We all remember the Golden Rule from our kindergarten days: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Generally, we all learned this in response to our demonstrating some selfish impulse. We took someone else’s toy, or made fun of them in front of others, without a shred of empathy as to how it would make them feel. At four and five years of age, those empathy skills are still in their nascent stages, and we are at the center of our own universes. Our parents, family, teachers and leaders had to constantly work on our predilection for self-centeredness so that we could understand how our actions impacted others, and more importantly, to care about it. But that core, that spark, resided in us; they only needed to instill the discipline that is needed to exercise it.
Jesus put this in much more specific terms in the Gospels: Love your neighbors as yourselves. In fact, He challenged us even further by telling us to love our enemies as well. That does not instruct us to despise ourselves, but to see ourselves, our neighbors, and yes, even our enemies, in our proper place in the Lord’s kingdom.
Today’s gospel parable (Luke 16:19-31) clearly speaks to that teaching, and in a much more understandable manner than last week’s gospel, which almost directly precedes today’s gospel. It echoes our first reading (Amos 6:1, 4-7), in which the prophet warns “the complacent in Zion,” who have been lulled into a false sense of security through a wealth of material pleasures. They put so much focus on their own pleasure that they do not seem affected by “the collapse of Joseph,” the coming defeat and exile of the northern kingdom of Israel. Because Israel does not focus on the Lord and care for each other, they are first to go into exile, as the Lord promises to Amos just a few years before the Assyrians sack Israel. Judah, the southern kingdom, will not learn the lesson either and will fall a century later.
Jesus’ parable takes a much more direct and personal approach. Speaking to the Pharisees, Jesus tells the tale of a man whose wealth blinds him to the poor at his very door. In fact, the rich man isn’t really blinded at all, as we see when both he and the poor man die. He knows very well who Lazarus is; he just couldn’t be bothered to help him in life. Suddenly, though, Lazarus becomes very, very important to the rich man, but by then it is too late.
It’s worth noting that the rich man still sees Lazarus as more of a servant than his equal and is still more consumed with his own predicament than Lazarus’, whom he calls into the torment to bring him comfort. The rich man still hasn’t really learned caritas, although he has enough of a sense of it to try to save his brothers from his own fate. And this, of course, is where Jesus’ parable really stings.
The Pharisees had agitated for Jesus to perform signs specifically for them in order to prove his status as the Messiah. Jesus spent his mission performing works among the poor, not the powerful, which makes this parable a reflection of his own ministry — and casts the Pharisees into the role of the rich man in an entirely different way than the literal. The Pharisees’ desire for the Lord to serve them parallels the rich man’s desire for Lazarus to make an appearance to his family for their redemption, to which Abraham replies that they should have listened to Moses and the prophets. Jesus then predicts that the Pharisees — and many others — won’t listen even if someone should return from the dead, a prophecy that Jesus Himself will literally prove not long after this meeting.
What lessons are we to learn from this? In a literal sense, the poor remind us to live outside of ourselves and to orient ourselves to service rather than greed and gluttony. In the case of the rich man, he dissipated his own salvation by ignoring Lazarus, who finally received justice in the bosom of Abraham. But this parable also teaches us that demanding new signs and miracles as a pretext for our belief is just another way of putting ourselves at the center of the universe rather than The Lord. We have Moses, the prophets, and the gospel, as well as the risen Christ.
And there’s another lesson; one directed to us by Paul in his letter to Timothy (1 Timothy 6:11-16). We are to “pursue righteousness, devotion, faith, love, patience, and gentleness,” not as a means to an end, or even for our own sake, but for the sake of Christ and the Father. This lesson calls us to orient ourselves and our lives in this fashion in order to open ourselves to that caritas that goes beyond the Golden Rule and our often more transactional or even karmic understanding of it: Don’t be mean unless you want people to be mean to you. Jesus’ teachings emphasize love, or in the Latin, caritas — the self-giving, self-emptying love that comes from truly wanting the best for someone else. Love others even when they do not love you, we are taught.
And why? Because that’s how God loves us. He loves us through our sin, our rebellion, and wants us to find our way to Him out of love rather than out of duty or out of self-interest. He wants us to join Him in a kingdom of caritas love, but first we have to orient ourselves to become part of it. When we do, we can join Lazarus, Abraham, and the saints as brothers and sisters, siblings of one Father, who desires above all else to celebrate our return to Him.
May God Bless You and Grant You His Peace!