create and perpetuate
for others to inhabit
in the here-and-now.
Albert Schweitzer, the theology professor and world-class organist,
gave up his life of
wealth and status,
and became a missionary doctor in Africa.
When asked why, he pointed to the parable of the rich man and Lazarus.
In his mind, the parable seemed spoken directly to Europeans,
and he said ‘We are the
rich man,
[whilst]
out there in the colonies sits wretched Lazarus.’
This situation has not changed,
and it is not limited
to Africa.
Listen to how Tom Wright puts it:
We have all seen him.
He lies on a pile of
newspapers outside a shop doorway,
covered
with a rough blanket.
Perhaps he has a dog
with him for safety.
People walk
past him, or even step over him.
He occasionally rattles
a few coins in a tin or cup, asking for more…
As I see him, I hear
voices.
It’s his
own fault, they say. He’s chosen it.
There are
agencies to help him. He should go and get a job.
If we give
him money he’ll only spend it on drink.
Stay away –
he might be violent.
Sometimes, in some
places, the police will move him on,
exporting
the problem somewhere else. But he’ll be back.
And even if he isn’t,
there are whole societies like that.
They camp
in tin shacks on the edges of large, rich cities.
From the door of their
tiny makeshift shelters
you can see
the high-rise hotels and office blocks where,
if they’re
very lucky, one member of the family might work as a cleaner.
They have been born
into debt, and in debt they will stay,
through the
fault of someone rich and powerful
who signed
away their rights, their lives in effect, a generation or two ago,
in return
for arms, a new presidential palace, a fat Swiss bank account.
And even if rich and
poor don’t always live side by side so blatantly,
the
television brings us together.
So we all know Lazarus. He is our neighbour.
And Lazarus is currently living in hell,
and it is a hell that
others have had a hand in creating.
It is a hell that we have had a hand in creating.
And Jesus calls those of us who are not currently living in hell,
to see Lazarus sitting
in poverty at the bottom of the pile,
and he calls us to dip
our finger in the water of life
and to
offer it to Lazarus to cool his tongue.
Poverty is not to be sanctified,
and neither is wealth
to be vilified.
Poverty is not a gift from God but a problem,
often the result of sin
by numerous people,
which needs relieving.
Wealth may indeed be a blessing of God and the result of hard work,
but also, as the Greek
dramatist Menander put it,
‘property
is a veil for many evils’.
Jesus’ parable attacks a particular kind of wealth,
it attacks the wealth
that does not see poverty and
suffering.
It attacks the idea that possessions are for one’s own use,
and that they are owned
without responsibility to God and other people.
This is not, as some have feared, an opiate for the poor
which will keep them
satisfied with a handout.
The parable does not tell us how the wealthy are to assist the poor,
but it insists that the
poor are brothers and sisters of the wealthy,
and that the injustice
of the juxtaposition of wealth and poverty
cannot be
tolerated within God’s eternal perspective.
Our lives matter eternally to God,
and when the dross is
cast into Gehenna to be burned away,
and when we pass
through Sheol to the arms of Father
Abraham,
there will be a
question to answer.
And it may well be this:
Did you see Lazarus?
This sermon borrows extensively from Klyne R. Snodgrass, Stories with Intent: A Comprehensive Guide
to the Parables of Jesus, Eerdmans, Cambridge: 2008; and Tom Wright, Luke for Everyone, SPCK, London: 2001.
No comments:
Post a Comment