Listening to the Risen One about Caring for those Suffering, 26th Sunday (C), September 29, 2019

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Church of the Holy Family, Manhattan
Twenty-Sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C
September 29, 2019
Amos 6:1.4-7, Ps 146, 1 Tim 6:11-16, Lk 16:19-31

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below:

The following text guided today’s homily: 

Ignoring versus Getting Involved

Today Jesus presents us with a truly unforgettable Gospel. Who among us is not moved when we hear the story of Lazarus, covered with sores, being licked and molested by dogs, longing to eat just the crumbs from the rich man’s table? Who among us is not moved by the desperation of the rich man after he dies, dying of torment, thirst, worried about his brothers? What moves us all the more is not simply the state each of them is in, but the fact that each was avoidable.

In the Parable, the rich man went to Hell not because he was rich, not because he had earned his money in an immoral way, not because he had been asked by Lazarus for help and refused, not because he had sent dogs to lick Lazarus’ wounds or had done anything at all evil to him. He went to Hell because when there was a poor man at his gate he simply did nothing. He was condemned not because of anything he had done, but precisely because of what he hadn’t done: he was so caught up in himself that he didn’t make any effort at all to help out a man who was struggling and dying in his midst. He simply ignored him.

In St. Matthew’s Gospel (Mt 25:31-46), Jesus made clear that when he judges us, he will separate us into two groups on the basis of how we have treated the poor and needy in our midst. To those on his right who will be saved, he will say, “Come, you who are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you since the beginning of the world, for I was hungry, thirsty, a stranger, naked, ill or imprisoned and you cared for me.” But to those on his left, he will declare with great regret, “Depart from me, you accursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels, because I was hungry and you gave me no food, thirsty and you gave me no drink, naked and you gave me no clothes, a stranger and you gave me no welcome, ill and in prison and you didn’t care for me.” The condemned will ask, “Lord when did we see youhungry, thirsty, naked, ill, a stranger or a prisoner and not minister to your needs?” Jesus will then reply, “As often as you failed to do this to the least of my brothers and sisters, you failed to do it to me.” The rich man went to Hell because in neglecting the dying poor man at his doorstep, he was neglecting God himself. In failing to love his neighbor, he was failing to love God and even to love himself.

So many Catholics are accustomed to thinking about how God wants us to change simply in terms of the bad behavior we know he wants us to excise from our life. We think about sin just in terms of commissions, the bad thoughts we have, the malicious or mendacious words we say, the wayward deeds we commit. But, as we note at the beginning of each Mass, these are not all the sins we commit. We confess to Almighty God and to each other that we have sinned not just in our thoughts, words, and what we have done, but “what I have failed to do.” Few of us spend much time, however, examining ourselves on these failures. We omit the omissions, the acts of love we should have done but didn’t do. We can become like the husband who doesn’t cheat on his wife, doesn’t beat her, doesn’t do any type of evil to her, but who never tells her he loves her, who doesn’t make the time for her, who omits what to her is most important. The lesson Jesus teaches us in the Gospel is that it’s not enough for us not to do evil, but we also have to do good, to sacrifice ourselves for those who are needy, to look past ourselves, identify their needs, and do what God makes possible to remedy them.

I remember very vividly a story from Montreal that took place early in my priesthood. It caused a lot of soul searching in Canada and, after I preached it to the Catholic high school where I was chaplain, there, too. A 16-year old girl, after she had been abducted, stripped, sexually assaulted and badly beaten, was dumped out of a van on the sidewalk in the downtown financial district shortly before rush hour. She had no pants on and just a simple shirt. As she lay almost motionless on the sidewalk, people walked around her. Some people stared at her and perhaps mumbled to themselves what the world was coming to. Several employees from the offices on the corner noticed her, but they thought she was just a drug addict or prostitute who had had a bad night, so they left her alone. A few secretaries from the office across the street saw her there and asked their boss if they should call the ambulance, but their boss commanded them not to get involved, because they were on work time and he didn’t want them wasting time talking to the police. Countless people passed her on the streets — but no one did anything. Other things, they doubtless thought, were more pressing, more important. This young girl lay there, on an unseasonably cold spring morning, for about two hours. Finally one of the women in the office complex across the street, at the risk of losing her job, called the police. The paramedics rushed the poor girl to the hospital, where because of all the delay in getting her treatment, she fell into a coma and soon died. For several days afterward, Canadian commentators on television, radio and in the newspapers were asking what the circumstances of her death said about their country and about Canadians. In a country in which almost everyone was Christian at least in name, no one had really stepped up to be a Good Samaritan, no one had proven to be a Christian in fact. And the poor girl diedas a result. The question for us is what we do when we see that people are in need of help. We can’t walk more than a few blocks in Manhattan without meeting people who are in need, people who are sleeping on the streets, people who depend on others’ generosity just to get a meal. Every night we have two to three men who sleep at the entrance of the Church. During the winter, we have many women who sleep in our hall. Do we take responsibility for them or do ignore them?

