Thursday, Second Week of Lent

We were all terribly shocked by the murder of so many worshippers in two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, last Friday. The man who carried out the awful attack was a self-confessed racist. It shocked the welcoming and peace-loving people of New Zealand. It left the police force and the politicians of New Zealand asking, ‘What could we have done to stop this from happening that we didn’t do?’ When a human tragedy on this scale happens, we invariably ask, ‘Is there something we, as a community, didn’t do we could have done?’ Sometimes the consequences of not doing some good can be as harmful as the consequences of doing some evil? In the parable in today’s gospel reading, the focus is not so much on one individual and a community or on two communities, but on two individuals, one of whom, a very wealthy man, did not do what he could have done, and the other, a destitute man, who suffered the consequences of the other man’s inactivity. The destitute man was looking for very little, just the scrapes that fell from the rich man’s table, but that little would have kept him alive for longer. What the rich man needed to do and could easily have done was very little, but he failed to do it. His failure to do the little that was asked of him and that was well within his ability had fatal consequences for someone else. The poor man died before he had to, and the rich man ended up in dire poverty in the next life. It is a challenging and unsettling parable for us all. It invites us to ask, ‘What am I failing to do that I could easily do, and who is suffering because of that failure?’

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