When you have read today's gospel story, the story of poor, destitute Lazarus and a "rich man," how is your heart responding. Does the Jesus story have any meaning for you? This question stands because your response will tell you something about yourself, your "value system," your awareness of what lies outside your door, your daily experience of what lies outside "your door," your daily experience.
What misleads us today is one particular word: "rich." Reading or hearing the expression, the "rich man," most likely makes a contemporary person think of what we call "the top two percent of society." We thereby separate ourselves from the "rich man." However, it does not put most of the "bottom ninety-eight percent" on the same level playing field!
The purpose of this particular gospel story is to make clear what having somethings can do to us. We can so easily overlook real need that lives with us in some of our fellow human beings in our own towns, our own neighborhoods or our own blocks. You don't think you are rich? Imagine how much it would cost to replace the items in your home: your kitchen, your living room, your bedroom, your "home office," your rec room (if you have one), your garage, your attic or a backyard shed. It is then challenging to say maybe I am a rich man or a rich woman!
And what about the many types of Lazarus are just up the street or across town? See the lines waiting to find work. How many empty homes and townhouses stand empty as witnesses to so many broken lives? I write these thoughts few than 10 miles from the White House and the United States Capitol building. How many homes and lives lie broken in such a short distance? The painful reality is this: neither the homeless nor us with a roof over our heads are evil. What Jesus is teaching us is so simple: having possessions can so easily dull our awareness of others and the cards dealt them in the game of life. Our "wealth" can so easily bring about genuine blindness. Just "having" can knock us off our horses in Pauline blindness! "Having" can create in us the inability to see the great needs that have broken other lives. What a tragedy ... not their lives but that we may have been unaware!
