Year C / Ordinary Time / Week 26 / Sunday
Readings: Amos 6.1a, 4-7/ Psalm 146. 6c-7, 8-9a, 9bc-10 (R/v 1b) / Timothy 6.11-16 / Luke 16.19-31
Sisters and brothers, has mercy ever stared you in your face? Has mercy ever cried out to you in your ear?
What would mercy look like in these moments?
I’d like to suggest our gospel reading today is God’s way of staring us in the face, crying to us in our ear – doing these for no other reason that God wanting to be merciful to you and me. Merciful by entering into our lives, no matter how messy or ordered it might be, to sit with us and at the right time, to lift us up into salvation.
We are familiar with this parable Jesus teaches. But what if Jesus is using this parable to reveal something profoundly good about God and God’s mercy in our lives? What does this mercy look like?
We each have an image of what mercy looks like. A family member forgiving us. Healing from illness. Safety from a possible accident. Reconciliation among friends after misunderstanding. Peace and harmony after discord and chaos. Jesus on healing and forgiving. Jesus dying to save us
But what if God is calling us to recognise mercy in the person of one like Lazarus?
The Lazaruses in our lives who are a pitiful sight to behold, covered in poverty, pockmarked by illness, handicapped by disability, lesser for lack, homeless as refugee, soiled by sin.
The Lazaruses who only want something to eat, some acceptance to welcome them, respect for their dignity, some affirmation for their goodness, some love for them who are like us.
The Lazaruses who are God’s mercy come to us in human form.
Do we see God’s mercy in their faces? Do we hear God’s mercy in their voices?
Probably not. Not because we have placed them apart from us, distant them away from us, dug chasms to protect them from us
Chasms that divide because we have created gaps in education, in economic opportunities, in gender inequality, in racial, religious and linguistic difference, in access to opportunities.
Chasms like telling our children be good or else the Bayis* or karung-guni** men will take them away? Or, gossiping about that woman at work those dressing suggests an immoral nightlife? Or, sending out whatsapp messages that ridicule the socially awkward or fat or dim-witted classmate?
Chasms too like being jealous of a neighbor’s good fortune and refusing to celebrate with him? Or, like distancing oneself in self-preservation from a family member needs help but we are embarrass for his wrong? Or, like passing unChristian remarks that little ones and special needs children should not be at Mass because they disturb one’s worship?
All these chasms divide us from them. They pit is against one another.
These chasms are sinful. Like that which separated the rich man from Lazarus on earth first.
What is the rich man’s sin? Not that of a crime like defrauding the people that the tax collectors did or embezzling funds like the dishonest steward in last Sunday’s gospel. Not that of being rich and indulgent.
His sin is the sin of omission. This is how the Letter of James describes it: “So for one who knows the right thing to do and does not do it, it is a sin” (4.17).
He is like the “complacent in Zion” in our first reading. He can neither see nor hear: he does not see Lazarus in need at his door; he does not listen to Moses and the prophets who guide him in right ways.
The rich man is in “the netherworld, where he was in torment” simply because his self-contained, self-satisfied lifestyle was not faithful to God’s teaching that he be concerned for his neighbours and care for them, especially the poor .
But what if the rich man had reached out to Lazarus and allowed him to cross the divide that separated them? Not just cross but welcome him into his home, fed him, clothed him, welcome him as guest?
What if this did happen?
Then God’s mercy to save would have come to the rich man by changing him for the better, and saving him. Come in the person Lazarus, one like him but lesser, lost, least and little. But Lazarus cannot come unless the rich man gives him permission to enter.
Aren’t we like the rich man who God wants to come to us but is awaiting our permission to come and abide with us? "Behold, the Lord says, I stand at the door and knock; if any man hear My voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with Me" (Revelation 3.20). William Holman Hunt’s painting "Light of the World" expresses this quotation very well. It presents Jesus knocking at the long unopened door waiting for someone within to open it so that he can enter.
There is no door knob or handle on the outside; it is on the inside. Indeed only those inside can open the door for Jesus to enter.
Jesus is knocking on the doors to our hearts, our minds, our lives every moment to make us better. Do we open them? Can we open them? Will we open them?
Often times you and I believe we must reach to share and proclaim God’s mercy. But we cannot give what we don’t have.
How can we have God’s mercy to share unless we let ourselves receive God’s mercy first? Let God’s mercy enter our lives? Come in the person of another, one like Lazarus? To welcome. To host. To create space for. To sit at table with. To say you are friend.
Why the Lazaruses in our lives?
We hear that Lazarus dies and is carried away to heaven by angels where he is in the company of Abraham. And while Luke does not expressly say it, we can imagine Lazarus resting in Abraham’s bosom completely healed and made whole, fully the person God had created Lazarus to be from the beginning.
For us who struggle and suffer like Lazarus because in some ways and at sometimes we are the outcast, the ill-treated, the despised, Jesus’ parable cannot be anything but hope-filled. For in God’s plan, all wrongs will be righted and God will restore all to wellness and wholeness. And so it is for us, who struggle to keep the faith in the face of injustice and violence, addiction and abuse, neglect and indifference.
Can we believe this will come to pass and be real and alive in our lives? We can by re-orientating our everyday life to Jesus’ way that Paul describes this way in our second reading: “aim to be saintly and religious, filled with faith and love, patient and gentle. Fight the good fight of the faith and win for yourself the eternal life to which you were called.”
Indeed, we can begin to practice this when one like Lazarus comes and calls us out.
Today, Jesus reminds us that the Lazaruses God sends into our lives are his mercy for us. Mercy that calls us out of our sinful, selfish, self-preserving ways. Mercy that transforms.
Mercy that demands we stop being deaf and blind to the truth about ourselves and how we should live.
Who are we? How we should live? The word ‘Christian’ says it all.
It must be because when mercy comes and stares us in the face of another and cries to us in our ears in the voices of others, it is really that of no other than the one whose name we bear.
One who is like us in his poverty and homelessness, like us in his faith that God will raise us from the dead – and more than us really because he has indeed risen from the dead and whose name is Jesus.
Here through this parable is the mercy of God looking at the Pharisees straight in the eye as Jesus to save them. His mercy is for us too. Here and now God is indeed staring in our faces with his mercy and crying out to us in our ears with his mercy. Mercy not just for ourselves but God’s mercy we must share if we know we are indeed Christian.
Will you and I see and listen? God’s mercy abound. What will we do?
* a Singaporean term for Sikhs
** a Singaporean term for junk collectors
Preached at St Ignatius Church, Singapore
photo: www.thirdsector.au
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