“Before the After”
Luke 16:19-31
First
Presbyterian
The Reverend
Thomas A. Sweet
September 26,
2010
There
is a cartoon in an old issue of National
Lampoon that offers a spoof of a Medici rose window in a grand cathedral in
I
tell you that as a way of saying the obvious: namely, that one’s own situation
or social location in life can affect the way we interpret scripture.
So, while personal reading and pondering of scripture is a legitimate and
essential part of our becoming biblically literate and biblically Christian, no
interpretation finally can be trusted that has not been tested and tried in the
larger Christian community. It is
yet another reason why communing with God on the golf course or in the woods,
while possible and pleasurable, is also inadequate.
You have done a good and necessary thing in coming to church today!
Sometimes
we are tempted to use scripture – by taking it out of context or twisting it
– to prove a previously held point or position or prejudice and preachers
surely are not immune from that disease. The
proper way to approach scripture is to let it use us so that its message can
come alive in us. The only way we
ever can hope to understand the Bible is to “stand under” its teaching and
authority, to engage it on its own terms rather than to make it fit ours.
So,
for instance, when we come to a parable – to repeat something I said last week
– the right question to ask is not “what is the point of it?” but rather,
“what in the Sam Hill is going on here?”
To ask “what is the point of the story?” is to reduce it and flatten
it and deflate it. That is just an
intellectual exercise and Jesus had something bigger in mind when he told these
stories. Do you remember that his
first sermon, as reported by Mark, was very brief, but demanding.
He said, “The
Some
people in the history of interpretation want to turn today’s parable into a
polemic against the so-called “rich” and find satisfaction in the rich
getting their comeuppance in the end. But
that is not it.
First of all, compared to most of the world’s people, most of us are
numbered among the “rich” though we might not think of ourselves that way
when we read the parable. The rich
man is not us, we think, but someone else, someone really
rich. But, comparatively speaking,
we are “the rich” of the world and that makes the parable a little less
attractive, does it not, if we pursue that meaning.
Besides, there were some among the followers of Jesus, like Joseph of
Arimathea and Nicodemus, who were very wealthy.
Neither
is the parable a cautionary tale about life after death and what is bound to
land us in heaven or Hades. No less
than N. T. Wright, a theologically conservative heavyweight scholar, has said,
“The parable is not, as often supposed, a description of the afterlife,
warning people to be sure of their ultimate destination…”
Consider
the large body of the teachings of Jesus and almost all of them have to do with
the here and now, with this current
life, this present world. Even
in the prayer he taught his disciples, he told them to pray, “Thy
will be done on earth as it is heaven.”
The kingdom of God or, as Matthew calls it in his gospel, the kingdom
of heaven, is not something reserved for some future time or eternity, not some
distant place or destination. It is
contemporary. It is now.
It is “before the after.” What
comes after this earthly life in the
What
is going on here in this parable is that Jesus is making the case for open
commensality* and wanting to draw us into it as a signature hallmark of the
What
is it – open commensality? Commensality
means eating together at a common table. An
egalitarian meal. One of the reasons
Jesus got into so much trouble with the religious authorities was that he
insisted on an open table. Judaism
in the time of Jesus was hierarchical. Women
served men at meals, never the other way around.
People from one side of the tracks did not eat with those from the other
side. “Sinners” never ate with
the pious, the clean with the unclean. Slaves
did not dine with their masters. The
dinner table buttressed all of the barriers that existed in society that kept
people in their places and the status quo.
The
series of parables that Luke cobbled together in this part of his gospel,
beginning in Luke 15, were introduced by Luke this way:
“Now the tax collectors and
sinners were coming near to listen to Jesus.
And the Pharisees and the scribes were grumbling and saying, ‘This
fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them.’”
The common meal – open commensality – where all are welcomed was
a way in which Jesus subverted the social arrangements of the time in favor of
God’s ways.
The
beginning of today’s parable says that “there
was a rich man who was dressed in purple and fine linen and who feasted
sumptuously every day. And at his
gate lay a poor man named Lazarus, covered with sores, who longed to satisfy his
hunger with what fell from the rich man’s table…”
Open commensality is a way in which Jesus meant to tear down gates
– be they physical, social, metaphorical – that separate, divide, exclude,
and keep people from people. It
shall not be that way in the
And
how telling that when Jesus wanted to give his followers a way to remember him
– and I mean remembering him both in the sense of calling him to mind and in
the sense of communally re-constituting his body in our present world by being
people who live and act in his name – he instituted a meal at which all are
welcome without regard to status or station, position or place because that is
how it is in the kingdom of God.
It
occurs to me that our hot dog Thursdays in the summer are a kind of open
commensality. As much as anything we
do at the church, it seems that at those meals the gates that often separate us
from our neighbors and those with whom we do not much mix are, if not completely
torn down and thrown away, at least opened for a while.
There is not much God talk spoken at those suppers, not a lot of religion
in the air save for those of our friends who are looking for someone with whom
to talk about faith. But there is a
camaraderie that develops among those present, an openness, a suspension of
judgment, a hint of vulnerability as we sense a common humanity if not always a
common circumstance. None of that
should surprise us since scripture tells us that where two or three are gathered
in God’s name, God will be present. Together,
we conjure God there on that piazza pavement and it is evident.
I
suspect that the hope of Jesus is that if we can share a meal together across
the gated divides of our stereotypes and our fears that we also will look out
for those in need of health insurance or a better job or a better education.
Maybe we can be a guide or a friend to those who need someone to come
alongside of them or to believe in them. Perhaps
we can accept help or wisdom offered to us by someone we previously would have
disregarded as someone who had little to contribute to our lives.
In our radical openness to others we can manifest the
The
parable makes it clear that when Jesus at the beginning of his ministry told his
would-be followers to repent, he meant far more than simply saying sorry for our
sins in our quest for a personal salvation.
The call to repent is a call to turn in the direction of God and God’s
ways with God’s people. It has to
do with entering a new way of life and signing on with the
As
he tells his stories, Jesus is putting us in touch with God’s Story, inviting
us to enter into it with its open commensality.
The implicit question asked of the rich man’s five brothers at the end
of the parable applies: Will we?
Amen.
*The term “open commensality” is attributed to John Dominic Crossan.
Copyright
© 2010 First Presbyterian Church