Twenty-sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Below the dam at MSF

Moreover, 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.'
 

You’ve heard it before: the three most important considerations when buying a house – location, location, location.

Where people live still says much about their income, their family and their politics. They may profess Catholicism, Protestantism or Hindi; the only thing that matters is where they live.

And there is always a great chasm set between the wealthy and the poor. If they could see one another in Jesus’ day, as Lazarus saw Dives through the gate of the rich man’s demesne, we watch one another across the electronic divide. The poor watch Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous; the rich watch the local evening news, which is always purple with stories of shootings, robbery and mayhem.

Who set that chasm? The Hindus believed it was karma, a mechanical process that rated one’s moral behavior and determined what you would be in the next life, a prince, a pauper, or a maggot. Christians supposed it was God’s will, like the “Divine Right of Kings.” Didn’t Jesus bless the way things are with his caustic remark to Judas, “The poor you always have with you?”

Only recently, do we realize the great chasm has been "set" by our own economic practices. It is our own creation. But, with the American Revolution, we have acquired the myth of upward mobility; and it might be crossed with hard work and ingenuity. Indeed we have created a "middle class" where the vast majority of people can live in reasonable security, with sufficient food, shelter, health care, education and recreation to enjoy life. 

But the myth is dying. The chasm has been growing wider since the salad days of the 1960’s. One in seven Americans lives in poverty today. Most children in the Louisville public schools live below the poverty line. Many have no home. The kitchens that provided thirty homeless people with food in the 1980’s now feed three hundred people.

And the numbers keep getting worse. 

In his magisterial work, The Prophets, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel says of Amos and the great prophets of pre-exilic Israel:

Indeed, the sort of crimes and even the amount of delinquency that fill the prophets of Israel with dismay do not go beyond that which we regard as normal, as typical ingredients of social dynamics. To us a single act of injustice – cheating in business, exploitations of the poor – is slight; to the prophets, a disaster. To us, injustice is injurious to the welfare of the people; to the prophets it is a deathblow to existence; to us, an episode; to them a catastrophe, a threat to the world…. To the prophets even a minor injustice assumes cosmic proportions.

Our Mass should remind us weekly of the cosmic gulf that still remains impassable between the rich and the poor. Lazarus cannot enter the rich man’s house; Dives cannot imagine letting him in -- he begs the poor man for a drop of water to “cool my tongue.”