Paying Attention To The Sky

Lazarus At The Gate

There was a certain rich man who used to clothe himself in purple and fine linen, and who feasted every day in splendid fashion. And there was a certain poor man, named Lazarus, who lay at the gate, covered with sores, and longing to be filled with the crumbs that fell from the rich man’s table; even the dogs would come and lick his sores. And it came to pass that the poor man died was borne away by the angels into Abraham’s bosom; but the rich man also died and was buried in hell. And lifting up his eyes, being in torments, he saw Abraham afar off and Lazarus in his bosom. And he cried out and said, ‘Father Abraham, have pity on me, and send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue, for I am tormented in this flame.’ “But Abraham said to him, ‘Son, remember that thou in thy life hast received good things, and Lazarus in like manner evil things; but now here he is comforted whereas thou art tormented. And besides all that, between us and you a great gulf is fixed, so that they who wish to pass over from this side to you cannot, and they cannot cross from your side to us’”
Luke 16:19-26

The account is thought-provoking. Above all, we are struck by the warning that eternity is being prepared now, during these fleeting days of our worldly existence is precisely when we are deciding our eternal existence. In John 9:4 it says: “I must do the works of him who sent me while it is day; night is coming, when no one can work.

Both beggar and worldling live forever; not simply as a continuation of their former lives, but as those lives of earthly existence are evaluated by God, once and forever.  Decisive in our parable here was that the one (Lazarus) through a life of privation and misery still held fast to God, whereas the other (the rich man clothed in purple and fine linen ) enjoyed himself and forgot both God and mercy.

But there is more to it than this, as the final sentences reveal. The damned one begs Abraham to send Lazarus to his brothers to warn them to think of their own hereafter. Abraham replies for this they have Moses and the prophets: in other words, revelation as it stands in Holy Scripture and is taught daily. That will not help, pleads the other; what is read from Scripture or preached in the temple no longer has the power to impress. But, he suggests, should eternity itself in the form of a dead man confront them, they would take heed.

But Abraham only remarks: If they do not heed Scripture and the teachings of the faith, they would also be unimpressed should someone return from death to admonish them. And we are reminded of that other Lazarus who actually made the dreadful return and lived among just such demanders of flesh and blood proof. And the result? They assemble the high council who declares the sign dangerous to the welfare of the people and debates how it would best to put Lazarus out of the way! (John 12:10-11).

So this leads us to the question: How can the reality of God make itself known to men? Is it easier for some people to grasp revelation than for others? Why doesn’t God speak to us himself, since he upholds and transfuses all being? Why must we depend on printed and spoken matter, on teachers and preachers?  It is difficult to say. Ultimately the reply will be: Because it is not God’s will. Still, we can guess a little.

Certainly, God speaks through everything and to everything, also to me. Everything that is reveals him; everything that happens is an effect of his guidance and somehow affects the conscience; he is palpable at the core of me. But all this remains vague. It is not enough to live by, not to live as I feel I must. It is ambiguous and needs the ultimate clarification that can come only through the word of God, and this he does not speak to everyone.

Specific revelation of reality and God’s will comes to us only through people. Divine Providence selects an individual with whom he communicates directly. The chosen one pays dearly for the grace; we have only to think of what has been said of the lot of prophet and apostle. In him we see what it means to stand in immediate contact with the word of God how uncompromisingly it isolates him from the rest of humanity strips him of the ordinary joys of existence. The one who has received the call passes it on to the next. “Thus speaketh the Lord God!” This is the way God has chosen to convey his will to us, and he who wants to understand, will. Moreover, he will soon realize that this method of divine communication is the only one suitable to human nature.

The idea that everyone is strong enough to bear immediate contact with God is false, and conceivable only by an age that has forgotten what it means to stand in the direct ray of divine power, that substitutes sentimental religious “experience” for the overwhelming reality of God’s presence. To claim that everyone could and should be exposed to that reality is sacrilegious. God is holy and speaks specifically only through his messengers. He who refuses to accept him through his chosen speakers, who insists on hearing his voice directly shows that he either does not know or will not admit who God is and conversely who he himself is.

We can also put it this way: God has established both man’s essence and his salvation on faith. Faith, however, seems to come into the full power of its intransigence and purity only when applied to one sent by God. He who insists on hearing God himself shows that what he really desires is not to believe, but to know; not to obey, but to react to his own experience. It is entirely fitting and proper that man hear his God through his fellow men, for all lives are inextricably interwoven into the one great community of human existence. No one life is self-sufficient.  My existence draws on the core of my being but simultaneously on others in order to exist. Plantlike, we sprout from our own seed, but we grow by feeding upon other growth. In the same way we arrive at truth through personal recognition; the ‘ingredients’ which go into that recognition, however, are brought us by others. Man is humanity’s way to life — and of course, to death. Man is humanity’s way to God, and it befits us that God’s word personally penetrate each of our hearts, but that it be brought to us by others.

God’s word through the lips of man: that is the law of our religious life. It demands humility, obedience, docility. At the same time, it is reassuring, this sharing of experience, for the prophet does not simply pronounce words; he voices something that has passed through his own life. He, the called one, stands behind his words; his conviction carries them; on his faith the faith of the others is kindled. This is not essential, for the divine word exists in its own God-given power, independent of the private faith or doubt of the speaker. Still the speaker’s faith is a help for the hearer.

In Christ, the living God speaks from our midst. Not as science speaks or cold law. God’s Son does not write his message on the walls of validity, demanding that we read and obey. His thought is formed in his human intellect, experienced in his own heart, and sustained by his love. He is consumed by “the zeal” for his Father’s house and burns for love of the Father’s will. He is the living Word. And from his holy life at once human and divine flies the spark that lights the flame of our own faith.

To this day Christian faith glows from the warmth, security and love of truth which burned in Jesus’ soul. The vitality of the divine word in him is other than that which so stirred the prophets. The prophet cried: Thus speaks the Lord God! Jesus says: “But I say unto you . . .” His word does not serve, it is; creative, activating force. The ardor with which Jesus lives the word he speaks, gives it its vital fire. We believe in Christian teaching as it was brought to us warm from the lips of the Lord. Were we to attempt to isolate his word from the living person behind it, taking it for itself, it would no longer be the word God meant. Were we to apply a single statement of his directly, from “God” to hearer, it would cease to be Christian. Christ is not only Messenger, but also Message, “the Word” that we believe. What he says is what it is only because he says it; the Speaker , whose speech is an act of self-revelation.

Good. But then the question returns, more pressing than ever: Why aren’t we permitted to warm ourselves in Christ’s fire? Why may we not we hear his message from him? Since he is the living truth of God, corporeal Epiphany of the hidden Creator, why aren’t we permitted to see him for ourselves? Weren’t the men and women of his day incomparably more privileged than we? What wouldn’t we give hear the accents of his voice, to see him cross a street? What immeasurable assurance it would be to catch his eye and feel his power surge through us, to know with every cell of our being who he is? Why isn’t this granted us? We must know.

Did those who saw him really have an advantage over us? Was “hearing” then fundamentally different from what it is today? One thing makes us pause: if it was so advantageous to personal faith to see the Lord, why did those of his day fail to believe? For with the exception of a very small group (possibly no larger than that of his mother, the two Marys and John) they did fail! Apparently then, it is erroneous to think that Jesus’ bodily presence necessarily overcame resistance to belief. It is equally erroneous to think that immediate enthusiasm can replace the real essentials of faith: obedience, effort, responsibility. What would God’s visible light make easier, the decision? The quitting of self for the things of God?  Obedience? Surrender of soul? He who wishes to facilitate such things is underestimating the earnestness of faith; he is prone to seek refuge from obedience in sensational religious “experience.” Probably he also has false conception of what divine light itself is, humanly enough imagining it as an overpowering sensation straight from the realm of the religious rather than from that of simple Christian faith. If we suppose that direct contact with Jesus would have automatically eliminated the intrinsic risk and struggle that are the elements of genuine faith, we are far from comprehending the Master of souls! Never would he have permitted this.

The person swept to him on a wave of enthusiasm would have to stand his test later. The unavoidable hour would surely come in which he would, be forced to a fresh decision — without benefit of transport, in which he too would have to take the step from the “direct experience of Jesus” to faith in Jesus Christ, the incarnate Word and Messenger of God.  Isn’t this precisely what was demanded of the Apostles at the Lord’s death, then at his Resurrection, and above all at Pentecost?

What then is really the Incarnation? It is the fulfillment of revelation, in which the unknown God makes himself known, the remote God suddenly steps into human history. Incarnation is literally what the word says: the living, actual Word of God, the Logos, Son in whom all the mystery of the Father is gathered, becomes man through the Holy Ghost. Do we see the essential now? Becomes man — not “enters into” a man. The Heavenly One is translated to the earthly scene; the Remote One becomes temporal reality. As Jesus was quoted in John 12:45:  “And he who sees me” need no longer guess; he “sees him who sent me.”  The Hidden One steps out into the open in human form, identifying himself with the form, content and sensory realm of the Word made man.

Incarnation: the “deus absconditus,” a hidden God revealed in flesh and blood — strange how this very self-revelation hides him from us. How difficult it is to accept as God’s living messenger, as the long awaited Messiah, this Son of Man whom we see eating, drinking, walking the streets; who is threatened by countless enemies; who suffers. How am I to recognize in this transient, already doomed figure the ultimate measure of being for all ages?

