A Poor Man Named Lazarus

 Our Lord’s parable of Lazarus and the rich man is unique among the parables, for in this parable alone one of the characters has a name.  The parable begins, “There was a rich man, who was clothed in purple and fine linen and who feasted sumptuously every day.  And at his gate lay a poor man named Lazarus”.   Compare how the parable of the Prodigal Son begins:  “There was a man who had two sons”.  One might ask, “What were their names?  What was the father’s name?  Where did they live?”  It doesn’t matter; all that mattered were their actions.  In all the Lord’s parables the characters are nameless—the prodigal son and his father, the sower who went out to sow, the man who sowed good seed in his field, but whose enemy came by night and sowed tares in it—none of these characters have names.  We ask therefore:  why is the poor man in our parable given a name?  The name “Lazarus” of course is from the Hebrew “Eleazar”, meaning “God helps”, but this doesn’t explain why he alone is named in all the parables—especially, one might say, since God clearly did not help him during his life, but left him to die by the gate of the rich man. 

            I suggest that the poor name is given a name to reveal the magnitude of the rich’s man’s sin.  For consider it:  the rich man left a man suffering outside his very gate whom he knew by name.  The poor man was not just another anonymous and nameless beggar in the street, someone whom the rich man quickly passed by and who then vanished from his consciousness.  The rich man was on a first-name basis with the poor man.  And yet despite this, he still did little or nothing to help him.  Every day the rich man feasted sumptuously, and then wiped his mouth and hands with bread (the ancient equivalent of a napkin), throwing aside the scraps.  (These were the kind of crumbs falling from the table which the Canaanite woman mentioned in Matthew 15:27.)  The poor man was so hungry that he would’ve been grateful even for these, but there is no hint in the parable that he ever was given them.  Rather, the rich man finished his sumptuous meal, adjusted his purple and fine linen, walked past Lazarus lying at his gate and went on with his sumptuous life.  He may or may not have greeted Lazarus as he passed by; but it is clear that he never gave him alms or brought him past his gate to enjoy food from his table.  Instead he let him die at the edge of his property.

            A look at the rich man after he himself died reveals that he was something of a slow learner, and that death produced no real change in his heart.  To his perplexity, after what was doubtless a great and splendid funeral where his friends declared how wonderful he was, the formerly rich man finds himself engulfed in flame in the next world, and more perplexing still, sees Lazarus far away, feasting at the head table lying in the bosom of no less a celebrity than Abraham himself (the ancient Jews reclined at such feasts, so that one literally reclined on the bosom of the diner feasting next to one; compare John lying on Jesus’ bosom in John 13:23).  But does the rich man repent?  Does he apologize to Lazarus for his appalling neglect and ask his forgiveness?  Does he congratulate Lazarus on his current blessedness?  No, none of this.  In fact, he doesn’t speak to Lazarus at all—instead, he speaks to Abraham.  And, showing how hard and unrepentant his heart still is, asks Abraham to send Lazarus far from the festal table to minister to him.  The request is stunning—the rich man requests that Lazarus cease feasting, traverse the long way across the chasm, brave the fire, all to do a service for the man who let him starve and die at his gate, and in all this he still doesn’t even speak to Lazarus!  The rich man apparently assumes that Abraham will send Lazarus to do the job as if Lazarus were just a lackey or a slave.  Not surprisingly, Abraham demurs.  And even then the rich man asks that Abraham send Lazarus from the table to visit his brothers and to do a service for them—still saying nothing to Lazarus.  The rich man is a slow learner indeed.

            What is the lesson for us?  Our Lord tells the parable not to give us an inside peak behind the scenes at the next life, but to give us an urgently needed lesson for this one.  The rich man’s sins and punishment show what happens when we store up our treasure and use it all for ourselves, ignoring the plight of the poor at our gate.  Placing the parable in the wider context of Luke’s Gospel allows us to see the central point:  You cannot serve God and Mammon (Luke 16:13), however much the Pharisees who were lovers of money (v. 14) or the American Dream say otherwise.

