Today I am drawn to a quote from LILLa Watson, an Australian Indigenous scholar and activist: “If you have come here to help me you are wasting your time, but if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.”
Luke 16 contains the story of a wealthy man and a homeless man named Lazarus who subsisted outside the wealthy man’s home. The wealthy man apparently couldn’t even work up enough condescension to throw Lazarus something to eat: Jesus said Lazarus “longed to satisfy his hunger with what fell from the rich man’s table.”
Both the wealthy man and Lazarus died, and they both found that the tables had been turned. Lazarus, who lived a life of agony and was subjected to callous indifference, was now bathed in the glow of love, caring, and support. The wealthy man, on the other hand, was being tormented in Hades, and it was now him pleading with the angel Abraham to allow Lazarus to do for him what he never did for Lazarus—give him a bit of water to help him cope with the flames surrounding him. He also begs to allow Lazarus to return to earth to warn his brothers of the hell that awaits them if they do not recognize that their eternal fate is tied to how they treat others in the here and now.
But Abraham tells the wealthy man that we all already have been given the wisdom we need to know how we are to relate to the Lazaruses of the world. And it’s not simply that we give them the crumbs off our tables, for that is what for too many of us “charity” amounts to—the fragments of our wealth that we can give away without altering our sense of wealth, privilege, or status.
Instead, think liberation—actually freeing people not only from momentary hunger but the conditions that leave many people hungry while a few have more that they can ever eat. What the wealthy man learned too late is that extreme wealth inequality is a trap that separates us from the love of God because it severs our connection to people who need not just material things but participation in a mutual liberation.
It’s striking, by the way, that even in Hades the wealthy man didn’t get it—it was all about what Lazarus could do for him and his family, not what he could do to make amends for his lack of empathy in life.
But, now that we know the story, we don’t have to repeat the same mistake. We are called to reject indifference to the needs of people around us, but it doesn’t stop there. We are called to act in love in ways that recognize that our fate and our liberation, and the fate and liberation of the Lazaruses in our midst, are inextricably linked.