Crossing the Chasm
Luke 16:19-31
It was a weekday morning in January 2001, shortly after 9:00. I had just settled in at my desk at my corporate office in New York City’s Theatre District when my desk phone rang. It was Sandy. She sounded distressed. In agony, actually. I could barely make out what she was saying between groans, but I instinctively knew what the problem was.
Ever since I had known her, which at that point had been three and a half years, Sandy suffered occasional bouts of intense abdominal pain. She would vomit repeatedly and violently until, her stomach having been emptied, she was bringing up bile from her gall bladder. To alleviate the pain that radiated through her upper body as she knelt over the toilet, she would ask me to pound on her back with my fist, much harder than I was comfortable doing.
Once, exactly two years earlier, in January 1999, the pain had been so intense that she ended up in the emergency room at St. Vincent’s Hospital in Greenwich Village.
And so it was happening again. Through her sobs and groans on the phone that morning she told me that she had called 9-1-1 and was waiting for the ambulance. I immediately left work and raced toward our apartment all the way at the southwestern edge of Manhattan in Battery Park City.
I arrived to find Sandy writhing on the floor. Seconds later EMS arrived, placed her on a gurney, and wheeled her out of the building. In a scene that now feels as if it came straight from an overwrought Korean drama, Sandy, lying on the gurney, looked into my eyes and said, “John, I think I’m going to die.” She didn’t express it at the time, but underneath that very real fear, Sandy was asking herself and asking God, “Why now? Why am I going through this now just when John and I are starting to establish ourselves?”
The previous summer we had bought the apartment we were living in. It was only a studio apartment, but it was ours—504 sq. ft. of Manhattan real estate, in a building with a lobby and a doorman and an ever-so slight view of the Hudson River. And just a few months after purchasing the apartment, I had taken a job at a medical advertising agency, with a significant bump in salary from my previous job in publishing. Things were going great!
And so, yeah, why now?
Let me pause the melodrama for a brief moment of comedy. While one of the EMTs was loading Sandy into the ambulance, the other was asking me biographical information about her—full name, date of birth, allergies, that sort of thing. He prefaced his next question saying, “You probably don’t know, but can you tell me her Social Security number?” I rattled it off as if it were my own. Clearly stunned, he replied, “Wow! That’s love.”
I don’t think I’m spoiling the story by revealing that Sandy, in fact, was not dying, but that’s not in any way to minimize the severity of her suffering. For her this was not just a medical emergency, it was a spiritual wakeup call. She felt that God was speaking to her through her suffering—not that God had caused it, mind you, but that God was in it and was using it to get her attention. As we were not attending church back then, God needed to show up in a more dramatic way. So be it.
As a rule, we do our best to keep suffering and death as far from us as possible. We’d rather not think about them, not until they intrude upon us in some way—a news story, the death of someone close to us, or a diagnosis we receive that compels us to consider our own mortality. And yet, as much as we try to keep them at arm’s length, suffering and death are the means through which God works our salvation. The eternal life that is open to us through Jesus Christ comes to us via his suffering and death on the cross.
as much as we try to keep them at arm’s length, suffering and death are the means through which God works our salvation.
In the parable that Jesus tells in today’s reading, the rich man and Lazarus are separated in life and in death by a great chasm. The chasm that appears in the wake of each man’s death is readily apparent, with Abraham specifically identifying it. He and Lazarus stand on one side, while far away the rich man stands upon the other. Neither can cross from one side to the other.
But there is another chasm as well, one that may not be as readily apparent but that is just as real. Let’s listen to the beginning of the parable and see if we can identify it. “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.”
Did you hear it? The rich man and Lazarus are separated by a chasm in the form of a gate that surrounds the rich man’s home. On one side of the gate the rich man wears the latest imported fashions and eats the most sumptuous meals prepared by his private chef. On the other side of the gate lies Lazarus, whose body is not draped in linen but rather covered in sores, and who doesn’t eat sumptuous meals but begs for the scraps that fall from the rich man’s table.
