Jesus said to the Pharisees: “There was a rich man who dressed in purple garments and fine linen and dined sumptuously each day. And lying at his door was a poor man named Lazarus, covered with sores, who would gladly have eaten his fill of the scraps that fell from the rich man’s table. Dogs even used to come and lick his sores.” (Luke 16.19-21)
Names humanize us. Our names make us somebody in the world. We present ourselves to the world by way of our name. The first responsibility of parents is to give a name to their child. Until parents give a name to their child, the child is unknown to a large extent and cannot be addressed. A baby who is without a name is called “Baby Doe,” an identifier, but not a real name.
The failure to call someone by his or her name dehumanizes the person. We feel it in our bones when somebody can’t remember our name, an acknowledgement on some level of our unimportance, or when we’re asked to give our social security number, as if the nine digits define who we are. Our criminal justice system intentionally uses numbers to identify inmates, requiring them to put the number on all mail sent or received. They’re a number, not a person.
The extreme dehumanization, of course, was in the Nazi concentration camps where the prisoners were tattooed with a number on their left forearms, making it clear to those imprisoned that they were nobodies, their treatment by guards commensurate with their status as non-persons. Those who survived the brutality of the camps forever carried the tattoo on their bodies, a harsh reminder of their nonentity status and, while they had escaped the camps, they could not escape the memory of when they were treated as non-persons.
As we approach this story that Rabbi Jesus tells in Luke’s gospel of the beggar at the gate of the rich man, the first thing we want to see is that the beggar has a name. He is called Lazarus. That fact is often overlooked. But it is the only parable that Rabbi Jesus tells in which a person is named, a fact that carries significance by its singularity.
Some scholars propose that the parable was based on a real-life person, hence the giving of the name of the beggar. While possible, it is not determinative since the other person is simply called “a certain rich man.” I propose that the fact that Rabbi Jesus names the beggar may be as instructive as the story itself and may be a key to understanding the core teaching contained in the story.
And what is that teaching? Lazarus is a person. His name makes him a person. And yet, as the story shows, he is never treated as a person by the rich man who, interestingly, is not named, even if his wealth has given him status and importance in the eyes of others. It is not that the rich man doesn’t know Lazarus’s name. He does. We’re told that after his death the rich man asks Abraham to send Lazarus to give him a drink of water.
But the cruelty is that the rich man, when alive, knows Lazarus’s name, but refuses to call him by name or even acknowledge that he exists. He is a nobody to the rich man. And as a nobody, he is treated inhumanely, never offered even the scraps from the rich man’s table, left to suffer hunger and affliction a few feet from the rich man’s door. At best, the rich man sees Lazarus as a beggar, a nomenclature that robs Lazarus of his personhood by putting him into a collective grouping of people who are anonymous, who are nameless. They are labeled and categorized, but not recognized as persons in their own right.
That Rabbi Jesus intentionally gives Lazarus a name is further signaled in the fact that Lazarus is a variation of the name Eleazar, which means in Hebrew, “God helps,” or “God heals.” The reality, of course, is that God alone helps and God alone heals Lazarus, while the rich man offers no help and gives no healing. God sees Lazarus, while the man dressed in purple and in linen does not see him.
As we have seen before in this gospel–and in the whole of the Hebrew scriptures for that matter–God gives preferential treatment to the poor, the “little ones” of the world like Lazarus. He knows their name. As the Hebrew prophet says, “The Lord called me from the womb, from the body of my mother he named my name.”
We may want to ask why in the world would the Most High God be bothered by people with little or no significance in the big scheme of things? Because nobody else does. The world, like the rich man, turns a blind eye to those without power, those without prestige, those without position. They are nobodies in a world of big somebodies.
But, in the great reversal, where the values of the world are turned upside down by the ways of God, they are somebody to the One who made them and who loves them with a tenderness of a mother for her child. And that great reversal could not be made clearer than Rabbi Jesus does in this story where, in the end, the rich man becomes the beggar, the one clothed in fine linen now is clothed in torment, and the one who ate sumptuous meals desires a drop of water to quench his thirst.
Sadly, we see the rich man is late to the party. Even in Hades, he still treats Lazarus as a servant, as a subordinate, as his waterboy. “Send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue,” he says to Abraham, failing to see that in the realm of the Most High God he no longer calls the shots. In the heavenly abode, Lazarus–the beggar–sits beside Abraham, his status as somebody fully acknowledged.
