External solution?

(Lk 16:19-31)

The reversal of situations in the afterlife is a theme belonging to the entire culture of the ancient Middle East - an area strongly marked by social discrimination. But the meaning of the Gospel is profound.

The new IEC translation has correctly rendered the term Hades (v.23) as "underworld", no longer "hell" [IEC '74] because the sense of Jesus' parable is all about the hereafter!

The "behind the clouds" has nothing to do with it. What the Lord is interested in is not so much the final fate as the current situation of those who listen to him - starting with his own followers: where are they going?

In the parables of Mercy and the yielding Father Luke (15:1-32) announced that a lost man would be a defeat for God himself.

His unfamiliar Face induces the envious front-runners to spy on the freedom that the newcomers of the Church allow themselves.

"Who has authorised you to consider yourselves equal to the others and to undermine our precedence, without having undergone the whole rigmarole, the stubborn commitment and the labours of us veterans?"

The pagans have it easy (Lk 16:1-15): they accuse the old men of hiding their spirit of unmovable greed under the ill-concealed guise of "tributes", meritorious works, and hierarchical necessities.

Easily the 'best' are caught red-handed, accustomed as they are to reverence God in order to serve together a different master - well hidden.

In fact, after narrating the parable of the dishonest steward, Jesus himself hears sniggering behind his back (Lk 16:14), not the sinners, but precisely the pious and bigoted people.

They are the cunning elite attached to things and lovers of money (vv.13-15) - accustomed to exercising that ancient [easy, rightly valued profession of religious leaders]. What the Lord had described as incompatible ("abomination": v.15): reverencing the Most High and pocketing his loot.

"Poor deluded man!" - the traders, false friends of God, would say of our Master: "Impossible to make followers without loot: the Gratis of Love is a beautiful dream, but it raises nothing, it doesn't amass proselytes and it doesn't trigger the predatory instincts of the first of the class!"

In today's Gospel passage, those who consider themselves entitled to precedence [in the community of sons!] raise a question of seeming obviousness:

Is it not in the natural order of things that in human society there are first and last, learned and ignorant, rulers and subjects?

After all, the legal principle that governed all private property law in the Latin world is also the motto of a well-known official newspaper: Unicuique Suum.

Even Leo XIII, pope of the Social Encyclicals, recognised that "in human society it is according to the order established by God that there are princes and subjects, masters and proletarians, rich and poor, learned and ignorant, nobles and plebeians; the obligation of charity of the rich and the powerful is to provide for the poor and destitute" [a sin of simple omission: it is enough for them to do 'charity'].

The Lord's position is very very different. For Lk, the rich man is not God's blessed one, as the landowners were supposed to be - and so were the patriarchs of the First Testament.

His coveted clothing is only a metaphor for the inner emptiness and ephemerality he revels in - that which will later be corroded by moths.

His gorging is a sign of an inner abyss to be filled - a kind of nervous hunger, which feels dizzy.

"Eli hezer" ["Lazarus"]: God helps, but not the epulon - according to the pious, holier-than-thou, backward mentality.

He does not forget; on the contrary, he is firmly on the side of the shaky: the Faith believes the opposite of archaic religions!

Therefore, the careless 'enjoying life' of the rich man is to renounce living altogether: he does not even have a name - a terrifying thing for the ancient mentality.

The evangelist does not state that Lazarus may once have been a good and responsible person: just a poor man.

Nor does he state that the great lord was a total delinquent: apart from the 'blindness'... if the destitute preferred to stay outside his door and not elsewhere, it means that he was getting something there.

But in those days there was no cutlery and one wiped one's fingers with breadcrumbs, which were then thrown on the ground; this was what the wretched ate.

A dog's life, worse than insults. And ignored.

Here was the radical evil: which was not in individual acts, but rather in the depths of being, and the resulting global carelessness.

Carelessness that tends to choose consensus and hierarchies as the ultimate background of existence.

So the question that the passage from Lk reiterates is not trivially moralistic: merits or faults, juridical or religious.

The question is posed about humanity itself: diminished, reduced, barren, incapable; incapable of scanning a deliberate reversal.

Inextricably bound to the abysses already dug. 

The Gospel wants to stimulate us to reflect not on the issue of permissible almsgiving, but rather on the warning, and communion of resources: on the meaning of unbridled wealth alongside poverty.

Unintentional misery is often seen as a commonplace situation, but such drama affects individuals and entire peoples - from birth to death forced into an unbalanced reality, or one that is impossible to sustain.

In many areas, class disharmonies even tend to worsen, perhaps due to an internal logic of an economic and social system that tends to concentrate power and direct resources.

In ancient times, the 'bosom of Abraham' (vv.22-23) was the condition that recognised the success of God's plan, the place of the fulfilment of Israel's Promises.

Even today, those who do not perceive that some perish in a world of misery, turn life into a failure; they find themselves useless and empty, they do not come into the Light of Life.

Those who flounder - without the encounter with others - choose a form of existence that has nothing to do with the People of God; nothing to do with the Mystery of the Eternal, and its blessings.

How then not to sink into the abyss of insignificance?

It is not a fate due to ignorance or a spirit of revenge, that which collides with the Father's plan for his children.

Being open to the humanising sensitivity and greatness of God's work is not a matter of some heavenly 'later' vengeful mechanism.

So neither is it a matter of some sort of (albeit eloquent) forlorn warning.

So how do we turn away from the seduction of possessions?

Conquering the lure of money and the lust for accumulation, which generates social paralysis and humiliation that devastates the person, is a miracle.

And a miracle of conscience can do neither an immediate prodigy nor a vision (vv.29-31).

Neither can a common religion, if it tends to sacralise and not interfere, to make positions permanent; to be complicit in making the poor and the rich poor, gaining on both.

What Jesus refers to is Listening. The "Shemà Israel" - recited twice daily.

In extreme poverty of means, "Hear Israel" is the Call of the Father.

The Lord shares in the oppressed situation of too many of his children - unable to dress in expensive clothes or feast lavishly and frequently.

In short, to build the Kingdom and change the divided world, it is only worth letting oneself be educated by the Word of God.

Intimate Seed and Germ, Therapy-event, energetic Word and Call: which introduces us into the active and spousal awareness of Love.

Logos that places us in the right position. Unique warning; not external.

Foundational Eros that already reverses situations here and now.