We hardly need a homily to give us the secret meaning of a gospel like this one. It’s not very subtle. It’s an unforgettable image, what the reading describes as a great chasm after death, a chasm between all the people we could have helped and us, but with the roles now reversed, the poor rewarded, the rich with nothing. It’s a nightmare of eternal life that we’d like to think would shake us up, give us enough of a cold sweat to change some priorities, like when the ghost of Christmas yet to come finally put the fear of God into Ebenezer Scrooge.
And yet the point of this reading is not really the great chasm after death that might await us, it’s to show us the chasms in life that exist now that we don’t see, the great valleys that separate people. It’s a story of distance between two people who aren’t so far apart, the rich man who doesn’t even see the poor person right next to him, that is the real-life chasm in the story. Today is a day for us to confront something that is often hard to see, the great distances in life that are so familiar they are hard to notice, the distance between the poor side of town and the rich, the imprisoned and the free, the sick and the well, the black and white, the person who belongs and the one who is the outsider. And if the gospel today is about anything, it’s about the fact that all these chasms are not meant to be there. The great distances between the people who count and those who don’t, the people who get noticed and the people who don’t, those valleys are human creations, every one of them. We are not meant to feel as if other people, despite how poor they are, or how suspicious looking, or how much failure surrounds them, we’re not supposed to see them as so separate, so foreign, so far from us. Whether we like it or not, in God’s eyes, the great differences we are sure that we see are not important.
This seems to be something God is extremely eager for us to notice. In fact, God’s desire for us to realize the fundamental oneness of people is so strong that lavishes his attention in the scriptures on people and places that normal people like us wouldn’t imagine. If we learn anything from the Bible, it’s that God took special pleasure in reversing what we think of as success and accomplishment and recognition, all the things we think of as the way things should logically happen. There’s no other explanation for appointing the young and runty David as King instead of his strapping older brothers, in choosing a succession of old women and giving them unexpected children, in bringing an executed prisoner like Jesus back from the dead to lead us into the Kingdom. Today, another story, a beggar who is enjoying eternal life with Abraham and all those who were heroes of the faith, even though as far as we know he did nothing in his life except be poor. And it is still that way with God today, God’s is with the unsuccessful colleague whose failure makes everyone else’s job harder, the poor on the street who don’t seem very deserving, the prisoner who makes huge life mistakes over and over, the difficult sick person who makes it hard to help.
Between us and people like that there is usually a chasm, but it is a chasm of our making. All sort of things in life contribute to this division between people. Of course we’re impatient, we’re distracted, we worry about our own problems, that’s part of it. But it’s also that we live in a world of harsh words and harsh judgments, resentments about who deserves what and who doesn’t. We can be suspicious of all those who have hit the bottom in life, since we assume that maybe it was their fault — and who knows, maybe it was, if fault even matters. But the end result of so much judging and assigning blame is a great distance between people who in reality aren’t so far apart, we are not so distant from mistakes and tragedies that might have happened to us instead of them. And that distance will keep us from seeing the world through God’s eyes, and in God’s eyes it is a privilege to help both those who deserve it and those who don’t deserve it, a privilege and not a tiresome duty.
You’ve probably heard a lot of talk about this having been declared a year of mercy by Pope Francis, and yes, this idea of mercy has to do with recognizing and embracing our own need for forgiveness and knowing that forgiveness from God is always available to us. But mercy this year is about more than that. It is about closing distances between people, between someone who needs us and us; welcoming someone in who long ago decided they weren’t going to get an invitation to the feast. All these gaps are a scar on the world; God did not create them. They require mercy to close the distance. The gaps between the privileged and the poor, between the insider and the outside, are a sign that humanity has work to do, and that Christians have more to do than most, because we are followers of a God who came to earth to show us that there were no divisions between God and us, and that the fortunate and the unfortunate are not meant to be apart.
None of this requires us to be superhuman heroes. The rich man in this gospel, the one who is now stuck on the wrong end of eternal life, his salvation was sitting right on his doorstep all along. His salvation didn’t require him to do very much at all except see another person for once sitting outside his door. One person. In front of the house. Maybe there is someone in your life, or on your doorstep, or in your city, who has gradually become invisible, someone right there in front of you. One day we’ll all get it right, and put our hand across the great chasm that separates us; it turns out not to be such a great distance after all.