Today’s readings: Amos 6, 1.4-7; 1 Timothy 6, 11-16; Luke 16, 19-31.
Today’s gospel may very easily lead us into disquisitions about life after death, about the existence of hell, or how we can figure out what eternity would be like. But that’s not the point. What instead it points to is the actual world order as it is now, as we know it and sustain it, and it is proclaiming to us the big truth that this world order will crumble and fall apart and that a new one will come into existence.
Since the Old Testament, life after death has lent itself to fertile imagination which in turn found itself translated into dogmatic truths peppering our catechisms and theologies. Eternity, as proclaimed in the Scriptures, is in no way to be seen as simply an extension of life or time on earth. “Now he is being comforted here while you are in agony,” was Abraham’s imagined response, referring also to “a great gulf” which impedes crossing from one side to the other.
What the prophets and Jesus himself proclaimed is not about a world that would substitute the present one. Given our belief in Christ ascending to heaven and in Mary’s bodily assumption, it is logical to ask how can this other world be figured out. We very logically imagine it as a place somewhere out there where our share will be in inverse proportion to how we lived here on earth.
The Kingdom of God comes in power as the kingdom of this world is overthrown. The kingdom of this world as denounced by the prophet Amos eight centuries before Christ, and as represented in Jesus’ story of the rich man and Lazarus, is still very powerful. It still translates the ‘might is right’ philosophy in the everyday life of millions of Lazaruses around us.
It is interesting that in his story, Jesus speaks about “a rich man” who has no name and “a poor man” called Lazarus. No name means no identity and no dignity. It reminds us of how during an interview, Nelson Mandela was once addressed as the one who had given dignity back to the black in South Africa. He promptly remarked that he had struggled to give dignity to the white, because it was actually they who had lost all dignity during the Apartheid regime.
One other very important point made in today’s gospel is what is it that can make the world repent and change ways insofar as gross imbalance is concerned. In our times we’ve heard over and over again since the 9/11 tragedy that things will never be the same. This was repeated even after the credit crunch in 2008 and we hear it again every so often whenever we go through dark patches. But there is no repentance, it seems.
Unfortunately, the world as it is, with the mainstream way of doing politics and with the utter lack of vision that transpires, seems constrained to generate more poverty and marginalise more generations.
Etienne Balibar, the French philosopher and author, in his book Politics and the Other Scene, writes: “The most massive form of poverty in today’s world is the one we see in underdeveloped countries, where millions of human beings are superfluous, nobody needs them, they are, so to speak, disposable people.”
Sounds so terrible! Yet very true, from the scenarios we’ve become used to seeing daily in our headlines. And judging from what is at present unfolding all over the affluent West, even in mainstream politics, these scenarios are not enough warnings as to what future awaits us. “If they will not listen to Moses or to the prophets, they will not be convinced even if someone should rise from the dead.”
It is very hard to figure out what is it that can convince our generation that there are versions of humanity that endanger, rather than safeguard, the human species, that deny, rather than give back, dignity to the downtrodden.