The Great Divide: Catholic Social Teaching and American Health Care
All of us have heard the story many times. It still remains one of the best told stories in the New Testament and perhaps in the whole bible. It is the story of the Rich Man and Lazarus. Since the text is so familiar, allow me to read to you a contemporary paraphrase by the Episcopalian priest and spiritual writer, Robert Farrar Capon, in Parables of Grace, pp. 155-157). N ow there are two details of the story that we need to note, details which point to one another. I mean the gate and the chasm. Lazarus lies at the rich man's gate. In the Old Testament, "the gate" was where the elders of the city rendered justice. So, Luke implies by including this bit of architectural information that Lazarus was waiting for justice from the rich man. Justice which never came. There is good reason to think that the duty to do justice to the poor is what Luke had in mind because one theme running through this chapter, as through the rest of Luke's gospel, is the rejection ofthe Law and the Prophets which made justicefor the poor a primary way of showing one's devotion to God. Besides this allusion, the evangelist makes a quite deliberate contrast between "the gate" in the first part of the story and "the unbridgeable chasm fixed between [the two men"] in eternity. It is as if he said , here was an opportunity irrevocably lost. The rich man might have passed through the gate and given alms to Lazarus; he might even have invited him in to share his table. But he never even saw him, not until he sought relief for himself and his family . In hell, the evangelist says, he looked up and saw Abraham far away and Lazarus at his side. With hindsight, then, Jesus' listeners can appreciate the tragedy of Dives, the Rich Man, as a case of missed opportunity. Under the covenant what mattered was whether a Jew gave justice to the poor, to widows, orphans and strangers in the land. But distracted by his conspicuous consumption, Dives never grasped the need of his neighbor.