A Brother's Touch (Luke 16:19-31)

(Homily for Gayton Road Christian Church's Sunday Worship on September 25, 2016, Proper 21,
and for Lakewood Manor's Vespers Service)

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Hand-Holding, High-Fiving, Hugging—and Tickling

Since before I can remember, I have been blessed by the helping hand of a brother. I know this because my family has a single home video, recorded with our neighbor’s camcorder (back when camcorders were a big deal). In that video, there are several scenes of my early childhood. And in each of those scenes is my brother. He is holding my hand: helping me to stand upright, attending me as I totter across the kitchen, guiding me safely down a slide.

My first conscious memories of my brother’s touch are of a completely different order. No longer is he holding my hand. Now he is tickling me! I particularly remember our vacations. My parents kept my brother and me under tight wraps. Thank God for grandparents! With them, we had a bit more freedom. We called my grandparents’ room the “fun room”—for obvious reasons. It was fun: we could run around, jump on the beds, have pillow fights, and, as I’m remembering now, our escapades would nearly always end with my brother tickling me until I was nearly out of breath. His tickling gave meaning to the expression “side-splitting.” It was unbearable…and perhaps also the most fun I’ve had in my life, at least if my laughter is counted as evidence.

From these first conscious memories of my brother’s touch proceed other memories. As I began to play soccer, my brother would always be on the sidelines, cheering me on. At the end of the game he might give me a high-five, or if we lost a consoling pat on the back. Later my brother would leave for college, and thus ended our day-to-day life together. Even so, we now see each other nearly every Christmas and the occasional summer too, and during these reunions we greet one another with hugs.

These are the many ways that I have known my brother’s helping hand. How about you? Perhaps you have known the helping hand of a brother or a sister, or maybe a lifelong friend. Perhaps you have special memories of how their hand guided you or supported you, made you laugh or encouraged you. Whether it was hand-holding or side-splitting-tickling, high-fives or hugging, we all have known the blessing of a helping hand.

A Parable about More Than Morality or Merit

On the surface, our scripture today has nothing to do with brothers or hand-holding. The distance between the two men in Jesus’ story could hardly be greater. On the one hand, there is a rich man, and he wears the finest clothing, feasts sumptuously everyday, and lives in a gated home. On the other hand, there is the poor man Lazarus, who is covered not with fine clothing but sores, who does not feast but fantasizes over crumbs, who lives not within the gate but without.

In this story, there is no hand-holding or tickling, no high-fiving or hugging. The two men who live side by side could not live further apart. But is that a bad thing, we might ask? Does the rich man actually do anything wrong? Jesus never says so. In fact, there is a notable absence of detail regarding the moral lives of the rich man and Lazarus. Perhaps the rich man lived respectably, tithing at the Temple, praying all the right prayers, studying the scripture. And perhaps the poor man lived in a manner that would make us suspicious. Perhaps he preyed on people’s generosity. Perhaps he used people’s donations not for money or bettering himself, but for the cheap comfort of strong drink. Who knows? Jesus doesn’t tell us, because his concern here is much more than morality or merit.

A Parable about Wealth?

What is Jesus’ concern? To begin, it helps to know that he’s addressing this story to a crowd who were, we are told, “lovers of money” (16:14). With that one detail in mind, we might assume that this is a simple parable about money. We might suppose that Jesus is telling folks to stop pinching pennies, to share what they have with folks who have nothing. We might guess that Jesus’ concern is a world where wealth is unhealthily distributed, where great abundance can sit next to great poverty without any show of concern or care.

This undoubtedly is a concern that weighs heavy on Jesus’ heart. Do you remember the first words of his ministry? “The Spirit of the Lord…has anointed me to bring good news to the poor” (4:18). Jesus desires that the poor might have an abundant life. And only two chapters before today’s scripture, he tells us, “When you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind” (14:13). Oh that the rich man of today’s parable, who was in the habit of eating banquet feasts all his life, could have only heard Jesus’ words. 

But in fact Abraham’s brusque replies to the rich man suggest that he has heard these words, for they are the same words proclaimed by Moses and the prophets, whom the rich man has had with him all his life. Throughout the scriptures at the rich man’s fingertips, God calls God’s people to care for the orphan, widow, and stranger (e.g., Deut 26:12), for the hungry and the homeless (e.g., Isa 58:7).

Or a Parable about Brothers?

