This Sunday, the Rich Man and Lazarus and Our Two Paths Forward

The story of the Rich Man and Lazarus, along with the rest of the readings for the Twenty-Sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C, are a lesson in how our priorities today determines our happiness hereafter.

Here are six takeaways drawn from Sunday Readings columns at this site and the Extraordinary Story podcast.

First: The Gospel passage this Sunday isn’t about wealth. It’s about self-centeredness.

The Gospel reading from Luke this Sunday is the story about the rich man and the poor man, Lazarus, on his doorstep. But it isn’t about people with a lot of money — it is about people who live a self-centered lifestyle.

St. Jerome, whose feast we celebrate Sept. 30, said, “The rich man, in purple splendor, is not accused of being greedy or of carrying off the property of another, or of committing adultery, or in fact of any wrongdoing. The evil alone of which he is guilty is pride.”

This is important to note for Americans, who are wealthy compared to the rest of the world. We need to know that, as St. Ambrose put it, “Not all poverty is holy, or all riches criminal, but luxury disgraces riches.”

The rich man in Jesus’ story isn’t just rich — he is focused on luxuries, including what he wears (“dressed in purple garments and fine linen”) and what he eats (“sumptuously”) each day. Meanwhile, he apparently ignores the poverty right outside his gate in the person of Lazarus.

So the first lesson of Sunday’s Gospel is to prioritize helping others over luxuries for ourselves.

The truth is, giving our money away is actually a better strategy for happiness. Dave Ramsey’s popular money-management advice site lists the reasons “Why Giving Makes You Feel So Good.”  The Harvard Business Review recently cited 15 scientific studies to point out the same thing.

But Christians have long known that nothing will make you happier than what you give away — because Jesus himself is present in the poor, and he blesses us when we give.

As Christians, the Our Father prayer is our rallying cry. In it, we ask God not for “my” daily bread, but for “our” daily bread. God is the giver of all good things, and he gives them not to individuals but to all of us, togethe. What we have, we have to share.

Second: The parable also shows how heaven flips the priorities we have on earth.

The rich rule the world as we know it. Their names command respect, and the world takes notice when they die. Their wealth leaves legacies that outlive them in institutions that enshrine their names.

But in Jesus’s story in Sunday’s Gospel we never learn the name of the rich man, and his death is treated without fanfare. He merely says, “The rich man also died and was buried” and “from the netherworld, where he was in torment, he raised his eyes and saw Abraham far off and Lazarus at his side.”

What the rich man learns, too late, is that only one name has left a real legacy: the poor man Lazarus’s. Because, while poor people live unnoticed in our world, after death, it’s the opposite.

“When the poor man died, he was carried away by angels to the bosom of Abraham,” says Jesus. This is what Jesus meant by “Blessed are the poor in spirit for the kingdom of heaven is theirs.”

St. Paul in the Second Reading reminds each of us is supposed to follow in Lazarus’s footsteps.

“Lay hold of eternal life, to which you were called when you made the noble confession in the presence of many witnesses,” he says pointing to our baptism as the start of the serious pursuit of what really matters in life — “righteousness, devotion, faith, love, patience, and gentleness;” the virtues of the Kingdom.

Third: But, to tell the whole truth about Sunday’s Gospel, we have to mention hell.

In Jesus’s story Lazarus ends up in the bosom of Abraham. The rich man ends in hell — which Jesus describes by using one word four times: the word torment.

The rich man “was in torment,” he says. He calls out, “I am suffering torment in these flames.” Abraham says Lazarus “is comforted here, whereas you are in torment” and the rich man, too late, wants to warn his brothers “lest they too come to this place of torment.”

The Son of God himself here is saying:  Make no mistake: Hell is real, and it is a place of “torment.”

Two millennia of saints have followed Christ’s example and energetically told as many people as possible how to avoid going there, from St. John the Evangelist and St. Paul — to St. Jacinta who said “It is necessary to pray much to save souls from hell!” and St. Padre Pio who said of those who disbelieve: “They will believe in hell when they get there.”

Fourth: The case of the rich man and Lazarus is Christ’s own answer to arguments against hell.

The truly great theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar wrote a book called Dare We Hope That all Men Be Saved? which makes a number of important points. First, we honestly don’t know whether or not any particular person is in hell. Second, we should not actively desire for anyone to be there. God doesn’t; he desires everyone to be saved. So, third, we have to be able to intellectually see that it could be the case that everyone is saved.

But I fear that in our day of waning belief in hell, the question “Dare we hope that all men be saved?” quickly turns into the question, “How dare you believe that anyone can be damned?” But Sunday’s Gospel is why we dare: Jesus practically describes someone going there.

And he gives the perfect story to illustrate damnation, because it is very difficult for us to imagine that wealthy oppressors of the poor will go from a life of earthly luxury to an eternal life of “luxury” with God.

In fact, the First Reading this Sunday, form the prophet Amos, describes what looks like a caricatured picture of heaven, with people lying “on beds of ivory” eating and drinking what they like and playing harps. But since the scene happens on earth, not in the afterlife, he says “Woe to the complacent in Zion!”

As Christ quotes Abraham saying to the rich man in the Gospel: “You received what was good during your lifetime while Lazarus likewise received what was bad; but now he is comforted here, whereas you are tormented.”

Fifth: That means hell or heaven for us starts now.

One prominent author who rejects belief in hell recently said it is “absurd” to imagine a sane person “choosing eternal loneliness and torment rather than eternal love and bliss.” But that’s not how it happens.

We don’t choose loneliness, we choose selfishness, then become lonely; we choose not to love, then find ourselves unable to love; we choose not to control our appetites, then find ourselves addicted; we choose to avoid the truth, then find we have become liars.

C.S. Lewis says the most common road to hell “is the gradual one — the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.”

Benedictine College economics professor Rick Coronado recently described a conversation he had with a parish priest about how Americans take that road.

“He believed that active decisions to sin, such as the decision to be greedy, did happen, of course, but that was not the path to sin for most people. Rather, it was the simple urge to be comfortable, to make life easier for oneself and one’s family. Concupiscence, in a word. That simple impulse — pursued day in and day out, over the course of a lifetime — he had learned, unless challenged constantly, resulted in people slowly sliding away from their spiritual life and neglecting their duties to others.”

Step by step we become the rich man in the story, unwilling and unable to see Lazarus in our midst.

Sixth: If this Sunday’s Gospel reading is a wake-up call, this Sunday’s holy communion is the first step on the road to heaven.

“The Lord grieves over the rich, because they find their consolation in the abundance of goods,” says the Catechism (CCC 2547). But it also gives the cure: “All Christ’s faithful are to ‘direct their affections rightly, lest they be hindered in their pursuit of perfect charity’” (CCC 2545).

The first place to reset your affections is Holy Communion, which unites us with Christ and gives us the grace to see and serve the poor.

This Sunday at Mass, place yourself spiritually on the paten with the host and asked to be transformed into the Christian you want to be: So united with Jesus that you act on his behalf for the poor in the world, and not just yourself.

Image: Wikimedia

By Tom Hoopes