Removing the Blind Fold

Luke 16:19-31

About 15 years ago, I developed a habit of meeting each month with a group of people from the congregation I was with at the time. The group changed month by month, but our task was always the same, to plan what we would probably call an intergenerational service. I distinctly recall on one occasion having a year 8 student as part of the group. As we discussed the readings, she made a comment about her understanding of the Christian faith which I think is problematic.

What she said was something like this, “Our life is a test about where we will go after we die.” This kind of understanding of Christianity removes the concept of grace and replaces it with a different story, the story of our good works as the mechanism for our salvation. When we hear or use the phrase, “well done good and faithful servant”, we can be easily drawn into thinking about our self-righteousness rather than thinking about the good news of God’s unconditional grace.

This little story is important because the Jesus’s parable that we shared from Luke's gospel could easily draw us into thinking that what Jesus is talking about is this idea of how we behave determining how our afterlife will be.

The oversimplification of this parable in this way ignores the broader context of the ongoing conversation that Jesus was having with the Pharisees and scribes that I outlined in last week’s sermon. His concern was how they were using their wealth and power then and there. 

Given this, I suspect Jesus’s words here are more about how people with wealth behave during their life and challenging them to change those behaviours. The mention of afterlife consequences may be a bit of hyperbole on Jesus’s part. At the heart of his debate is how we should live in this life. But getting people to shift their world view and change their behaviour is hard work because it involves admitting the possibility that maybe we are wrong.

Kathryn Schulz in her TED talk “Being wrong” highlights the reticence that people have, to admitting that they are wrong. Borrowing from the beginning of her talk, she asks, “How does it feel to be wrong?”  “How does it feel to be wrong?" She points out that the audience have answered a different question “How does it feel to know that you are wrong?" The answer to the question “How does it feel to be wrong?”  is that it feels like being right. To put it another way we don’t know what we don’t know.

So, how does all this relate to Jesus’s parable. In my suitcase I have a simple object. A piece of purple cloth. This simple piece of purple cloth may not mean much to any of you.  But 2000 years ago, when Jesus was telling his story, this purple cloth was hard to come by.  It was an extravagance. It was a display of wealth. It was a symbol of power.

We have different kinds of purple cloth in these days. Our wealth might be symbolised by the kind of car we drive, the size of our portfolio, or the size of our house. Our wealth might be demonstrated by our position on the corporate rung or the number of letters before, or after our name.  The purple cloth symbolises the privilege of education, power, authority and money. And any of these can act as much as a blindfold to the plight of others as the rich man in Jesus’s parable.

The purple cloth, the symbol of power and wealth, had become a blindfold for the rich man to the needs of others.  The access he had to be able to live a life of leisure meant that as he came and went from his home, he was blind to Lazarus, the suffering man at his door. 

In one of the commentaries that I read the commentator encouraged preachers to ask the question whether they or their congregations could name a person who was as poor as Lazarus by name. I found this an uncomfortable question. Whereas once I did know people living in boarding houses and classified as homeless by name this is not currently the case. Our suburban sprawl has added to our blindness as our wealth and social status means we tend to live in homogenous communities of like-minded people.

What Jesus parable does is tries to add a level of shock value for his opponents for whom the message about wealth simply does not seem to be getting through. In the parable, the rich man’s fate is not determined by anything other than his refusal to see and help the poor man. It is clear that the rich man knows him because he names him as Lazarus but even this personal knowledge had not led him towards generosity.

We can find numerous stories which involve tumultuous events changing a person’s perspective in life. Today we sung Amazing Grace and many of you would not the story of the writer John Newton who went from slave trader to priest to abolitionist in the late eighteenth century. There is an even recorded of Newton almost drowning in a shipwreck that is sometimes attributed as the most significant turning point. Newton influenced the young politician William Wilberforce who very much drove the abolitionist movement and influence his friend and prime minister William Pitt. The words of the hymn ring true now as they ever did “I once was blind but now I see” as we ask where our blind spots are.

Victo Hugo’s tale of Jean Valjean in Les Miserable provides another example of how significant events shift a person’s life trajectory. The story now immortalised in the musical has a significant moment when Valjean steals some silver after being hosted by a bishop. When captured by the police and brought back to the bishop for confirmation rather than condemn him the bishop says that he had given him the items and then adds the silver candlesticks. The moment is a turning point for Valjean who goes on to become both wealthy and kind to the point of self-sacrifice.

The story Jesus told, and these others remind us that the shift from the tyranny of our own ego and self-centredness often requires a sever jolt to occur. In Jesus parable, the rich man pleads with Abraham to go and let his five brothers know so that they might act generously in their lives and not bear any of the consequences that he is.

Abraham’s refusal to do so is resolute and as an outside observer this appears harsh. There are no ghosts of Christmas past, Christmas Present, and Christ Yet to Come as were afforded Ebenezer Scrouge, in Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. Abraham points to the teachings of the law and prophets of containing all that is necessary to understand that prioritising the poor is central to God’s will.

At the end of the parable Jesus makes this pointed comment to his audience, “‘If they do not listen to Moses and the prophets, neither will they be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.’” Whether this is Luke’s insertion or Jesus’s actual words anticipating his own death and resurrection the message remains for us that Jesus’s resurrection should be enough for us to think about what it means to live a good life and live well in the world.

As hearers of this story, we are not Jesus’s direct audience, but the story is asking us the same question about how we will live in this world with what we have. To make the story about good works as an entry into a better afterlife is to miss Jesus’s point. It is interesting that there is no piety on Lazarus’ part that has earned his place but rather the only reason given is that in his life Lazarus received evil things in life so is now being comforted.

The problem of the great chasm in the afterlife is in some ways no different to the purple blindfold. Gaps which appear to be unable to be crossed to create the change that is need so that all people might live well in this life. The momentous events that change us can only work on us if we have the ability not simply know that we wrong about something but allow that realisation to work on us.

In her talk about being wrong Schulz reminds us that twelve hundred years before René Descartes penned his famous “I think, therefore I am,” the philosopher and theologian Augustine wrote “fallor ergo sum”: I err, therefore I am. In this formulation, the capacity to get things wrong is not only part of being alive, but in some sense proof of it. I think Jesus was saying to his audience and maybe us as well that we need a bit more humility to be able to see the world in a whole new light and to see and know others are as much part of God’s love as we are.

To return to where I began and the reflection of my Year 8 friend in the meeting, I don’t think life is a test for us about what happens after this life. And neither do I think that Jesus was making responding to the poor as the way to earn our way. The grace of God is a complex mystery that encompasses all, both rich and poor. Yet, as people who may have had an encounter with that grace we are invited to consider again and again how we live in the world.

Paul writing to Timothy

As for those who in the present age are rich, command them not to be haughty, or to set their hopes on the uncertainty of riches but rather on God, who richly provides us with everything for our enjoyment.

They are to do good, to be rich in good works, generous, and ready to share, thus storing up for themselves the treasure of a good foundation for the future, so that they may take hold of the life that really is life. (1 Timothy 6:6-19)

Let us take hold of life that is really life now as we remove the blindfold and live towards others with generosity.