Thrown. That’s the word that got me this week. In my Lutheran Study Bible, the note for verse 16:20 gives us this: The Greek may be translated as ‘thrown at the rich man’s door.’ Which got me to thinking about where I’ve been thrown.
I was thrown into a home with two loving parents, both of whom had jobs. A safe village. A loving extended family. Good public schools. White skin, blue eyes, blond hair, female, heterosexual. An American. Born in the 20th century. I chose none of these. This is where I was thrown. A major key to awareness is to acknowledge this – to step outside myself, to see where I am, when I am, and to live consciously and deliberately within the gift of time and space called my life. For this life is a gift, along with the freedom to do with my thrownness as I will.
We often learn at an early age to get busy and stay busy and never think about this type of thing. This is exactly what the rich man did. First, he hid himself, led his whole life covered up with purple robes, nothing but an empty suit. Then his earthy life was done and all the potential that he had was buried. He was covered up in life and covered up in death, never truly confronting himself, his true being. Unable to know himself, he is unable to have true relationship with others, including His Creator.
Without relationship, we cannot be human. We understand ourselves in relationship to those we encounter, including God. Every encounter is a little bit anxiety-producing because every person we meet is a potential threat to our insular world order. If the rich man had encountered Lazarus, if he had truly seen him, things might have been different. In alienating himself from himself, he annihilated any chance of relationship. A great chasm was created.
Then he gets to Hades and he still doesn’t see. He’s still working with externals, purple robes and positions of power. Abraham is obviously BMOC in this part of the Kingdom, and who does this rich guy dare to address? Does he ask Lazarus to help him? No, his perceptions are still out of focus. He asks Abraham to order Lazarus to act. First, to bring him water and then to go back and warn his brothers. Can you even imagine? He’s asking that Lazarus, who was covered with sores, malnourished, living in the dirt down on earth, go back to that wretched condition to meet his (the rich man’s) needs.
Making the material and temporal the center of our lives is when we lose sight of our eternal self. And this is what we are. Not just a body. Not just a spirit. We are a self. Wealth, contentment, success – these can hide the self from us. Kierkegaard writes that “…only that person’s life was wasted who went on living so deceived by life’s joys or its sorrows that he never became decisively and eternally conscious as a self, never became aware and in the deepest sense never gained the impression that there is a God and that he, himself, his self, exists before this God…”
It’s another paradox. See ourselves. Die to self. Arise to life in Christ.
The rich man was thrown into life as a rich and potentially powerful person. Yet, not only did he not see Lazarus, he never even saw his own self. Did you notice he doesn’t even have a name?
Lazarus was thrown into a poor and sickly human body. Yet, Lazarus has a name, has encountered his self, existed before God as self. When this earthly life ended, it was an easy transition for Lazarus straight into the bosom of Abraham. He’d been resting there all along.
Thrown. Seen. Named. Saved. Rocka my soul.
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