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Year C / Ordinary Time / Week 26 / Sunday
Readings: Amos 6:1,4-7 / Psalm: Psalm: Psalm 146:7-10 (R/v 1b) / 1 Timothy 6:11-16 / Luke 16.19-31
"Father Abraham, pity me and send Lazarus" (Luke 16.24)
Here is the rich man crying out for mercy in the gospel reading. We hear it too. However, I wonder if we recognise that this story of the rich man and Lazarus is God's way of staring us in the face and crying out to us today for no other reason than this - God wants to be merciful to us and remind us He wants to save us for Himself.
What does God's mercy look like? We each have an image of this. Being forgiven. Experiencing healing. Reconciling with one another. Knowing peace that only God can give. Even this truth: that God enters into the mess and chaos our lives sometimes are to sit with us in pain and sin, and at the right time, when we are ready, to lift us up into salvation.
But what if God is calling us to recognise mercy in the person of one like Lazarus coming into our lives?
The Lazaruses who are difficult to behold, covered in poverty, pockmarked by illness, handicapped by disability, lesser for lack, homeless as refugees and soiled by sin.
The Lazaruses who only asked to be fed, to be welcomed and accepted, to be respected with dignity, to be affirmed for their goodness and to be loved as we are loved by God.
These Lazaruses and many like them are indeed God's mercy come to us in human form.
Do we see God's mercy in their faces and voices? Probably difficult, may be not. Not because we have dug chasms that distant and differentiate them from us.
Chasms, like gulfs, that divide because have created too many gaps in education, economic opportunities, gender inequalities, in racial, religious and linguistic differences and in access to our common good to share and our community to live in.
Chasms that begin when we tell our children to be good or else the 'karang-guni' men* will take them away. Or, gossip about that woman's dressing in the office that casts doubt on her moral values. Or, whatsapping messages that ridicule the socially awkward or fat or dim-witted.
Chasms that widen when we refuse to celebrate a neighbour's good fortune because we have quarrelled. Or, refuse to forgive a family member who has embarrassed or hurt the family. Or, shame parents by passing unChristian remarks about their noisy children during Mass.
All these chasms pit us against one another. They divide us. These chasms are sinful acts. They are like the gulf that separates the rich man from Lazarus. What chasms have we created to keep us apart from others?
What is the rich man's sin? Simply, it 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).
The rich man's sin is like those of the "complacent in Zion" the Prophet Amos describes. He does not want to see Lazarus in need at his door. He does not want to listen to Moses and the prophets who offer guidance to live in God's ways. His self-contained, self-satisfied lifestyle numb him to the plight of the poor like Lazarus. His sin leads him to the "netherworld, where s in torment."
What if the rich man had reached out and helped Lazarus to cross the divide and enter into his home? Not just cross but welcomed, fed and clothed him, greeting him as a worthy guest? As people of faith, we know God would be pleased because he would have cared. Lazarus's coming would save him because he would have had to change his attitude and behaviour to care. This is how God's mercy comes in the person of Lazarus. But Lazarus could not do this because the rich man did not permit him to enter his home.
Aren't we like the rich man sometimes in our words and deeds? God wants to come to us but he is waiting for our permission to enter into our lives and abide in us to save us.
"Behold, the Lord says, I stand at the door and knock; if any man hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and will eat with him and he with me" (Revelation 3.20). Yes, the Lord is repeatedly knocking on the doors of our hearts that can sometimes be hard and cold. He does this because he wants us to be better Christians and save us. However God cannot open these doors because the handles to open them are on our side of the doors. Do we open? Can we open? Will we open?
Christians are called to be merciful to all as God is merciful to us. How can we do this unless we let ourselves receive God's mercy first?
This is why the Lazaruses in our lives matter. They are God's mercy come to us. They demand we open our hearts, minds, all of our lives to create space and welcome them, to host and feed them, to sit and say, "you are my sister, my brother" and to dignify them as my friend, one who shares the same likeness of God I have.
We all want mercy. God comes to give us mercy. The choice to receive it is ours. How can we do this? By reordering our everyday life and choices to Jesus's teaching. For Paul, these enable us "to be saintly and religious, filled with faith and love, patient and gentle," and so, "fight the good fight and win for ourselves the eternal life to which we are called." The many Lazaruses challenge us to live this way because they are God's agents of mercy toward us. Mercy that calls us out of our sinful, selfish, self-preserving ways and saves.
God's mercy demands one more thing from us: that we stop being deaf and blind to who we truthfully are and how we should really live. The word 'Christian' explains. Christian indeed are we and how we ought to live when we know God's mercy is not just for ourselves but through us for all who seek God.
Today, God's mercy stares us in our face to see and cries out in our ears to hear. We glimpse this stare and hear this cry in none other than the Lazaruses God sends into our lives to save us.
Will we see and hear? What will we do?
Preached at Sacred Heart Church, Singapore
photo: D A V I D S O N L U N A on Unsplash
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