            We need to remember this parable the next time we visit the mall and encounter someone asking for the morsels that fall from our festal table (or “spare change”, as it is called in our culture).  It is true that they may possibly use those morsels in ways that are less than helpful to them, but of course we also use our resources in ways less than helpful to us.  We remember here the words of C.S. Lewis when he was rebuked by a friend for giving spare change to a beggar.  “He’ll just use it for ale”, said his friend.  Lewis paused and responded, “But if I kept it, that’s what I would use it for.”  We give our morsels to the poor not just to help them, but to help ourselves transcend our insular selfishness and remember our essential solidarity with the poor.  It is as Solomon said:  “The rich and poor have this in common:  the Lord made them all” (Proverbs 22:2).  We too easily rush past the poor man, not realizing he is our own flesh and blood, one of our own family.  The question, “Could you spare some change?” should remind us of another question:  “If anyone has the world’s goods and sees his brother in need, and yet closes his heart against him, how does God’s love abide in him?” (1 John 3:17)  We may think that we know nothing about the man or woman accosting us in the parking lots of our nation and asking for our help.  But we do know something about him—we know his name.  His name is Lazarus.

           

Moving the Boundary Marker

           Part of the Law of Moses forbids moving the boundary marker.  It reads, “In the inheritance which you will hold in the land that the Lord your God gives you to possess, you shall not move your neighbour’s boundary marker which men of old have set” (Deuteronomy 19:14).  Moving the marker was a serious matter—so serious in fact that it was subject to a terrible curse in the corporate liturgy set out later in that Book:  “Cursed be he moves his neighbour’s landmark”.  And all the people shall say, ‘Amen!’” (27:7).  This law also found an echo in one of the proverbs of Solomon:  “Move not the ancient landmark which your fathers have set” (Proverbs 22:28).

            What was deal with moving a neighbour’s boundary landmark?  Those landmarks were stones set up to determine the boundaries of a neighbour’s property, and rich people wanting to expand their land at the expense of their poorer neighbours would surreptitiously move the landmark and redefine the boundaries which were previously set, thereby stealing their neighbour’s property.  Because the act was hard to prove (for who could say where the stone originally stood?) the crime was often done with impunity—hence the terrible curse pronounced upon it.  The one whose land was taken might not be able to obtain justice, but God saw where the landmark once stood, and He would avenge.

            The Fathers regarded the Law as not simply an ancient document dealing exclusively with agricultural matters, but also as spiritual text, dealing with matters of the Kingdom.  Thus St. Paul interpreted the law about not muzzling an ox while it threshed, but allowing it to eat while it worked, as not only applicable to oxen, but also to workers for the Kingdom:  “Is it for oxen that God is concerned?  Does He not speak entirely for our sake? (1 Corinthians 9:8f).  In the same way, the Fathers also interpreted the Law’s proscription against moving the ancient landmark which the fathers had set as forbidding theological innovation.  In his second Defense Against Those who Attack the Divine Images, St. John of Damascus applied that very law to the situation of his own day, saying, “do not be an innovator, ‘moving the age-old boundaries set up by your fathers’” (chapter 15).  John knew that in the apostolic Tradition the Church possessed the authoritative divine teaching, which defined the spiritual boundaries of things such as Christology, icons, and idols—and, more importantly for us today, gender.

            Every age has its own errors, and in every age therefore the Church faces a different set of challenges, distortions, and lies.  In the fourth century the Church faced distortions about the nature of Christ, as heretics such as Arius sought to move the ancient landmarks set by the Fathers and proclaim a counterfeit Christology.  In the days of St. John of Damascus, the Church faced the distortions and errors of the iconoclasts, as they sought to move the ancient boundaries once set regarding the legitimacy of Christian art depicting Jesus. 

