Hard to Convince

Luke 16:19-31

Luke 16 features two parables about wealth, the first Jesus addressed to his disciples, and ends with this famous saying, “No one can serve two masters, either you will love one and hate the other, or you will be loyal to one and have contempt for the other. You cannot serve God and wealth [mammon].” The second parable, Jesus addressed to a group of Pharisees. Luke 16:14-15 reads, “The Pharisees, who were money-lovers, heard all this and sneered at Jesus.” Jesus responded to this sneering by saying, “You work so hard to justify yourself before other people, but God knows your hearts. And oftentimes, what the people value is highly offensive to God.”

Jesus accuses the Pharisees of manipulating the Law and the Prophets to justify their lavish lifestyles and then tells them a parable which begins: “There was a certain rich man who clothed himself in purple and fine linen, and who feasted luxuriously every day.” Can you picture the scene, the Pharisees quickly looking down to check and see if any of them were wearing purple. “Phew, I’m wearing blue today...he can’t possibly be talking about me, then.”

Jesus contrasts this wealthy man with Lazarus, a poor man who lies outside the gates of the wealthy man’s estate, longing to eat even a crumb that fell from his table, surrounded by stray dogs who gather to lick the sores that covered his body. A disgusting, dirty, diseased spectacle of a man.

Fred Craddock suggests that when Jesus was scolding the Pharisees for manipulating the Law and the Prophets, he was setting the scene for this parable about a very rich man and a very poor man. When the Pharisees scoffed at Jesus’ position on the subject of wealth, they did so from a position which they believed was endorsed by the Scriptures: “theirs is a theology in which God and mammon are comfortably joined” (Craddock, 192). “As Pharisees whose religion was of the Book, their love of wealth found its confirmation in the law and the prophets, as pointed out at verses 14-15 above,” writes Craddock. “Whoever is careful to obey the commands of God shall be highly favored: ‘Blessed shall you be in the city, and blessed shall you be in the field. Blessed shall be the fruit of your body, and the fruit of your ground, and the fruit of your beasts, the increase of your cattle, and the young of your flock’ (Deut. 28:3-4).”

“The equations are clear to them,” Craddock continues, “wealth = blessed of God = obedience to God’s commandments. If, then, the parable is to address them, the rich man cannot be an exaggeration of godless materialism but a realistic portrait of a man whose wealth was taken as evidence of God’s favor, a man with whom the Pharisees can identify. Otherwise the story has interest but no power. And as for the poor man, is not his condition the punishment of God on a life unknown to us but known to God?” (Craddock, 196).

What a shock it must have been for the Pharisees to hear that when these two men die, it is the poor man who is welcomed at God’s banqueting table and the rich man who finds himself suffering on the other side of an unbridgeable chasm. And to be clear, Jesus is talking about heaven and hell, the afterlife, not some unbridgeable chasm in the here and now. Jesus couldn’t possibly be referring to any sort of real disconnection between people currently living in the world, or any sort of philosophical chasm between Jesus’ understanding of the Law and the Prophets and the Pharisees’ interpretation of them.

The rich man cries out for relief, and finding none, cries out that Lazarus be sent back to the earth to warn his family, to tell them to change their ways lest they fall into the same pain and agony of the chasm in which he now finds himself stuck. “They’ve already all they need to safely cross the chasm,” Abraham responds, “they have Moses and the Prophets, just like you did. Let them read the Scriptures and be convinced of their need to bridge this chasm before they die.” “Yeah, but I didn’t interpret them correctly, and now I’m here...if someone were to rise from the dead and go to my family and warn them, then they would be convinced,” pleads the rich man. Abraham shakes his head, “If they don’t listen to Moses and the Prophets, then they will be hard to convince by any other means.” To be clear, Jesus is only telling a story about this “certain rich man’s” failure to interpret the Law and the Prophets appropriately, Abraham is talking to this “certain rich man” in the parable, and talking about the other wealthy members of his family who will be “hard to convince” to change their hearts and lives. The Pharisees, to whom Jesus is telling this parable, can safely look at this story from a distance.

In referring to the dichotomy between this certain rich man, who “feasted luxuriously every day”, and Lazarus, who “longed to eat the crumbs that fell from the rich man’s table”, Craddock writes: “wherever some eat and others do not eat, there the kingdom of God does not exist.” And to be clear, the kingdom of God has to do with the afterlife, it couldn’t possibly be referencing the here and now. When Jesus tells his parables, he couldn’t possibly be seeking to bridge the chasm between God’s hope and vision for life and love and stewardship of creation and justice among the nations with the actual reality of life lived out on earth in the here and now...we can safely look at these stories from a distance. Jesus isn’t actually building a bridge that people can walk across, helping them to change their hearts and lives, showing them the way to new life...or is he?

