Lazarus's Neighbors

“Good fences make good neighbors.” You might recognize that statement if you are familiar with the work of the American poet Robert Frost. It’s from one of his more famous poems, “Mending Wall.” In the context of the poem, it is the saying of a New England landowner who explains why he’s performing the hard labor of repairing a stone wall that separates his property from others. He wants to rebuild the wall because, in his words, “Good fences make good neighbors.”

There is a kind of logic to that point of view that our society recognizes as well. We usually don’t like to meddle in the affairs of other people, and we certainly don’t like it when they meddle in ours. We have a sort of built-in mentality of “Don’t bother me and I won’t bother you.” Good fences make good neighbors.

The problem, as we all know, is that this can be taken too far. Sometimes we need others to be invested in our well-being, even if it invades our privacy. If our house is on fire and we’re not home, we don’t want our neighbors to say, “Oh well, you know, I didn’t call the fire department because it’s not my house, I didn’t want to get involved in someone else’s business.” And it goes the other way, too. We have the obligation to get involved in the affairs of others when a true emergency is present.

In today’s Gospel, Jesus tells us that the well-being of the poor is just that kind of emergency — it’s a spiritual house on fire, and the hydrant and firehose are within our reach. The great sin of the rich man in Jesus’s parable – the sin that leads him to perdition – is not the fact that he is wealthy, but that he doesn’t use any of his wealth to aid the man who was so clearly in need at his doorstep. We can think of all kinds of reasons that the rich man might have had for not helping – “I don’t really want to get involved”; “Lazarus, I’m sorry, I’m in a hurry, I don’t have time right now”; “Lazarus, can’t you just get a job, for crying out loud?”; “Lazarus, how do I know that you won’t use what I give you for booze or drugs?” But none of these reasons, in the end, justify the fact that the rich man failed to help someone whom he *could* have helped, who was in such dire need.

The Rich Man and Poor Lazarus (1625) by Hendrick ter Brugghen

The implication, I think, is obvious for us. Helping the needy and the poor might take us out of our comfort zone, and we might be tempted not to help because of all kinds of What-Ifs that might come to mind. But Jesus is telling us today that the well-being of the poor has a direct impact on our eternal well-being, so it’s best to use our dishonest wealth now — that is, our money, to use a phrase from last week’s Gospel — in order to build up treasure in heaven.

Now, I know many of us might say: "Father, my situation is not exactly that of the rich man's. Things are hard for me." But wherever we may find ourselves on the economic scale, I think we can all admit that there's someone who is in an even more challenging situation. What this Gospel should prompt within each of us is an examination of conscience about who is within our reach that is need of our help. Maybe it’s a neighbor who is going through a difficult stretch after losing a job. Maybe it’s those folks we see standing on street corners and red lights asking for a little help. Maybe it’s those in our community that we’ve never met, but whose needs are known to us, that we can alleviate through supporting a homeless shelter, a soup kitchen, a pregnancy resource center, a halfway house.

And lest we think otherwise, it’s not only those close to home that we must have concern for. Today is the World Day of Migrants and Refugees, an annual reminder as Catholics that we also are to help vulnerable persons who have been displaced from their homelands because of famine, violence, or economic hardship. As citizens of a global society, and as members of the Body of Christ spread throughout the world, we have a duty to know about and help even those far away from us whom we may never meet personally. I’d encourage you to consider learning more about how you can help migrants and refugees through the work of groups like Catholic Relief Services, Jesuit Refugee Services, or the International Catholic Migration Commission.

Friends, perhaps it feels a little overwhelming to think of all these systemic problems like homelessness or a global refugee crisis. But the point today is that we don’t have to solve those issues in order to still help the individual people that are within our reach. What makes good neighbors, in the end, is not good fences, but just being good neighbors to the Lazarus's among us – having concern for the well-being of others and doing what we can to help those clearly in need. As we prepare for this Eucharist, may the Lord Jesus be our model in all these things – he who humbled himself to help us in our need, who submitted to the lowliness of the Cross in order to raise us to new and eternal life.

God Is #1

On this Labor Day weekend, I have some family visiting from out of town. My sister and her husband and their three kids live in Nebraska, which means that they make it to Arkansas only about once a year. The rest of our immediate family – my parents, myself, and my younger brother Fr. Stephen Hart – all live here in Arkansas, so we really value the opportunities we have to see them, since they are relatively few and far between. And as some of you know from your own lives, visiting with nieces and nephews has a special importance when you don’t have children of your own – you get a chance to see the world in a different way, and have a glimpse into the future of your own family and your heritage. Plus, they’re just a lot of fun to be around.

