Jeremiah 32:1-3a, 6-15 Psalm 91:1-6, 14-16
1 Timothy 6: 11-19 Luke 16:19-31
1 Timothy 6: 11-19 Luke 16:19-31
An obvious reality in our world today is what is called the wealth gap. One percent of the world possesses a third to forty percent of the world's assets. The bottom fifty percent own only two percent of world's assets. One might say that the wealth gap is more like a grand canyon between the haves and the have nots.
The prominent religious skeptics of the world blame religion for providing the ideology for the very few to own the majority of the wealth of the world. Karl Marx called religion the opiate of the people because religion gives the poor hope for the afterlife so that they can tolerate their less than heavenly, even hellish current lives.
And this might raise a question which biblical people might ask. Does visualizations of what the afterlife might entail absolve the people who live from working for justice? And further does Jesus believe that messages from the afterlife would change the hearts of the wealthy and the greedy?
The Gospel of Luke includes a parable which Jesus told about the afterlife and the potential of messages from there affecting the behaviors of the living.
In the parable, Lazarus is a leper who begged for years at the gate of the house of a wealthy man. And when they both died, they found that in the afterlife they had, as it were, traded places. Lazarus was in the bosom of Abraham, signifying his comfortable post-life abode. The rich man was in the torment of flames, so much so that he wished for but a drop of water to be given to him. In the afterlife there was a great canyon which separated the rich man from Lazarus and Abraham, and they could yell messages to each other across this great canyon. Apparently, the great wealth gap of life had become reversed in the afterlife.
The wealthy man in his afterlife knew he could not change his fate, but he began to worry about his surviving family. So, he made a request of Abraham. He asked Abraham to send Lazarus back to life to warn his family about their greedy ways.
But Abraham told the rich man that if his surviving family did not practice what was given to them by Moses in the law and in the messages of the prophet, then they would not believe the message of Lazarus even if he were sent back to life to warn them.
Pause for an inter-Gospel aside. In the Gospel of John, written by one who probably had first read the Gospel of Luke, and we find a Lazarus of Bethany who was brought back to life from his grave, and the result was that even the religious leaders did not believe.
The message from Jesus in the form of a parable is this: the message about the afterlife or from the afterlife will not change the behaviors of people who live now. Do not use the afterlife as an excuse for not doing the work of love and justice in this life.
Religious people often use the notion of reward and punishment in the afterlife as a method of influencing people's choices about religion. For many religious people salvation mainly is about whether a person will be in heaven or hell after they die.
This parable of Jesus indicates that the heaven on earth values have come to be known through the law and through graceful wisdom and when performed such values are their own earthly reward for the benefit of the doer and for the people of the earth.
In the Lord's Prayer, we ask that God's will be done on earth as it is in heaven, which means that this earthly visible life has a parallel interior realm which includes the superb values of love, justice, kindness, and self control. This realm is always already accessible and we should not need motivation about our status in the afterlife to do the required justice to bridge all the gaps in our world which keep people from treating each other with dignity and respect, let alone ensuring that everyone has enough of the needed things in life to live well.
The parable of Jesus about Lazarus and the rich man in the afterlife is a message for us to get on with the work of love and justice because those heavenly values are accessible to us here and now. Amen.
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