So the unjust distribution of wealth must be a concern of Jesus—it has been a concern for God from day one. But if wealth is part of Jesus’ concern, it is really just the tip of the iceberg. His parable hints that an unhealthy distribution of wealth is really just the symptom of a deeper illness.

Our first clue to the parable’s diagnosis is the curious stage appearance of Father Abraham as the divine spokesperson. We would perhaps have expected instead an angel, or even God Godself. Why Abraham? If we pay close attention, we notice that the rich man always address Abraham as “father.” Likewise, Abraham addresses the rich man as his son.[1] We also see Abraham strike a fatherly position with Lazarus, keeping by his side and comforting him (cf. 16:23, 25).[2]

Sometimes what remains unspoken speaks the loudest. If Abraham is the father of the rich man and also the father of Lazarus—then what does that make the rich man and Lazarus? 

Today’s parable is about more than money. Today’s parable, at its heart, is about two brothers, one who is blind to the other. And even in death, the rich man cannot see his kinship with Lazarus. The only brothers he acknowledges are the five who live in his father’s house, for whom he requests a supernatural warning. Is it any wonder that there is an unbridgeable chasm between the rich man and Lazarus? It was not really the gate that separated them. In death as in life, the rich man cannot see that Lazarus is his brother, and so in death as in life there remains an impassable distance between them.

“Do Your Hands Touch?”

Today’s parable does not merely tell us to give money to the needy, to help out the poor. The poor and the needy are the symptoms of a deeper illness. And Jesus does not want merely to treat the symptom; he wants to touch and heal the painful illness itself. According to our great physician, the problem lies within our hearts. When we look at the people outside our gates, we do not see our sisters and brothers. The reason that there is an impassable chasm between the rich and the poor—as well as between right and left, black and white, man and woman, [gay and straight/young and old]—is because we see other people as other people, and not as our sisters and brothers. We have not followed Jesus into the kin-dom of God, that kingdom in which every person is our kin.[3]

On this experience, the pope has some wise words. (Now I know he’s not Baptist—but that doesn’t mean he’s any further from the truth than we are!) The pope once asked a crowd of people, “When you give money to the poor, do your hands touch the hands of the poor, or do you just toss the coins?”[4] What I think he was really asking, was, “Do you treat the poor as a check box or a duty, or do you treat them as your brothers and sisters?” Do you merely throw money over the gate by which they sleep, all the while the gate stays closed? Or do you step beyond the gate and welcome them with a brother’s touch?

To reduce today’s parable to a simple message about what to do with our money is to domesticate the kingdom of God, to make it manageable and convenient, to make it to conform to our own world, which runs on money. It is to try to serve Christ with our checkbooks rather than with our hands and our hearts. Today’s story is about much more than money. It is about having the scales fall from our eyes, so that when we look at others—the poor or the wretched, or perhaps simply the people who think differently than we do—we see not some strangers to be kept at the gate, but rather brothers and sisters.

We all know the meaning of a brother’s touch, or a sister’s or lifelong friend’s. We all know the meaning of a hand holding ours or tickling us, high-fiving us or hugging us. A helping hand, a hand that actually touches us with love, means family. Not just the blood kind of family, but the gospel kind of family. It means the kin-dom of God, the kingdom where all are kin. It is the gospel of today’s story: the good news that God has been proclaiming since Moses and the prophets and the good news that God may be proclaiming today through our very own lives, if you would believe it.

Prayer

Loving God—

We all have gates,

At which there lie strangers

In need of a brother’s or sister’s touch.

May your kin-dom come:

Through hand-holding and high-fiving,

Tickling and hugging,

Given and received.

In the name of our brother, Jesus Christ.

Amen.

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[1] The Greek here, teknon, “child” is commonly used in the vocative in a sense interchangeable with, “Son.” 

[2] In the Greek, Lazarus is in “the bosom of Abraham.” 

[3] For more on the idea of the “kin-dom” of God, see Tripp Fuller, The Homebrewed Christianity Guide to Jesus: Lord, Liar, Lunatic—or Awesome? (Minneapolies: Fortress, 2015), especially chapter 3, “Abba Says, ‘Drop the G.’” 

[4] Paraphrased. David Uebbing, “Touch the Poor and Needy, Pope Tells Argentineans,” http://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/touch-the-poor-and-needy-pope-tells-argentineans/, accessed September 21, 2016.