Sermons
In the Saturday edition of the Tagesspiegel, yesterday a week ago, I read an interesting article with the headline: How much does Berlin earn? Six persons speak about their wages and how they can manage their life with this income. The top earner, a member of the Senate, gets 6.657,- € and the last one earns not even 1,- €. Somehow like today's gospel: There was a rich man ... and lying at his door was a poor man named Lazarus. Please, note at once the difference: In the story the poor man is introduced by name. The other, jolly fat and feasting fellow is just anybody. That's exactly the opposite of what we are used to. The VIPs, whether politicians, football stars or pop singers, make sure that their name is constantly in the headlines. The poor are simply the poor, asylum seekers, refugees, homeless, and nobody cares to know them by name. But God's eye looks at society in a different light.
If each one of us were as holy and perfect and immaculate as we ought to be, today's gospel would have little to tell us. For it speaks of those who are not holy but sinners, not perfect but full of faults, blameworthy and off the mark. It also speaks about those who fail to recognise how much they are out of line, and nevertheless they imagine to act exactly as God wishes us to lead our lives.
The first group is represented by the tax collectors and sinners, the second by the Pharisees and scribes. The former love to come to Jesus, they all were drawing near to listen to Jesus. The latter begin to complain. They see a great gap between themselves and those sinners, and they see Jesus on the wrong side of this divide, they feel that Jesus mixes with the wrong sort of people.
Therefore the Lord tries to cure their error by telling two little stories, about the strayed sheep and the lost coin. Ninety-nine sheep stay nicely together in the place where the shepherd has led them, but one ran away and went its own road into the wilderness, unaware of the dangers to which it exposes itself. Then we hear how the shepherd reacts. He goes searching for the run-away sheep until he finds it, sets it on his shoulders with great joy, … Rejoice with me because I have found my lost sheep.
Over the centuries a great number of famous little booklets were composed with the intent to teach how to make a good impression in society. Balthasar Gracian's Manual of Worldly Prudence is a classical example of this type of literature. One would imagine that it is obligatory reading for candidates of a diplomatic career. Some might perhaps get the impression as if today's gospel could fall into this category. In this way, Jesus attended a feast, observed, perhaps with amusement, how foolishly some guests behaved, and wished to advise them how to achieve their aims more intelligently. If you wish to be honoured at a dinner table, be aware that claiming honour for yourself may badly backfire. Success will be safer and greater by making sure that honour be given to you by others. Start low in order to be lifted up before everybody's eyes. Beyond doubt, that is sound advice, or rather a clever hint.
But it is surely not the meaning of the text. There we read: He told a parable to those who had been invited. We are told a parable!Many of you may remember the fascinating picture books that a few years ago flooded the market. When looking at the page, you see nothing but a colourful pattern, but if you adjusted your eyes so as to look not at the page but through it - as in a shop you see the goods under the glass of the counter -, you suddenly and very clearly discover unexpected objects. Parables are like that. When we stare at them they merely show a colourful surface, when we look through them they reveal quite a different reality.