Today the ancient boundaries are being moved again, and the stakes in this contest are every bit as high as in the previous ones.  Today voices are raised calling for the moving of the landmarks regarding the nature of gender and sexuality.  In the original boundary marker, we were taught that gender was binary and divinely-given, an irrevocable gift from the hand of God.  God made them male and female, and from this difference and complementarity family arose as God continued to create the human race.  Gender difference and binary sexuality were absolutely basic to human nature.  Certain rare medical conditions such as hermaphroditism aside, one’s sexual anatomy indicated one’s gender, which brought with it in turn the role one would play in the creation of family and in society.  Occasionally of course psychological abnormalities might be found in young children, so that a young boy might feel that he was actually a girl, but these cases were recognized as the anomalies they were.  The label for such a pathology in the traditional Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (“DSM” for short) was “gender dysphoria”.

As the homosexual community continues to press for radical redefinition of sexuality (i.e. as it continues to move the boundary landmarks further and further), the given nature of gender itself has now come under attack.  At first that community simply asserted that homosexual practices were legitimate and morally equivalent to heterosexual ones.  (Yet note even here the subtle change:  before now the latter were simply regarded as normal and normative; by insisting on the further label “heterosexual” the homosexual community prepared the way for legitimizing homosexuality.)  Then came a further development, where a person could legitimately be both homosexual and heterosexual, engaging in sex with both males and females.  Now we see a further erosion, for the concept of male and female as binary realities itself is being challenged.  And again we observe the same sanitation of language:  such pathology and confusion is now celebrated under the new term “gender creative”.  If a child or adult declares that they are a certain gender, well then they are, anatomy notwithstanding.  Gender becomes a subjective choice, like a preference for one type of food or music over another.  And  such a choice now becomes a “right”—one enforced with all the draconian apparatus of the law.  This is not so much moving the landmark stone as it is throwing it away completely.

Note too that it involves the tyranny of one community’s choices over the majority.  If, for example, little Stan now feels he is actually Suzy, Stan now is allowed to use the girls’ washroom at school, and if the girls feel uncomfortable with sharing their washroom with a boy, their discomfort (and with it, their rights) are simply over-ruled.  The same goes with the use of the gymnasium change-room.  Perhaps change-rooms in schools today are halls of privacy and modesty, but it was otherwise in my day, when anyone sharing a change-room could survey the anatomy of the others using it.  And even if some arrangements are available for some privacy there, who is to say how much privacy one needs?  Should the girls showering in the change-room who feel reluctance to do so when Stan is sharing the facilities with them simply be forced to stifle themselves? 

Current cultural trends are more and more insisting on such stifling (backed up of course by a generous dose of school-administered propaganda), but children are not always as easily stifled as all that—hence the propaganda.  At the very least the ones doing the stifling should have the honesty to admit that the current rulings enforce the submission of one group (those who feel discomfort with such common arrangements) to another (the homosexual community pushing for gender re-definition).   The tyranny of those insisting on the redefinition is masked when the re-definition is heralded as giving to the trans-gender child its “rights”.  Framing the debate in terms of rights in fact pre-determines the outcome in favour of those pushing for re-definition.  No one wants to deny anyone their rights.  But declaring that access to gender-specific facilities is a right presupposes that gender is not in fact binary.  And that has not yet been proven, though it is increasingly widely declared. 

Ultimately it is not about the individual feelings, discomfort, or rights of any one person or group, but the larger and long-term question about what gender will mean for our culture in the coming generations.  Gender is the factory from which healthy family and personhood are manufactured, and if we drastically alter the factory’s machinery the product will be correspondingly altered as well, and in ways that we cannot yet foresee, and this will in turn produce difficulties hitherto unimagined.  Compared with such changes and challenges, the discomfort of a single child when faced with using the “wrong” washroom pales into insignificance.   

