Reversal of kingdoms – Sermon
Christianity is often seen as a religion of personal salvation; the religion of “Jesus, my personal Lord and Savior.” Today’s Gospel parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus may be seen in this light, as a contrast of two individuals and their eternal destiny according to…what? Did one of them accept Jesus as his personal Lord and Savior and the other did not? Nothing even remotely close is indicated in the parable. I’m not saying you shouldn’t believe in Christ as your Lord and Savior. I just think we should not put so much emphasis on “personal”.
Quite to the contrary, the parable is not so much about individual, personal salvation, as it is about the great reversal that is the mark of the kingdom of God, when the first will be last and the last will be first. The chasm that is fixed between the two men after death is simply a reversal of the chasm that existed between them in life. The rich man lived inside a gated luxury home. Lazarus was on the street, homeless and hungry.
The question I get asked most often is what happens after death. Where do our souls go? I always answer the same: The Orthodox Church does not have a specific answer to that except a place of rest, free of pain and suffering. What about today’s parable? Doesn’t it say something about our existence after death? Yes… And no. It uses imagery that would have been familiar to Jewish listeners, and the Gospel writer, Luke, has cast it in language of the Hellenistic age. “Hades” after all was the Greek analogue of the Hebrew Sheol. It is a parable, and parables don’t always mean what they appear to say. Jesus himself warned precisely about that! (e.g. in Mark 4:10-12)
So if the parable is not about personal salvation and not about what happens after death, what is it about? The image of two destinies after death is simply a vehicle for Jesus’ message. His message was always about the kingdom of God coming to replace the kingdom of man. Was he wrong? Did the kingdom of God fail to come about? Certainly all the evidence is that we are still living firmly in the kingdom of man.
So what’s the point, if the parable is about a great reversal which has not happened? Why did Jesus speak it? To comfort the 99% and tell them that in heaven they will have what the 1% have in this life? Was Jesus a preacher of pie in the sky after all? Quite the contrary, Jesus came to plant a seed in the world – a seed as small as a mustard seed, like he liked to say.
Here is a much bigger question than the one about our souls after death: Why was Jesus’ resurrection from the dead NOT a public event? Why did Jesus appear to only a few women and men after his resurrection? Even without 24-hour cable news or smartphones or YouTube, wouldn’t more people have believed in Jesus if he had made a big public splash and revealed himself risen from the dead to thousands of people? Why didn’t he do it? Because such a miracle would have been a sign of the kingdom of man – a kingdom built on show of power. Abraham himself said in today’s parable that people would not change their lives even if someone should rise from the dead and warn them. He meant that their reaction to such a show, such a miracle, would be for the wrong reason and would have nothing to do with Jesus’ way. The women and men who witnessed the resurrection were the seed of the kingdom of God! And they continue to be the seed.
The kingdom of God does not come with miracles and exhibitions of power. Have you noticed in some of our Sunday Gospel readings how often Jesus resisted performing miracles? He scolded people who were looking for miracles!
These are the thoughts that I jotted down Friday night, while sitting in the darkness. We had lost power several hours earlier, but thank God for my MacBook which was fully charged. So I could sit in the darkness and quiet and work on this sermon. But yesterday morning it hit me what I was trying to say up to this point. The Cross – the crucifixion of Jesus Christ – belongs to human history, it is a manifestation of the kingdom of man. The resurrection of Jesus Christ does not belong to human history, it is a manifestation of the kingdom of God. And that is why it was only revealed to a few people, the people who would be the seed of the kingdom of God planted in the midst of human activity.
The Cross represents the kingdom of man and all the evil that man is capable of doing. We are still in the grips of the kingdom of man. But the kingdom of God is quietly present. It is the seed that is slowly growing, spreading the fruits of Christ’s Resurrection.
Dear friends, we are called to be seeds of resurrection. We are called to be harbingers of the coming kingdom of God. It is quietly present among us. Believe it!