All of that is to say – I love my family very much, and I’m sure you love yours, too. How challenging it is then for all of us to hear in today’s Gospel that to be Jesus’s disciple, we have to hate our families: our mothers and fathers, wives and husbands, sisters and brothers – yes, even presumably, our nieces and nephews. I think we all know that Jesus, the Prince of Peace, isn’t saying here that we have to literally *hate* them – as in, feel dislike or harbor animosity toward them. Perhaps it’s important to be clear about that, at a time when a lot of family life and relationships are disrupted by hatred, distrust, disagreements, and resentments. The Church has always privileged the life of the family and promoted its unity and harmony, not just as the building block of society but as a microcosm of the family of faith, the Church, with Christ at the Head and we as members of his Body. God wants us to love our families, because he has given them to us as his gift – and given us to them as his gift – and as means of coming to know and love him more deeply. We always take our example of how to do this from the Holy Family, the life of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph in Nazareth.

What Jesus is really saying here is that our love for him must exceed every other love, and that includes the love that is perhaps most natural, most deeply held – the love of our families. If asked, most of us would probably agree that the love of God should come before all else. In fact, sometimes I hear people say, in a list of their priorities, “God is #1, my family is #2, and then every other priority is a distant 3rd.” But while we might agree that’s the proper ordering, we often don’t really live up to that in practice. In fact, I think Jesus refers here to our families because he knows that when it comes to those relationships, the ones that are most important to us, we sometimes can let our values and principles slide a little bit.

For example, how many of us have ever gotten out of a work or school obligation because of a family emergency? Or looked the other way with language or behavior we didn’t approve of because it came from a family member? I’m not saying those things are always wrong to do; perhaps they may even be the right thing, in a given situation. But right or wrong, our family relationships sometimes have a certain, special hold over us that other things don’t. What Jesus is pointing out to us today is that that may be okay when it comes to other things, but not when it comes to him. To put our relationship with God second to that of our family *is* wrong, and we might do this in practice more than we like to admit.

For example, we put our families ahead of the love of God if we think that, because we are going out of town for the weekend or going away on vacation, then it’s okay to not go to Sunday Mass since we are away from our regular parish. We put our families ahead of the love of God if we find it very important to get our kids to sports practice or to their favorite activity but not as important to take them to Confirmation class or to the parish youth group meetings. We put our families ahead of the love of God if we find it more important that our family members share our political viewpoints, or our favorite hobbies, or our sports allegiances, than we do our Catholic faith.

Now, I imagine that most of us might say at this point, “Okay, okay — maybe there are some times when I place the love of my family before the love of God. Is that so bad? After all, it’s my *family*!” And I think here we have to say, “Yes, it is.” I’m sorry, I know it may be hard to hear, but Jesus really is saying we have to love him even ahead of our families. In fact, I think we have to say that Jesus is telling us that unless we love God first, and unless we teach our families to love God above all else, then we really aren’t loving our families, because we are not forming them in the most important way – in the only thing that really matters: to know, love, and serve him.

James Smetham, Christ Preaching to the Multitudes (c. 1890)

To be sure, family relationships aren’t always easy, and even if we try to make sure our love for family is rooted in the love of God, it’s not always easy to know what to do in difficult situations. For example, sometimes people ask me things like: “Father, my daughter has decided to leave the Church; what should I do?” or “My nephew is getting married, but not in the Catholic Church; should I go to the wedding?” Those kinds of questions are often hard to answer, because a lot depends on the particulars of the relationship. Most of the time, the person knows what is best or what they are being called to do. Generally, I tend to favor the approach of trying to preserve the relationship, while also explaining what we believe or what our Catholic faith teaches. But it’s not always easy, and we should wrestle with these situations. We should really ask ourselves, “What does my relationship with God and with my faith ask of me in this particular situation?”

There’s one last thing that Jesus says we shouldn’t prefer to love of him, and that’s our very own life. The possibility of martyrdom is not something that keeps most of us up at nights. We know that it’s still possible in places in the world for people to die for the name of Jesus, but that’s a possibility that feels pretty remote for most of us. But there are lesser forms of martyrdom that perhaps we face more frequently: whether we will compromise our beliefs to preserve a friendship or to keep up appearances or to win the esteem of those we want to think well of us. Putting Jesus first can often mean putting ourselves last, sometimes in the very ways we find it most hard to do.

Friends, I know this has probably been a challenging homily; I found it a challenging one myself! But sometimes to love well we need to be challenged – whether that’s loving ourselves, our families, and especially God above all. It’s only in this way that we advance toward the future and the heritage that God has created for us. But in those difficult things the Lord asks us to do, let’s also remember that he will give us strength, perseverance, and even peace of heart, if we seek his will above all. He comes to us now, in this Eucharist, to renew the relationship that we have with him – individually and collectively – so that in all we do, we might seek to love him above all.