Abstract
The men and women described in today’s readings all find themselves looking at barriers they cannot control and cannot cross. Birth and death are barriers of time, and we pass through each of them once only, marking the start and finish of everything we mean to the world that lies between them. Heaven and hell are separated by a barrier of judgement no-one can cross once arrived on one side of it. Righteousness and wickedness are held apart by the barrier of human choice and eternal consequence. When in the Bible pictures that tease are used instead of words that regulate, we can see the horror of ending up on the wrong side of the image, unable to get back.
By the grace of God a whole people could escape from slavery across a reedy river, and by the grace of God the same people could one day cross another river to receive a promise that would forever shake the world. By the grace of God a ram’s horn’s call could flatten a towering wall, and by the grace of God a warrior could escape in a basket down another towering wall. Without the grace of God there would only be splashing and tumbling and looking foolish, and it meant, means, everything to be on the right side, in the right place.
The rich man, sometimes called Dives, can see all the way from Hades to Heaven. There to his surprise, sitting with Father Abraham himself, is Lazarus who used to clutter up the ground around Dives’ own gate, turning decent people’s stomachs with his weeping sores that only the local dogs were decent enough to clean for him. The rich man was not expecting this, perhaps, or perhaps had not thought enough about it to expect anything. Here lies the barrier between Heaven and Hell: permeable to sight it seems, if truly those in torment have the extra torment of being able to see Paradise, but impermeable because no mortal has ever travelled from one to the other.
Dives longs to reach back into the world, and meddle with the freedom of his brothers who are making the choices he made, sliding towards the consequences he now sees. What of the boundary between Heaven and earth, and between Hell and earth too? No-one can go back across that divide once the crossing has been made, and anyway no-one in our world would believe them if they did. After all they have had their warnings and did not heed them, from prophets like Amos who saw a people so hypnotised by luxury that they couldn’t so much as grieve their own nation’s ruin, who could not find words sharp enough to wake them in time. Lazarus, whose virtue seemed to be his repulsive poverty, whose value in heaven seemed to be the value denied him on earth, Lazarus would not be able to shock Dives’ brothers who cannot see what he alone is now able to see.
There are, however, no impermeable barriers to Heaven or to Hell from the world of the living, from those lives that were judged when the story of Dives and Lazarus began, nor from the lives we are living and trying to offer today. Those are destinations we can reach in the glittering imagery of Christian faith. Human action can take a soul to a consequence that has no human undoing; and your life’s chosen direction can result in the tragedy of getting what you wished for. The actions and the choices take place between those barriers of life and death, and we bring to those crossroads moments only the wisdom and resources of this life, though we carry the consequences then as the only luggage we can take with us through death.
Of course the irony is that the story of Dives and Lazarus was told by Jesus Christ, the one man who ever had power enough for Heaven and Hades, for the virtuous and the vicious of humankind, for both sides of the boundary of death and for the journey across that terrible line and back again. There, St Paul promises, is light enough to see which way we are going, to make the murky way clear.
Paul, writing to Timothy, knows what a short span of opportunity we have to make our possibilities blossom. We have come through the barrier of birth with nothing, and pass through its twin, death, taking no earthly wealth forward with us. So if we fall in love with the things that can belong only here, we confine our own worth only to the little time we have in this little space. If we spend on the things of this world the love that is our deepest treasure, everything will go bad, spinning down a vicious cycle with our heart in the wrong place.
So where do we learn instead to do the things that are right, to have the attitudes and priorities that can pass with us through barriers like death and profound moral judgement? Where in this hemmed-in world can we find the nobility and the virtue to face towards Paradise and long to belong in Christ’s kingdom even now? Starting with nothing as we pass into this life, how can we set ourselves on a virtuous cycle towards blessing when we pass out of it again?
Paul provides a list of virtues to be desired, and not one of them requires the resources of worldly wealth or the advantages of inherited privilege. And to begin with they are virtues that sound like achievements: righteousness that makes us think of adventuring Abraham, and godliness that makes us think of unstinting prayer and praise. These are not words we would presume to use of ourselves; they belong in the mouths of other people, or in the judgement of God. And then the list moves to the powers that enliven us even when we can’t help ourselves: faith that bugs and bugs an ordinary soul so that they cannot help opening themselves to the extraordinary life, and love that burns a life from the middle outwards and can take a spirit to impossible places. These are forces we are not ashamed to say have driven us along, and how busy they have made us when we let them. And finally the list reaches the most passive of virtues, like a tune softening towards a gentle final chord: endurance that is the keeping of integrity in the special temptation of suffering, and gentleness that is the keeping of suffering away from the touching of another. And those are the gifts we offer when we have exhausted everything else and our hopes and our lives and ourselves. So even if in this little space of life we have not managed to pick up many spiritual gifts alongside our physical wealth, somewhere in that list of virtues are things we can do for God who has done everything for us.
And that means, surely, that the shortest human life, and the most damaged human mind, and the most self-harmed human body can all, somehow, pell-mell, messily and with weeping sores, find their way towards Lazarus.
Coming Next Month
In next month’s issue, Neil Messer offers reflections on “The Ethics of Biotechnology and Genetic Engineering”, the latest in our occasional series on current issues in Ethics. Scott Callaham discusses “Old Testament Preaching from the Lectionary”, while Dillon Thornton offers “Genuine Confession and the Joy of Forgiveness: The Pastor’s Guide to Psalm 32”.