The Globalization of Indifference

We’re now living in an internet age in which we see can see all the tragedies happening throughout the country and the world all at once. We see a news report of terrorists burning Christian Churches down in Egypt or bombing them with Christians worshipping inside in Iraq or Sri Lanka or Nigeria and we’re tempted to flip the channel. We read about governments’ severely repressing their people and, while we’re outraged, we say it’s none of our business. We know that 815 million people in the world, one in nine, are chronically malnourished and 155 million children will go to bed tonight hungry, but we say there’s little we can do. We recognize that each year more than 638 thousand babies, made in God’s image and likeness, are killed through abortion in our country, one every 49 seconds, but we turn a deaf ear to their silent screams. The magnitude of the need can sometimes make us just turn inward toward ourselves, mind our own business, and divest ourselves of responsibility.

Pope Francis is trying to wake us up and wake up the whole world to what he calls this “globalization of indifference.” When he went to the small Italian island called Lampedusa where over 20,000 people have died on a perilous 16-hour journey on a rough stretch of the Mediterranean packed as sardines mostly on pirate smuggling vessels, he poignantly asked, “Who is responsible for the blood of these brothers and sisters of ours? Nobody! That is our answer: It isn’t me; I don’t have anything to do with it; it must be someone else, but certainly not me. … Today no one in our world feels responsible; we have lost a sense of responsibility for our brothers and sisters. We have fallen into the hypocrisy of the priest and the levite whom Jesus described in the parable of the Good Samaritan: we see our brother half dead on the side of the road, and perhaps we say to ourselves: ‘poor soul!,’ and then go on our way. It’s not our responsibility, and with that we feel reassured, assuaged. The culture of comfort, which makes us think only of ourselves, makes us insensitive to the cries of other people. … Indeed, it even leads to the globalization of indifference. … We have become used to the suffering of others: it doesn’t affect me; it doesn’t concern me; it’s none of my business!” Where does this indifference come from? How can so many in the world, including so many Christians, get to the point where they chronically fail to be Good Samaritans, where their hearts are no longer touched by the misfortune of others, where, even if they fail to do something, they fail even to weep over others’ misfortune when they notice it? Pope Francis spoke about it this during an International Gathering for Catechists in St. Peter’s Square and he based his response on today’s first reading from the Prophet Amos and today’s Gospel. Amos says, “Woe to the complacent in Zion, those who feel secure … lying upon beds of ivory!,” leading Pope Francis to comment, “These are harsh words that the prophet Amos speaks, yet they warn us about a danger that all of us face. … The danger of complacency, comfort, worldliness in our lifestyles and in our hearts, of making our well-being the most important thing in our lives. This was the case of the rich man in the Gospel.… The poor man at his doorstep who had nothing to relieve his hunger … was none of his business, it didn’t concern him. Whenever material things, money, worldliness, become the center of our lives, they take hold of us, they possess us; we lose our very identity as human beings.

The solution to this complacency is not just doing “something” for the poor but remembering God, and in God rediscovering who we really are and who others are. In today’s Gospel, the Lord wants us to overcome our apathy toward others, our indifference, our neglect, our lack of responsibility and love. He is never indifferent to us, he never forgets us, but left heaven to come down to save each one of us lost sheep because each of us is infinitely valuable to him. He wants to help us to learn how to love others in this same way. But for this to occur, we’ve got to be willing to respond to his help to overcome our self-centeredness, to learn to put others’ needs ahead of our own, to sacrifice for them, to take responsibility. Our prayer needs to change as we remember God and remember others and seek to pray more for those in need. How we spend our money needs to change, as we remember that everything we have is a divine depository placed in our hands and start, as good stewards, to give more away for the needs of others needs than we spend on our wants. The way we celebrate the Mass needs to change, as we begin to pay attention much more to those who are needy in our own community, and as we receive Jesus’ body and blood learn how to make sacrifices of our own lives for others.

Heeding the Risen One

At the very end of the Gospel today, the Rich Man asks Abraham to send Lazarus to his five brothers to warn them that they need to be charitable, to overcome their indifference to the plight of those in need, lest they join him in the place of flames. Abraham replied that his brothers have Moses and the Prophets, all of whom have testified to the fact that the Lord expects us to care for the sick, hungry, naked, oppressed, imprisoned, the blind, the strangers, the widowed and all those in need. The Rich Man said that that wouldn’t be enough, because they, just like he used to, were ignoring the poor and ignoring Moses and the Prophets, too. They were, in short, ignoring God. “But if someone from the dead goes to them,” the Rich Man says, “then they will repent.” Abraham replied, however, that if they were deaf to the Law and the Prophets, if they were deaf to God, then they would be unmoved even by the appeals of someone risen from the dead.

Well, today, we receive what the five brothers in the Parable did not. Not only do we have Moses and the Prophets to speak to us about charity, but Jesus, risen from the dead, has come today to proclaim to us this Parable live. Let us act on these words. God who calls us to be remember him and to love others as Good Samaritans will give us all the help he knows we need, but we need to respond to that grace to put God and others ahead of ourselves. Embracing that assistance, let us begin to notice those in need, to love them, to cross the street and to take responsibility for them. This is the path that, when it comes time for our judgment, will enable Jesus to wave each of us to his right for having cared for him in the person of others. This is the way that we may take our seat with all those eating not just scraps from the Master’s Table but sharing in the sumptuous eternal wedding banquet for which the Mass is a foretaste.

The readings for today’s Mass were: