Being religious and facing realities

I am unabashedly religious. With regularity I gather with other motivated believers and in a variety of ways confess that God is God and I am not. Before eating I acknowledge God as the great giver in life. Before closing my eyes in sleep I claim God’s sustaining presence. There are other times that I take pause and say “thank you” to God for the privilege of living. I see myself as a religious person.

I am a Jesus follower. Define him as you may, he makes sense to me. I take seriously his formula for life. Love God. Love your neighbor. This perspective was not new with Jesus. The Old Testament is loaded with the same message. The Old Testament is a tale of the disasters that occur when a particular people tries to claim the first part of the formula and ignore the second part.

Almost 50 years ago I became a student of Dr. William R. Herzog II. I first heard him speak at a ministers’ conference in Southern California. He was at the beginning of his career studying and teaching about the parables of Jesus. I followed his teaching career at American Baptist Seminary of the West, The Graduate Theological Union, Central Baptist Seminary, Colgate Rochester Divinity School and Andover Newton Theological Seminary. He now lives in retirement in Pennsylvania. My intellectual debt to Bill Herzog cannot be overstated.

Dr. Herzog for me absolutely destroyed any possibility of separating the two great commandments. Loving God without truly loving neighbors is not possible. Herzog’s first major volume was published in 1994. The title grabs the serious Jesus follower. “Parables as Subversive Speech.” The subtitle is equally engaging. “Jesus as Pedagogue of the Oppressed.”

Jesus was a master story teller. Good stories are effectively remembered and transmitted. The most reliable material we have about Jesus and his message is found in the stories he told and that were later recorded in the gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke. Studying these stories reveals Jesus, his teachings, and the settings in which he taught. For Christians of every kind, we ignore them at our own peril.

In chapter 16 of the Luke gospel, the parable of the rich man and Lazarus is reported. The rich man is very rich and lives in the luxury of a city such as Tiberius or Sepphoris. His home was gated. Lazarus was a diseased beggar, who had left a rural area of Galilee, and was left to the plight of being jobless and diseased and without the support of family.

In the rural area of Galilee, the economic patterns were chronic and produced a steady stream of beggars who tried to take refuge in a larger city. To the wealthy of the cities, the beggars were a nuisance and unwanted pests. The beggar was an expendable reject, who was destined to die on the streets. The gap between the expendables and the enormously wealthy is a jarring part of the parable. Add to the mix the storyteller, son of a community handyman, who was considered beneath peasants both socially and economically, and the story becomes even more understandable.

In this situation, Jesus was not telling an earthly story with a heavenly meaning. He was speaking to rural peasants about economic realities.

A reality of a class and wealth layered society is that the wealthy control the thinking of lower social classes. Amazingly, people in lower economic and social classes end up embracing the thinking of the rich and powerful. The intent of Jesus was to start discussions among peasants about politics, wealth and social classes. In the story the rich man remains committed to religious understandings. The story declares that the time for religious understandings has run out.

There is danger in modernizing the parables of Jesus and there are dangers in not applying the parables to modern life. The advanced rural economics of the Jesus era are not being duplicated in the 21st century. The nature of life is not repetitious. Rather it is ongoing. However, the social, political and economic messages in the parables cannot be abandoned in favor of interpretations that erase earthly lessons and leave peasants and expendables to the resolutions of the next, heavenly life. The spectacle of the privileged walking past the beggars at our gates must be challenged by people who are seriously religious.

Those who are seriously religious must be responsive to every form of injustice that surrounds us. If we fail in that task, our religion and our religious activities are fraudulent. Jesus, the man sent from God, will not allow us to separate our responsibility to love God from our responsibility to love neighbor.

Jesus told the story about the rich man and Lazarus to start needed discussions. Church congregations are in pressing need to have discussions about the need for worshiping believers to do justice in our world.