Made Alive by Mercy
Jesus and sinners
Dear Friends,
The Gospel passage we hear proclaimed this weekend contains the Parable of Lazarus and the Rich Man. If you don't remember the story, perhaps this snippet will help your recollection:
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.
That last, little, all-too-graphic description is extreme poverty of the sort we rarely encounter. If it is shocking, good. Jesus intends it to be.
Jesus uses parables (The Parable of the Prodigal Son, The Parable of the Unjust Steward) to call his opponents to repentance. When we see a rich man in the wrong, then, we are bound to see in him an image of the Pharisees.
The Pharisees dined sumptuously on the things of God while Lazarus was left with nothing. Sinners, in the view of the Pharisees, were cast out, condemned. They alone were in the right.
But there Jesus is, upturning expectations. In his mission, Jesus is flipping the world right-side up, reversing the fortunes of the Pharisees and his followers in the same way that Lazarus is lifted up while the rich man languishes.
What's going on? In a word (supposedly CS Lewis' word), "Jesus didn’t come to make bad people good. He came to make dead people live." By God's mercy - by God's love that overlooks our unworthiness - we are made alive.
And when we are made alive by God's mercy, when God's love becomes our lifeblood, we long for others to come to life and share our joy. We are not the rich man, stingy with what gives. Rather, we make it our life's mission to bring God's merciful love to life for everyone we encounter.
For whom will you be an expression of God's merciful love this week?
With Love,
Father Daniel
δοῦλος Χριστοῦ Ἰησοῦ
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Preparing for Mass?
Check out this weekend's readings:
Twenty-Sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time
Lazarus and Dives, from the Codex Aureus of Echternach