The question for Christians is this:  is the apostolic Tradition which the Church has received authoritative, or not?  Have we the authority to move the ancient boundary landmark which our fathers have set?  Shouting that we now longer live in a binary world is not helpful, but is simply a form of bullying.  It is true, of course, that we no longer live in a binary word, but for Christians, it is also irrelevant, for we also no longer live in a world which values the life of the unborn.  The world is no longer binary, just as it no longer refuses to murder babies in utero.  In other words, the World is still the World, and as such it refuses to abide by God’s Law.  This is hardly surprising.  The question about gender still needs to be dealt with.  Scripture, the canons, the Liturgy, the experience of the saints, and in fact the totality of our Tradition assert emphatically that gender is indeed binary.  For us, the rock remains.  And as the old liturgy in the Book of Deuteronomy reminds us, we move it at our peril.  

Niqab or Icon?

I spent a lot of the Divine Liturgy this last Sunday looking at a woman’s face.  The woman was St. Elizabeth the New Martyr, (at left) and I was looking at her face because one of the faithful had brought her icon to church for me to bless, and after the customary blessing it remained on the altar for the duration of the Liturgy.  As I stared into those luminous eyes, set into a face swathed with the usual monastic apostolnik, I thought how she would look if she were not a Christian nun but a Muslim woman, and instead of the apostolnik wore a niqab, the veil that completely covers the face, leaving only a slit for the eyes to peer through.  My first thought was that it would completely negate the point of the icon, which allows one to come face to face with the saints and to look steadfastly into a holy countenance.  Indeed, if all the Christian female saints took their cue from Islam, all might be clothed in the niqab, and we might never see them in any sense worth discussing.  A row of such saints would present us with the pointless spectacle of a row of faceless women, interchangeable and anonymous apart from the labelling names on their icons.  The row would not say, “Here are St. Elizabeth, St. Macrina, St. Anna, St. Thekla”, but rather, “Here are a bunch of holy women”.  That is, their personhood and their individual holy traits would be completely submerged and eclipsed by their gender. 

            The icon therefore represents the great divide between Christianity and Islam.  Every icon is an icon of someone’s face, and in authentic icons that face is turned toward us for a holy encounter, not turned away or even turned slightly in profile.  Islam (at least in some of its forms) separates women from society at large by insisting that they be veiled and their faces hidden when appearing in public.  Some women consider such a veiling to be empowering.  It is certainly divisive, for it divides the person doing the beholding from the person being beheld, and even more importantly, divides men from women.  A woman in a niqab ceases to be a name or an individual woman, one with a different face than others.  She comes simply Woman, a female, one whose face may not be seen.  Her gender becomes the most important thing about her.

            This is not unrelated to contemporary issues, at least in Canada.  The true north strong and free is currently debating a government rule which says that a woman must have her face bared when being sworn in as a new citizen in Canada.  Some Muslim women, accustomed to wearing the niqab when in public, have contested the rule, and the higher courts are poised to agree with them and strike down this rule as unconstitutional.  Politicians are (what else?) playing politics with the whole issue, using it to stake their various claims to being more pro-women, pro-Muslim, and pro-tolerance than their rivals, painting those who object to the wearing of the niqab when being sworn in as a bunch of intolerant neanderthals.  At least some of the debate revolves around the question of identity (wondering if someone else might take their place at the swearing in ceremony), and so some have suggested that as long as the woman removes the niqab at some point to be identified, everything will be okay.  I suggest in turn that this misses the real issue, which is not identity, but the cultural norms set for the next generation regarding personhood and gender.  My concern is not that we might swear in Fatima when we meant to swear in Aleyah.  My concern is that if the cultural value expressed by wearing the niqab takes root in Canadian society something important will be lost—namely, the greater importance of individuality and personhood over gender.  In Canada as in the West generally, we believe that one’s individual name, traits, and personhood are more important than one’s gender, and that men and women may relate to one another safely on open and equal footing.  This openness and equality of encounter is expressed by the open face.  It is just this equality and openness which is threatened by the insistence on wearing the niqab.

