Whitsaturday (Year 1)
Deuteronomy 5:22-33; 2 Corinthians 4:13-5:10; Luke 16:19-31
PM: Eve of Trinity Sunday: Sirach 42:15-25; Ephesians 3:14-21
I pray that you may have the power to comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.
Ephesians 3:18-19
The Gospel today recounts the parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus. It is sometimes used to justify ideas that might be called “redistribution of wealth” and “social justice”. I’m putting them in quotes for a reason. Hold on: we’ll get to that.
Other times the Gospel passage is seen to disparage wealth and uplift poverty. And I’ve even heard it used to justify the idea of eternal hell - as if that was the point Jesus was making in the story. But I’d rather look at the reality of wealth and poverty as this is also the Eve of Trinity Sunday…
In my own life - and in yours, I’m certain - I can point at points of poverty and wealth. Mine was a single-parent household until I was in fifth grade (minus a year or two). Mom raised three kids in the rural South through the late 60s and early 70s at a time when to be a single mother was not terribly accepted in polite circles. I’ve asked mom for her salary back then - and converted it to “real” money, corrected for inflation. Imagine raising three kids (and yourself, of course) on about 10,000 a year. Even in the rural south, that’s not going to happen - adding even the $21 a month of food stamps. (My Mom, by the way, constantly amazes and humbles me.) And then when I was living in San Francisco, in my 30s I was earning a salary equal to my current age. It was a lot of money: would have been a killer wage in the rural south! But it was barely enough to make ends meet in SF at the turn of the century. When I moved back to the rural south, a cost of living convert told me I’d need to earn $17,000 a year to have the same purchasing power my $42k had in SF. Suddenly I was not lower class or even lower middle. I was on the solid median.
I feel blessed, looking back: not because there were never hard places, but rather because I know at each stage of the game, I was nowhere near “worst”. At least in terms of money: it’s the least important thing possible.
At every turn things change. Money, emotional support, spirit, health. At all stages of the game these things have been way up or way down: most often by my own doings, I confess.
I’ve been both, the Rich Man and Lazarus.
If you read this Gospel for social justice you miss a point: it’s entirely possible for both of them to be saved. Lazarus is there, working out his savation… the Rich Man, traditionally named Divies or Davies, is not working very hard at all. He’s taken a wee bit of a rest.
That’s what most of us do, I think. My maternal Grandfather used to say, “There are no atheists in foxholes.” It’s when the going gets tough that most of us hunker down and start to pray, or bother to think about “things eternal”. What happens if things never get rough?
One of the on-going discussions within the Orthodox Blogosphere (”Orthoblogoslavia” as I call it) is around the question, Can Americans be Orthodox? While most of the discussion gets phrased in a way that might imply something superior about Greek or Slavic cultures, at heart is an important question: can people who have so much leisure time, so much money and so much cultural distraction arrive at a point where they “take up their cross daily and follow Jesus.”
The question misses a point - as do all of us who want to read social justice - or such social issues - into this Gospel: our cross is not “bad”. St Paul tells the folks in Corinth (2 Cor 4:15) “[E]verything is for your sake, so that grace, as it extends to more and more people, may increase thanksgiving, to the glory of God.” OUr Cross is not the troubles in our lives: making it hard for happy people, for successful people, for winners in any way to get saved. Our cross is knowing what to do with what we have.
Divis’ problem is not that he was rich, per se: it’s that he didn’t take care of the poor with his wealth. The Church Fathers write that the extra bread in my kitchen is not mine: it belongs to the poor. So also the extra clothes and wealth in my life. It’s not that I’m rich that will be my curse. I’m selfish holding on to that what God has given me exactly ” that grace, as it extends to more and more people, may increase thanksgiving, to the glory of God”.
The book of Sirach tells us: All things come in pairs, one opposite the other, and he has made nothing incomplete. Each supplements the virtues of the other. Who could ever tire of seeing his glory? (42:24-25) And this takes us to the Eve of Trinity Sunday…
The Trinity is too great a Mystery to resolve in the course of this meditation: even if I had focused all the text on it (I have, but we’ll get to that). What the ancient saints taught us is that (no matter how it is possible) God is love and in that love there is, of course, community. God’s love is so great that in God’s being there is community.
But more than that: in the Incarnation humanity has become part of that community. Jesus as God-Man unites us in our nature with the nature of God, the community of love. It is our salvation to live out that community. It would not do for us to imagine any member of the Trinity to have “needs” that can be filled by the other two. But it is for us to see love flowing from one to the other, from two to the third, from each to each in a fullness beyond our imagining.
Even though it may never be possible for me, alone, to, as St Paul says, “have the power to comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge…” God calls all of humanity in Christ, to “be filled with the fullness of God.” Let us, mirroring God’s fullness, “Each supplements the virtues of the other.” Let Divis give to Lazarus to the glory of God until each are filled to overflowing with thanksgiving and love.
Say yes we live uncertainty
And disappointments have to be
And everyday we might be facing more
And yes we live in desperate times
But fading words and shaking rhymes
There’s only one thing here worth hoping for
With Lucifer beneath you and God above
If either one of them asks you what your living of
Say love, say for me love
Say love, say for me love
Say love, say for me love
Say love, say for me love
Say love, say for me love
Say love, say for me love
(The Avett Brothers, Living in Love
This is what the Church - all of Creation - is called to do that we might unite (be reconciled, be made whole, be saved) into an image of the Trinity.