I’ll leave you to ponder that, and while you do, I’d like to tell a parable of my own about building bridges and crossing chasms.

There is a certain portion of the lakefront trail at Camp Hanover that gets used when I run disc golf tournaments out there. The lake licks in and out of the surrounding hillside creating inlets and muck-filled chasms that would be rather impossible to walk through. I received a report from my brother last Sunday that a bridge we had placed to help competitors get across one such valley without wading through thigh-deep mud had gone missing. The mud-filled span was fairly wide, 20 feet or so--too wide to jump across. The rest of the inlet was surrounded by thick trees and brush and a very steep slope, making walking around equally complicated and dangerous. Some people might be able to balance across a section of fallen tree trunk stuck in the muck, but it was rotten and slick and required a 3 foot hop over mud to access...and I doubt all competitors would have been able to make that leap and find sure and safe footing. I needed everybody to be able to get safely across. Leaving an obstacle that I knew some can cross while others cannot would not have made for fair competition. And to be clear, I am talking about disc golf here.

I needed to find some way to bridge the chasm, otherwise people were not going to be able to get where they needed to go, at least not everybody. Martin, whom you know as “my friend with the banjo”, offered to go out to Camp with me on Thursday to put out flags, install tee signs on the disc golf course, paint out-of-bounds lines, and help get the course ready for tournament play. When I told him of the chasm predicament, he had a thought. “You know they’re redoing the waterfront at Camp,” he told me, “and I’m pretty sure they’ve taken a bunch of boards off the old F-dock which are now sitting on the bank of the lake. I’ll bet we could take some of those and use them to build a bridge.”

I called the Camp director to ask about using those boards and he said that’d be fine, but also mentioned that there were some piers, 20 feet long and already assembled, which were lying on the bank of the lake, and we could use those as a bridge. Great. Except the valley we needed to bridge was about a quarter mile from the bank where those bridge sections were lying. 20 feet of bridge made out of 2x6’s weighs over 200 pounds. That’s 2 guys lugging a 200 pound, 20 foot section of bridge a quarter mile through a winding wooded trail over roots and rocks and crossing at least two other mud-filled inlets on tree stump bridges and pallet box ladders...no thank you. We decided that carrying planks would be the more manageable solution...until we saw the planks and remembered why Camp had decided to replace the dock this summer. Many years of service have taken their toll on these planks, evident in extreme warp and wear. We could build have built a bridge from them, but it wouldn’t be a very good one or a very safe one. In order to be a bridge, a structure must be able to support people walking across it...not simply be looked at from a distance.

“What if,” I suggested, “we were to go and grab two canoes and lay one of the already assembled sections of bridge across the top so that we can transport the bridge across the lake?” This would bypass having to carry a 200 pound section of bridge a quarter of a mile up and down the lakefront trail. Plus, we’d get to go canoeing. This was the solution! We commandeered two canoes and paddled them to the lakefront where the bridge lay. Just lifting the bridge to get it loaded onto the canoes made us grateful we didn’t have to carry it any further. Then we set sail, or set paddle, in our makeshift catamaran: two canoes connected by a span of bridge.

We both remarked on how much more stable both of our boats felt with the bridge connecting us, the bridge made it nearly impossible to flip or even tip the boats as we paddled. But moving with a span of bridge between our boats required a lot more communication and coordination than paddling our own disconnected canoes. The bridge caused us to connect to one another in a new way, it required us to work together in order to make progress. And to be clear, I am talking about canoeing here.

We made our way to the bridge-less inlet and took the canoe catamaran as far in as we could before the front of our boats got stuck in the mud. Martin took his shoes off and stepped out of his boat...immediately sinking into muddy water up to his waist. Seeing no way to avoid it...I did the same. And in thigh-deep muck we maneuvered the bridge off the canoes and into place. But at some point during the lifting, paddling, dragging, and flipping Martin tweaked his back really badly and had to sit out while I kicked and nudged the bridge into its final position. Covered in mud from waist to toe, Martin sat in pain on the hillside path leading down to the newly installed bridge. He chuckled and said, “If this thing lasts long enough for everyone to get safely across during the tournament on Saturday, it will have been worth it.”

Well everyone was able to get across safely. Everyone, that is, except for Martin. He had injured his back so badly installing the bridge that he had to drop out of playing in the disc golf tournament. He sacrificed his ability to play so that everyone else could walk safely above the muck we’d wrestled with. He worked hard to think up a solution, and then put in the heavy lifting, the canoe paddling, the communication and coordination in order to navigate that solution into place. Bridging chasms can be messy and painful work, but if our work can help people move safely and cleanly across the messy muck that surrounds us, it will have been worth it. And to be clear, I am talking about Camp Hanover, and canoeing, and disc golf...or am I?

Craddock, Fred. “Luke” from Interpretation: A Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching. (Louisville, KY, John Knox Press, 1990).