A punch to the gut

 After my brother Tom passed away too early (at age 44), I started to write down things that affected me so that I could use them a) for an examination of conscience, and b) as a sort of therapy to deal with my grief.  My ‘journal’ eventually evolved into this blog.  Every once in a while, I’ll go back through my ‘journal’ entries and look for personal experiences that might help me in edifying the Gospels as I reflect on them.  Today, I came across this entry, which (through the Holy Spirit?) I think happens to tie in perfectly with the Gospel I chose to reflect on (it was originally written on July 24, 2004):

I went to the service station this morning to gas up the Pathfinder.  As I was pulling up, I noticed a man doubled over in pain, and obviously drunk.  My heart was torn, because although I wanted to walk up and talk to him to ask him how he was and if he needed any help, I didn’t.  I should have, but I didn’t.  Not very Christ-like.  I’m ashamed. 

I’m also disturbed that when I went inside to pay for the gas, the kid behind the counter was LAUGHING about the man’s discomfort.  He said he had called the POLICE, when what the man needed was obviously an ambulance.

All of the parables in the gospel are packed with meaning, but a few of them carry a punch to one’s gut. One such parable is in Luke’s gospel, when Jesus asks us to consider something shocking [Luke 16:19-31].  How could a man who has everything allow another man, whose only possessions were the sores covering his body, to die right before his eyes?  How could a man who feasts fabulously everyday not budge to share even the scraps from his table with the starving neighbor sitting at his gate?

It seems absolutely unthinkable—and irreparably scandalous—but we know it happens all the time, like it apparently happened on my ‘watch’, in my memory above.  Like the rich man in the gospel story, we can use wealth and luxury to insulate us from the intolerable sufferings of others.  We can become so accustomed to making self-satisfying pleasures the driving desire of our lives that we become comfortably oblivious to the afflicted and destitute among us, the many who, like Lazarus, are so grievously deprived of what any human being needs to survive that they die a little more each day.

Of course, there’s a fatal misperception at the core of the rich man’s life.  Nestled in the plump security of his life, he fails to see that he, not Lazarus, is the one truly in trouble.  He’s so stupendously deceived that he’s genuinely surprised when death takes him not to the comforting bosom of Abraham, but to the “abode of the dead” where he, who had tortured Lazarus by his casual indifference, is now “tortured in these flames.”  There, in the kingdom of the dead, no love can reach him, no mercy can soothe him, because, as Jesus sternly declares, there is now an unbridgeable abyss between the rich man in his torment and Lazarus who, upon dying, was “carried by the angels to the bosom of Abraham.”

This parable’s punch shows us that when we fail to help a neighbor in need, intentionally distancing ourselves from them, we likewise distance ourselves from God.  After a while, that distance becomes an abyss.  As the rich man belatedly discovered, this truth may surprise us, but it will also condemn us.

Lord of true riches, please free me from my selfishness.  Help me, instead, to remain focused upon the dignity of all people and to pour myself out in their service.  May I discover in the poor, the broken and the humble, an image of You.  And as I discover Your presence in their lives, may I love You, in them, seeking to be an instrument of Your mercy.  Jesus, I trust in You.