            In cultures which insist on the niqab, we find a conviction (sometimes stated, but usually assumed), that women are primarily sexual, and so to allow their faces to be seen would be too tempting for the men.  In these societies women wear the niqab because they feel that without it they would appear immodest and indecent.  Someone from outside such a culture might well ask why St. Elizabeth the New Martyr, clothed head to toe and her face swathed in an apostolnik, could be considered immodestly attired simply because we can see her face.

            There is much more at stake in this current Canadian debate than the rights of Muslim women to express their religion by wearing the niqab in public, for ultimately it is not about their rights, but about the understanding of gender, modesty, sexuality, and equality in society at large in the years to come.  If you doubt this, look at the icon of St. Elizabeth the New Martyr, or indeed at any icon.  And if you really think that St. Elizabeth is immodestly attired in her icon, try saying that to her face.

Byzantine Pomp and the Glory of the Cross

          Beginning with the Feast of the Elevation of the Cross September 14 and continuing throughout the week following, a flower-bedecked Cross will remain in the center of our churches, there to be kissed and venerated with love.  The feast has its roots in the Constantinian revolution in the fourth century.  Prior to this revolution, the Church was hunted and persecuted, hiding and crouching fearfully in the catacombs.  (Well, the metaphorical catacombs.  We never did actually worship in the catacombs, which were cramped places for burial.)  With the coming of Constantine, the persecution ended, and we were free to come out of relative hiding, blinking in the unaccustomed sunlight of honour with which the Church was now held.  The Christian Faith had not yet become the state religion, but there was no denying it now had favoured status.  Constantine made no secret of his support of the Christians, and he demonstrated this support by funding the building of large churches.

            Three of these were in the Holy Land, in Bethlehem, on the Mount of Olives, and over the site of Christ’s crucifixion and burial.  This latter church, called “the Church of the Resurrection” (later under the Crusaders, “the Church of the Holy Sepulchre”) was particularly wonderful.  The local Christians there retained the memory of the site, even though a pagan shrine had been built over it in the early centuries.  Constantine’s builders demolished the shrine and cleared away the rubble and found the original site underneath.  They began to build a beautiful basilica, with a space adjacent containing the hill of Golgotha (reduced in size to fit the building programme) and the original tomb of Christ (chipped away from the other tombs to stand alone).  And in an old cistern, the workers found the wood of the Cross.  Christ’s cross could be distinguished from the other two crosses there because the relic proved to be wonderworking and a source of healing.  According to the story, the bishop of Jerusalem, finding the cross, took it in his trembling hands and lifted it up (i.e. elevated it) as everyone around him cried over and over again, “Lord have mercy!”  It is this event which gave our feast its name.

            The feast is therefore a celebration of Byzantium.  Just as the Cross once lay hidden in the dark cistern waiting to be found by Constantine, so Christians once hid in the dark catacombs, waiting for their royal date with destiny.  And just as Cross was brought out into the light and honoured, so the Christians emerged into public prominence and were honoured.  It is fitting that the tropar for the feast has a royal ring to it (at least in its original form):  “O Lord, save Thy people and bless Thine inheritance.  Grant victory to the Orthodox kings over the barbarians!”  The song functioned as a kind of Byzantine national anthem.

            As anyone can see, all the Orthodox kings have gone.  (Sadly, the barbarians seemed to have remained.)  Byzantium’s glory with which it once adorned the Cross has long departed, and the Church is once again being forced into the cultural catacombs.  But the true glory of the Cross remains.  Constantine did well to honour Christ’s people and His Cross, but the imperial glory which he shone upon the Cross was always doomed to fade, like the glory of every earthly empire.  The true and undimmed divine glory is that which comes from the Holy Spirit, resting upon those who suffer for their Master.  The Cross is not simply a wooden relic which can be lost to history.  It is a disciple’s determination to serve the Lord even at the cost of suffering, blood, and death.  When reproached for the bearing the name “Christian”, Christ’s disciples rejoice and count themselves blessed, for the Spirit of glory and of God rests upon them (1 Peter 4:14).  This is the true glory of the Cross.  The flowered crosses standing silently in the midst of our churches this week proclaim that abiding and martyric glory.