Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost, September 25 2016
Jeremiah 32.1-3a, 6-15; 1 Timothy 6.6-19; Luke 16.19-31
St Helen’s Church, Cockburnspath, Berwickshire
When I was young, I liked to go to the cinema. I still do. As a boy, I liked to identify with the heroes in the films I watched and to hiss and boo the villains. Later, as a teenager, I watched the classic second world war film Casablanca in a cinema club in London, and at the end of the film, when Humphrey Bogart and Claude Rains go off to join the Free French and fight the Nazis, the whole audience stood up and we clapped ourselves silly.
Cinema audiences these days are more sophisticated or, perhaps, more cynical.
These days, the films I like best are more complicated. Today’s heroes don’t wear white hats and are less than purely heroic. The villains are painted not in darkest black but in different shades of grey. Arguably, these films are closer to real life, but they leave us wondering who, if anyone, in the story we should identify with.
If you listened closely to today’s gospel reading, you may have had the same reaction. Who are we to identify with in this story? The rich man? Lazarus?
*
When I was a minister here a quarter of a century ago, I would visit the elderly widows of farm workers, and sometimes they would tell me tales of how hard their lives were in the years between the two world wars.
But that was then, and this is now.
Few of us now can compare our lot with that of Lazarus – “a poor man named Lazarus, covered with sores, who longed to satisfy his hunger with what fell from the rich man’s table”. We may need to be careful; we may need to count our pennies; but few of us are so poor as to be destitute.
Equally, few of us, if any, are as rich as the rich man “clothed in purple and fine linen”; and few of us today, I hope, are as indifferent to the plight of the poor as he was.
The rich man does not care about Lazarus; he does not even notice him. Lazarus lies at his gate, but the rich man pays him as little attention as we pay the beggars sitting in the streets of Edinburgh as we walk by with our shopping.
Who should we identify with?
*
The surprise answer is “none of the above”. We should identify not with Lazarus, and not with the rich man, but with the rich man’s five siblings.
This story is a parable of warning, a warning directed not to the dead but to the living: to the five brothers and sisters of the rich man, and to you and me. It’s a wake-up call, pulling back a curtain to open our eyes to something we need to see now before it is too late.
The rich man asks Abraham to send Lazarus to warn his brothers and sisters not to live as he has lived. It is clear that he has not been living right, and it is likely that they are not living right either. If they are to live lives pleasing to God, they need to listen to Moses and the prophets.
We too have the law and the prophets – prophets like Jeremiah, who today is untypically cheerful. We also have a Christian advantage: We have one who has risen from the dead – the one in whose name we gather to worship.
How well do we listen?
*
The challenge is addressed to all of us. But it is addressed in a specially poignant way to our Jewish brothers and sisters today, and in particular to the Jews in the land in which I now live and work.
They have Moses and the prophets. Moses and the prophets, indeed, are in a special sense theirs. We just get to borrow them. But they are not listening.
When the new state of Israel won the war of independence in 1948, there was a sense of euphoria in Tel Aviv. When Israel took the rest of mandate Palestine in the six day war in 1967, there was again a sense of euphoria.
When the Lord restored the fortunes of Zion,
we were like those who dream.
Then our mouth was filled with laughter,
and our tongue with shouts of joy;
then it was said among the nations,
‘The Lord has done great things for them.’
The Lord has done great things for us,
and we rejoiced.
Yossi Klein Halevi borrows these words from Psalm 126 for the title of his book describing how the young men of the 55th Paratroopers Reserve Brigade captured the Old City of Jerusalem, just across the valley of Hinnom from the church in which I serve. Like Dreamers is what he calls it.
But today the Israeli dream has turned into a nightmare. If we do not live as God would have us live, if we do not act as God would have us act, it is bound to end badly. Today, more and more Jews I know speak of their sadness and their disappointment with the way Israel has turned out.
*
How has it come to this?
The state of Israel as it currently exists – it doesn’t have to exist in this form, and it can change if it wants to – is the child of one Jew’s dream. In the 1890s, the Austrian Jewish journalist and playwright Theodor Herzl published a book called Der Judenstaat – the state of the Jews. He argued that Europe would always hate its Jews, and that the Jews, therefore, had no other choice but to go somewhere else and create a state of their own. In 1897, he convened the first Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland, with the aim of establishing a home for the Jewish people in Palestine secured under public law.
The trouble is, when you go somewhere else to create a state of your own, you run into the problem of the people who are already living there. Most of the inhabitants of Palestine at the end of the 19th century were non-Jewish: Arab Muslims and Arab Christians; and they were in the way.
The solution the Zionist movement found in 1948 was to take almost 80% of the land by force and to exile 80% of the non-Jewish inhabitants of that part of the land. The solution the state of Israel found in 1967 was to take the rest of the land and to rule the non-Jewish inhabitants of that part under military law, as it still does today.
Arab Israelis – Palestinians living in 1948 Israel – are discriminated against, but they have certain rights. Palestinians in the territories occupied in 1967 effectively have no rights. And those exiled in 1948 and since have never been allowed to return.
This is at the root of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But it’s also at the root of another, more important conflict: the conflict between the Jewish state and Judaism.
The state of Israel as it currently exists is bad for the Palestinians – most obviously for those in the occupied territories, most fundamentally for those still in exile – but it is also bad for the Jews, because it conflicts with the most fundamental Jewish values.
*
The first letter of Timothy is probably not the favourite bed-time reading of most Jewish Israelis, but first Timothy says it right. We are to set our hopes not on our possessions, but rather on God. We are to do good, to be rich in good works, generous, and ready to share.
This is what Moses and the prophets say, and they are right.
There will be a just and lasting peace in Israel/Palestine when the Jews of Israel learn that they must not take the land from their Arab neighbours but must share it.
*
Let me end on a different note.
Jeremiah is notoriously a prophet of doom and gloom. Throughout the book that bears his name, he is constantly telling his people off and warning that it will all end in tears.
But in today’s reading, he steps out of character and speaks against type.
At a time when no one in Judah has any reason to buy land, he does that. And he tells the people confidently and in the name of God: “Houses and fields and vineyards shall again be bought in this land.”
Houses and fields and vineyards: the concrete shape of a future for his people that is full of hope.
Trust in ourselves, and we have no grounds for hope. We humans constantly mess up. But trust in a God who cares for us unfailingly, and we can face the future with courage. We can fight the good fight – a fight waged not with slings and arrows, or with tanks and helicopter gunships, but with God’s weapons of compassion and forbearance, of forgiveness and mutual love.
We can listen to Moses, and we can learn to share.
Hymns
Lord of all hopefulness, Lord of all joy (CH4 166)
Safe in the shadow of the Lord (Psalm 91, CH4 55)
The God of Abraham praise! (CH4 162)
Father of peace, and God of love! (CH4 272)
Immortal, invisible, God only wise (CH4 132)
Sources
Mark O’Brien op, The ABC of Sunday Matters. Reflections on the Lectionary Readings for Year A, B, and C (Hindmarsh, South Africa: ATF Theology, 2013)
Barbara Rossing, “Gospel commentary: Luke 16.19-31”, Working Preacher