Luke 16:19-31, from Proper 21 (26)
I received a gift this week so valuable that I didn’t know what to do with it and ended up eating it.
The story really begins six months or more ago, in the register line at McCallie Dining Hall, a cafeteria on the campus of Middle Tennessee State University. A professor at MTSU, I eat at McCallie often, perhaps too often for my own good. You pay one price at the door, and if you’re faculty, you get a discount. After that, you can stay as long as you like and eat as much as you want. There’s “meat and three” style cafeteria food and a grill, plus a salad bar, a pizza bar, a sandwich bar and a dessert bar. The only limits on your stay stem from a lack of access to power outlets and bathrooms. Once your computer battery drains or your bladder fills, you pretty much have to leave. Sometimes, although not often, I’ve gone in for breakfast and left after lunch, getting two meals for the price of one and, in between, a place to work disturbed by nothing more than the general bustle of the place.
That morning in the register line, I found myself standing directly in front of “M,” a wisp of a woman who cleans and maintains the bathrooms in a couple of buildings on campus, including my building. I know essentially two things about her: her first name (I’m using just an initial, here) and the fact that she is poor. Like an alarmingly high number of people who work in food and janitorial service on campus, she earns very little for the hard, often unpleasant job she does, and when the university closes due to holidays, snow or whatever else, she makes nothing at all. She needs every penny she makes, and then some.
So, I bought M’s lunch that day. I asked the cashier to ring up two admissions, then turned to tell a surprised M that her lunch was on me. M smiled broadly and thanked me profusely in English accented heavily enough to signal that it is not her native language. The cashier smiled admiringly at me, I felt good about myself, and M got a meal she didn’t have to pay for. Thereafter, every time I passed M, whether the distance between us was a few feet or 30 yards, she would flash that same broad smile at me and chirp, “Good morning, doctor!” always emphasizing the “tor” syllable in “doctor.” I would smile back and wave, internally congratulating myself for the kindness I had shown her that day. All was well.
Until this week.
We ended up in a cashier line again, this time at the small snack shop in my building, and this time with our positions reversed. She was in front of me. I was buying coffee. M was buying breakfast. Noticing that I had no food in my hands, M apparently concluded that I needed some. “What would you like?” she asked. Nothing, thank you, I said. I had eaten breakfast already. “One of these, maybe?” she said gesturing toward a display of baseball-sized Otis Spunkmeyer muffins. No, really, I said. I don’t need anything. “Blueberry, then,” she said, placing one on the counter, paying for it with cash, and then handing it almost ceremoniously to me. There were people in line behind us. M stood between me and the door. I had no choice. I took the muffin and thanked her. She left, beaming. Mortified, I paid for my coffee (at least she hadn’t bought that as well) and headed for the door, beyond which nobody had witnessed a poor woman spending a sizable chunk of her weekly income on feeding an overstuffed professor who makes easily five times what she does.
And then, as if on cue, this story in Luke about Lazarus and the rich man pops up in the week’s lectionary. Lazarus is a sore-covered beggar who lies hungry and miserable day after day at the fancy gate of a fancy home in which a fancy rich man sits in fancy clothes and eats fancy food off a fancy table, never sharing so much as a scrap with Lazarus. In the course of time, both men die. Angels spirit Lazarus’ soul off to hang with Abraham in some sort of idyllic afterlife. The rich man wakes up roasting in Hades. Desperate for relief, the rich man urges Abraham to send Lazarus over with a drop of water to cool the rich man’s tongue. Abraham declines, pointing out that Lazarus has been through more than enough hell already, and scraps of paradise for the rich man now will be as scarce as scraps of food were for Lazarus then. Changing tactics – but not his assumption that Lazarus remains his errand boy – the rich man suggests that Abraham dispatch Lazarus to warn the rich man’s equally rich brothers to change their ways, lest they, too, wind up in Hades. Abraham turns down this proposition as well, predicting that if the brothers have ignored a whole Bible’s worth of law and prophets, they’ll probably also ignore a guy raised from the dead. The allusion to Jesus’ own impending death and resurrection is obvious.
So if the point of the parable is that rich guys are going to hell, I’m in trouble. I look a lot more like the rich guy than like Lazarus, and people like M can be an uncomfortable reminder of that fact. But I think Jesus is conveying something more complex, here. For starters, the story isn’t a very good guide to how the afterlife works. All this talk about paradise, Hades and souls has more Greek flavoring than a gyro with a side of Tzatziki sauce. Luke wrote to his Hellenized audience in terms they would understand, not necessarily in terms designed to align with what the whole of scripture says about life after death.
I don’t think the point is that Lazarus went to heaven necause he was poor and the rich man went to hell because he was rich. I think the point is more like the mirror image of that statement: Lazarus avoided hell, even though he was poor, and the rich man missed heaven, despite being rich. Our situations after we die will have no direct relationship with how little or how much wealth and power we had in life. Death might promote and demote, but the chief outcome is a leveling. Everyone ends up six feet under, no matter who they were, or weren’t.
But enjoying riches and power in life does seem connected throughout scripture with difficulty finding one’s way into the kingdom of God. I think it’s because grace, the only way into the kingdom of God, is a leveler, too, in the sense that everyone ends up needing it in equal measure. To whatever degree you go through life thinking you’ve got it all together and under control, you’re unlikely to consider yourself in need of grace. Thus, wealth is more a symptom than a cause of the rich man’s eventual damnation. Surrender to grace is critical for salvation, and surrendering makes no sense if you’re convinced you’re winning.
That’s the real dilemma M handed me when she handed me that muffin, isn’t it? She upended my comfortable view of a world in which I am the “docTOR” and she – although I would never say it aloud to her – is the “janiTOR.” I know little about her precisely because, when I think about her at all, which isn’t often, I think about her only in these terms. Sure, I bought her a lunch once. But I didn’t invite her to eat it while sitting across from the spot where I sat to eat mine, did I? Had I done that, I would have had to talk with her, to treat her as an equal, to learn more about her than just how our paychecks compare, to recognize her humanity. Doing that would have meant giving up a bunch of the reasons why, day in and day out, I consider myself a cut above the rest of the world and, therefore, not really all that desperate for grace.
I wondered, at first, what to do with the muffin. I really didn’t even want it. Blueberry muffins aren’t that high on my list of favorite things. I considered finding a subtle way to give it back to her. I considered donating it to some hungry student. But in the end, I unwrapped it and ate it. It was actually pretty good. And now, the next time M greets me with her usual, “Hello, docTOR,” I can truthfully tell her I enjoyed her thoughtful gift. More importantly, though, maybe I can find a way to start treating her like the fellow human being I have just now begun to realize she is and, in doing so, loosen my grip on the illusion that I am any better.