All that separates one man from the other is a gate, a gate through which the rich man could, if he chose, look out upon the man begging in front of his house and show him mercy. He has chosen instead to build a gate, i.e., he has chosen to dig a chasm between himself and the suffering at his doorstep. He doesn’t want to see it, hear it, smell it. It’s as if it doesn’t exist.
As worlds apart as their earthly lives were, the rich man and Lazarus share the fate that is common to all flesh, that being death. In death, the two men experience a reversal of fortune. Lazarus, who had known only suffering in his earthly life, is comforted, while the rich man, who had known only luxury and comfort, is afflicted.
This dramatic reversal of fortune of the rich and poor is a theme that runs throughout the Gospel of Luke. When Mary learns that she is to be the mother of the Messiah, she bursts into a song of praise to God, singing:
He has brought down the powerful from their thrones
and lifted up the lowly;
he has filled the hungry with good things
and sent the rich away empty (Luke 1:52-53).
When Jesus preaches the Sermon on the Plain, which is Luke’s version of the Sermon on the Mount from the Gospel of Matthew, in addition to blessings he pronounces a series of woes, which includes the following verses:
“Blessed are you who are poor,
for yours is the kingdom of God.
“Blessed are you who are hungry now,
for you will be filled.
“But woe to you who are rich,
for you have received your consolation.
“Woe to you who are full now,
for you will be hungry (Luke 6:20-21, 24-25).
With words like that, it’s no surprise that Jesus did not win for himself many friends among the rich, while the poor were drawn to him in droves. But it’s not as though Jesus has it in for the wealthy. The gospel—forgiveness, repentance, new life—is for everyone, but not everyone is willing to receive it. The rich man no doubt thinks of himself as a winner, as a success, which will make it all but impossible for him to accept the gospel because the gospel is for failures and losers. “For those who want to save their life will lose it,” Jesus says, “and those who lose their life for my sake will save it” (Luke 9:24).
And the very next verse: “For what does it profit them if they gain the whole world—purple robes, fine linens, sumptuous meals—but lose or forfeit their very self?”
What the rich man cannot grasp—in this life or the next—is that it’s not success of any kind that saves. Not material success, as in having a large bank balance. Not social success, as measured in how highly others think of us. Not even religious success, in the form of keeping the law. Only the gospel of Jesus Christ, which is to say the gospel of death and resurrection, leads to true life in the kingdom of God.
Despite having the law and the prophets, the rich man never learned this lesson. Even in death he is still slow on the uptake to this basic truth. Seeing Abraham off in the distance, he asks him to send Lazarus to come with some water to cool his tongue. Yes, even in death the rich man is treating Lazarus as a servant! He can’t fathom that the man who used to beg outside his gate for table scraps would ever be anything more than a servant whom he could command to fetch him water.
No can do, says Abraham. You see this yawning chasm separating you from us? Just as you cannot cross to us, neither can Lazarus cross to you. Not now. Not ever.
Clearly the rich man is not accustomed to being told “no,” because he is not done ordering around Lazarus. “Then I beg you, father, send him to my father’s house to warn my brothers.”
Shaking his head, Abraham responds, Why would I do that when they already have Moses and the prophets? Everything they need to know is right there.
Yes, but, nobody reads anymore, Abraham. They need to be shown, not told. They need a dramatic gesture. Someone who came to them from the dead. Now that would get their attention!
You can almost hear Abraham sigh. He’s probably thinking, How did this guy get to be rich when he’s so naive? “If they do not listen to Moses and the prophets, neither will they be convinced if someone rises from the dead.” Why would they pay any more attention to Lazarus in death than they did in life, when time and again they walked past him and even stepped over him to get to the latest dinner party you were hosting?
For those who believe that salvation consists in living well—and this goes for all of us, not just the wealthy—suffering and death will always feel like God’s absence, or even worse, as punishment for sin. To the extent that the rich man paid Lazarus any mind at all, it was likely to think, “What a pitiful wretch.”
But far from being indicators of God’s absence, suffering and death are the very means that God uses to secure our salvation. The pitiful wretch sprawled in front of the gate, cursed and rejected, is Jesus Christ. And that gate is the cross. For it is in being crucified that Jesus crosses the chasm of sin and death for our sakes and leads us into life.