Complacency And The Path To Perdition

Twenty-Sixth Sunday in Course 2025

In today’s opening prayer, the Church celebrates God’s almighty power shown by Him pardoning sins and showing mercy, and we ask for abundant grace, God’s very life, so that we can hasten to attain His promises and be His eternal heirs. That sounds wonderful, but is there a catch?

Our Scriptures give us so many clues to the catch that we’d have to be totally without hearing or sense to miss them. First, we hear the prophet Amos, speaking God’s word in Israel before the total destruction of the Northern kingdom. He’s telling the truth to the rich people in the Southern kingdom around Jerusalem. He uses a pretty strong word: WOE. The rich are complacent. They hear news from the northern tribes that Assyria is threatening them, but they ignore it. They eat the most succulent meats as they lie in their recliners. And they overindulge in wine as harps are playing in the background. Later on in the chapter we hear God accusing them of turning justice into poison. That means they were perverting the law so they could cheat their neighbor.

God promised disaster, because He was sick of these people abusing others for their own comfort, and within a few decades, everyone felt His displeasure because their cities were ruined, either by Assyria or Babylonia, and thousands went as slaves into exile.

This may make you squirm a bit. But remember that the prophets had two missions: to comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable. As the psalmist tells us today, the Lord keeps faith forever, securing justice for the oppressed and freedom for the captives. He will not put up very long with what we today call “lawfare,” the corruption of our laws. If we want to be worthy of his undying love and rich benefits, we have to help the widow and orphan and blind and estranged.

Saint Paul wrote to his protégé, bishop Timothy, and encouraged him to “lay hold of eternal life” which he was called to at his baptism. Paul didn’t want his friend to get complacent either. He orders Timothy to “keep the commandment without stain or reproach.” That’s a strange turn of phrase, isn’t it? Remember that Jesus told the young man who wanted eternal life to keep the ten commandments? So what is THE commandment Paul is writing about?

The Gk word entolen used here is singular, so it’s a strong injunction. From Paul’s other letters, we have to conclude that it is the great commandment of Torah, repeated by Jesus: love unselfishly God first and then for God’s sake, the neighbor. Particularly we must love those living on the margin. We are once again commanded to do good for the afflicted as an act of worship of the One True God.

Our Gospel today seems also to be aimed at those who own more than what they need for a good life. Like the people Amos was fussing against, there was a rich guy who dressed himself in royal garments made of linen and had a banquet prepared for himself every day. And Luke’s Greek even intensifies the meaning of the words so that it really means in our vernacular every single day. Mercy, this guy must have been grossly obese!

At the gate of this porker’s house there was a poor man by the name of Lazarus. Now one of Jesus’s best friends was named Lazarus, so maybe Jesus was using that name to make him more lovable. But, no, the rich guy didn’t love him. He didn’t even let him glean the scraps from his table. He just let him lie in his misery, covered with sores that were licked by the wild dogs of the area.

No wonder the poor beggar died. He was righteous, so his place in Sheol, the realm of the deat, was wonderful, cuddled up with father Abraham, the founder of the family of Israel. The corpulent rich guy then died and got the back lot of Sheol, where the trash was being burned.

By the way, this was the Hades of the ancient world, divided into areas for the good and bad people after death. It wasn’t what we call hell, because the rich guy, now poor and suffering, still had some love for his stupid five brothers who were still alive. The rich jerk first asked for water, which Abraham couldn’t give him, and then for warnings from the now rich poor man, Lazareth, to his surviving kin.

Then came one of the saddest dialogues of the Bible. Abraham referred the five idiot brothers to Moses and the prophets like Amos. The rich guy knows his brothers, and their refusal probably even to go to the synagogue. “Oh, no, father Abraham, but if someone who has died goes and warns them, they will turn away from their evil lives.” Jesus then puts this final word into the mouth of Abraham, “if they won’t pay attention to the warnings from Torah and the prophets, they won’t be persuaded it someone comes back from the dead.”