God speaking human words from human lips, speaking from a human destiny, opens eternal doors to us. To enter them is what is known as faith; it is to know, too, who God really is: not the “absolute” or the “ground of being” but — let us dare the word — the “human” God. Precisely here lies our chief difficulty, in his humanity. God cannot be so! We protest. His flesh and blood is simultaneously revelation and veil. The tangible erects walls; that which makes revelation what it is also makes the “foolishness” that shapes our “stumbling block” (as St. Paul once put it)

We know only too well how difficult it is to hear Christ solely through his messengers. And not only through those first inspired ones who had been his witnesses and whose words bore the power of the Holy Spirit, but through messengers of messengers, thousandfold removed. Spokesmen, moreover, who are not always swept along by their own vital conviction, sometimes indeed little more than hired teachers. We know what an added difficulty it is that the sacred word has been worked over and over by the centuries, and not without endless controversy and hatred and resistance; that it has been dulled by usage, lamed by indifference, abused by greed and the thirst for power. On the other hand, it is a help to know that so many have given their minds and lives to it; that two thousand years of history have lived in it; that so much humanity vibrates in the divine tidings.

Doesn’t Christian community mean helping one another to understand God’s word? Haven’t we all known some person who has made Christ’s message clearer to us, has taught us to pattern our lives more truly after his? Who is not grateful to some personage of the past, whether a great mind or a great saint or anyone who has taken his faith seriously?

When we reflect a little we begin to wonder whether Christ’s contemporaries really had such an advantage over us. Was faith easier when Jesus wandered through Galilee, or after Pentecost when St. Paul preached in the cities, or during the persecutions, when the endurance of the martyrs blazed triumphantly or in the centuries of the great saints of the middle ages, or now? A hundred years or five hundred, how much do they affect the eternal truth of God? To believe means to grasp what is revealed by the spoken word, the historical figure — through the veil that covers them both. The initial revelation must have been wonderfully powerful; but often insurmountable too the question: who is that man?

Then the first barrier fell, barrier of God as a contemporary. After that he could be seen and interpreted only in retrospect, through the glowing experience of apostles stirred by the power of the Spirit. But the more this indirect revelation spread, the thicker, simultaneously, grew its veil, woven of the human weaknesses of its messengers and the distortions and abuses of human history. The problem of the later-comers, that of excavating the living Son of

God from sermon, book and example, from the sacred measures of divine worship, from works of art, pious practice, custom and symbol, is difficult, certainly, but probably not more difficult than that of recognizing him in the son of a carpenter.

And the conclusion? Aren’t we almost forced to conclude that faith’s situation remains essentially the same? Always both are present: what reveals and what veils. Always the demands remain the same: that our desire for salvation meet the desire for our salvation voiced in the sacred word. Naturally, in the course of time much changes; at one period a specific obligation is easier, at another more difficult; but the essential demand remains unchanged: the hearer must discard the familiar ground of human experience and take the plunge into the unknown. Always he must lose his life in order to find it (Matthew 10:39).

How this happens in each individual instance, it is impossible to say. Fundamentally there is but one essential requirement: readiness on the part of the hearer to receive revelation.  Something in him must keep constant watch, listening, straining for the reply to his unceasing qui vive? (French:Who goes there?) No longer may he find full satisfaction in this world; he must constantly be on the look-out for signs of the other. Then when one day that other actually presents itself, he will recognize it.

The form of one approaching through a fog is at first ambiguous. It can be almost anyone. Only two will know him: he who loves him and he who hates him. God preserve us from the sharp-sightedness that comes from hell. Let us keep to the keen perception of love, even if it is only that of beginning love; keep our desire to love one day with heart and soul for the coming of God’s Son into our lives. Then when he does come, we shall recognize him. There is no rule for the manner of his coming, nor for the hour.

It may be that the profoundest presentation has nothing to say to us, whereas a simple admonition or the magnanimity of a human heart may bring light. It can come instantly but it may take years of waiting and perseverance in obscurity. You must persevere in the truth!

 It is better to continue to bear uncertainty than to talk oneself into a decision that has no permanence. Genuine readiness already contains the seed of faith; untruth, on the other hand, that self-deception that pretends to view it does not really hold, and the violence with which we force ourselves to a creed which does not root in the heart, already contain the seeds of destruction.

This does not mean that doubts are already the beginning of a fall from faith. Questions can always arise to trouble us, particularly as they are usually afflictions of the heart that have assumed intellectual form. As long as our faith has not yet passed over to the beatific vision it will be constantly challenged — particularly in the glare of this over enlightened, all-destructive age, bare of vision and unwarmed by the glow of experience, where it can survive only by the sheer force of fidelity. Moreover, there are profound questions that return after every supposed solution, mysteries whose intrinsic meanings, not solved but lived, increasingly c1arify the faith of those who live them.