So, what are we to make of this story? Well, that seems obvious. We don’t want to end up like the rich man, which means we don’t want to live like the rich man. It is important to see that the rich man’s sin is not that he is rich. His sin is he uses his wealth for himself, not sharing, not helping, not giving it away. He is, as we would say in our psychological age, self-absorbed. He sees only himself.
Clearly, this cautionary tale that Rabbi Jesus tells is urging us to choose other values, specifically a way of life that sees all others as persons of equal importance to ourselves, that refuses to dehumanize others in any way because of their lack of status, and that shares willingly and happily of what we have been given, especially to those who have been given less.
Where do we begin living in such a way? There is one important detail that Rabbi Jesus includes in this story that we do not want to overlook because it may direct our way. He tells us that Lazarus was “lying at the door” of the rich man. Sometimes the word is translated as gate, but, for all practical purposes, the word means porch. Lazarus is lying on the rich man’s porch, in clear sight, within reach.
Which, of course, makes the rich man’s actions all the more deplorable because he doesn’t see Lazarus right outside his door. Or, if he sees him, he ignores him, stepping over him on his way to his next big banquet. The only time we’re told that the rich man actually sees Lazarus is when he, the one who feasted in the world, is in the netherworld where he is denied even a drop of water. He “raised his eyes and saw Abraham far off and Lazarus at his side.” Only then does he see him, really see him. Until that moment, when he is the one in anguish, he has turned a blind eye to Lazarus.
Now, the one who wanted no contact with Lazarus when they were alive on earth suddenly wants contact with him, asking Abraham to send Lazarus to him. But, as Abraham is quick to tell the rich man, the time for contact has passed. The opportunity when given was not taken. And, as he informs the rich man, “between us and you a great chasm is established to prevent anyone from crossing who might wish to go from our side to yours or from your side to ours.”
In other words, the door that could have been opened to the poor man while he was alive is now closed. The door could have been opened every day of the rich man’s life, inviting Lazarus to sit at the table with him, but the rich man never opened it an inch. The same judgment now falls upon him because the door between the abode of God and the abode of evil is permanently shut. It is sealed off.
The point Rabbi Jesus seems to be making here is that Lazarus, the one who is in need, is right in front of us, on our porch, so to speak, certainly within sight. He is not far off, not unknown, not unrecognizable. He is close by, in our line of vision, within reach. So we don’t have to look far for the one who needs our help, needs our healing. He is right in front of us, if we just open our eyes. The time for contact is now.
Once an enthusiastic believer in Mother Teresa’s work traveled to India. When she met with Mother Teresa she told her that she wanted to stay in India to work with her. Mother Teresa answered, “Don’t you have poor people in your own country?” In so many words, Mother Teresa was telling her to go back home and to help the poor on her own porch. She didn’t have to travel thousands of miles to find a poor person.
The problem, of course, is that we have trained ourselves not to see the person in front of us, not to look, not to know the ones who are asking for something to eat, a warm place to sleep, a roof over their heads. We easily adopt the ways of the world, blaming, badgering, belittling those in need, in this way becoming the rich man in the story, even if we don’t dress in purple or dine sumptuously each day.
A man I once knew lived this parable as well as anybody I have ever known. Generous to a fault, he never shunned the poor man on the street or made anybody feel inferior because of who they were or where they were in this world. Instead, he saw everyone as somebody. He once shared with me that whenever he saw someone in need he would go to the person, introducing himself and asking what the person’s name was. Then he called the person by name.
Often reflecting on what he said, I’ve come to see just how right he was. The first thing he did was acknowledge their humanity. In asking them to tell him their name, he returned to them their dignity, their personhood that had been robbed from them by a world that dismissed, denigrated, and denied them their place in the human family. Once they shared their name, he called them by name, repeating it often in his conversation, in this way reminding them that they were somebody, regardless of what the world had told them.
So, back to the question of where do we begin. Maybe that’s the place. Ask the person on our porch what his or her name is. Say it aloud so that they can hear it. In calling them by name, we have shown them that we see them. It is the first gift we can give them.
–Jeremy Myers
Sunday Brunch 