Life Matters

Luke 16:19-31

Know any hard-headed people? The ones who will not change their minds or try a different perspective, even while everything around them is proving that the current way is not working and will only continue to fail, but at a faster rate? We think of new, untried strategies to open their eyes, clear their heads, reconsider their direction. With teenagers we put on demonstrations of the dangers of drinking and driving, of smoking, of undisciplined sexuality. Occasionally, it even works; but far too seldom.

We do these things because we love the kids; we're desperate to protect them from the potential consequences of their own choices. We want them to live in a manner which sees the long road of life and prepares them to act wisely. And what better way is there to accomplish this than to bring someone who has been through the experience in question? What if someone who died as a result of the bad choices came back to speak at an assembly? Wouldn't that make a dramatic difference?

If we are to believe Jesus, the answer is "no." The human will, as has been the case throughout our history, is not a rational faculty; it wants what it wants. The best we can do for it is to train it to want the right things. In our text we meet a man who has not so trained his will. He continues to want all of the finest things life has to offer while a poor beggar with desperate needs is placed at the entry to his home. He ignores the poor one who asks for virtually nothing. The rich man's tastes and pursuits of their satisfaction had been trained through years of choices, choices which set the direction of his subsequent attitudes and hence his willingness to open his heart, or at least his hand toward Lazarus (isn't it interesting that the beggar gets a name; the rich man does not?). And while his concern for his brothers still living is admirable, Jesus shocks him by indicating even Lazarus' return to those brothers would not change the choices made by the wills trained to consume on self and to ignore the other, the stranger, the cripple, the beggar.

It's difficult to say who has been placed at our gates in need of what we have. Today it seems no one is truly outside the reach of anyone else, and surely we cannot meet every need. Or is this just an excuse? I have a suspicion that if we are looking, the ones actually placed at our gates will become evident to us; if we're not looking, it will not matter. Our lives, our choices. They matter--not just for the time we have in this world, but forever. Life matters because it is where eternally significant decisions are made daily, developing a character that seeks the kingdom of God or ignores it. If we don't want it now, we never will.