When I was in middle school, I read this great story called The Dog Days of Arthur Cane. Arthur was a teenager who treated everyone poorly, like the proverbial dog, until someone cast a spell and turned him into a dog. He had some adventures and when he had learned his lesson he became human again.
One of the things that has stuck with me is the part where as a dog Arthur describes drinking water from the toilet, and that the blue water tasted like cool aid.
A radical change in perspective, it’s amazing how we change once we experience that.
T.H. White’s classic about King Arthur, The Once and Future King, in it Merlin teaches the young King Arthur many important lessons by spending a season as different animals, a fish, an ant, a goose, a hawk. Arthur admired the orderliness of ant society, but he also admired the freedom and profound beauty of migratory geese, from the air none of the boundaries of human nations existed. Arthur told Merlin that humans needed to be more like ants, ordered and controlled, solving all the problems of suffering and poverty.
Merlin then asked Arthur would he rather be an ant or a goose? And Arthur couldn’t answer. He wanted to be like the geese, free, but he wanted everyone else to be controlled like the ants. He was torn by the contradiction in his own heart. It was his first step toward being a true king, living with the contradictions of freedom and power. That contradiction ultimately broke his heart and led to his death, killed by his own son. The story of King Arthur when it is told truly is always a tragedy.
A radical change in perspective, it’s amazing how we change once we experience that. It doesn’t always solve problems. What it usually leads to is a deep awareness of the pain and brokenness in the world, and the bitter sweetness of the human condition, the profound beauty of freedom and the inevitability of pain, death, failure and futility. Love and tragedy.
There are so many stories about trading places.
Mark Twain’s, The Prince and the Pauper is about a peasant boy and a prince who resemble each other trading places and learning something important.
Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird tells Scout, his daughter, to walk a mile in another man’s shoes, even Walter Cunningham’s.
Walt Disney’s Freaky Friday has a mother and a teenage daughter switch places, they both learn humorous lessons. Lindsey Lohan and Jamie Lee Curtis were in the latest remake.
Thirty years ago, the movie Trading Places, the comedy with Eddie Murphy and Dan Akroyd, about a rich man and a homeless beggar trading places.
Trading places with someone else is the stuff of comedy in the classical sense, not merely humorous and entertaining, but comedy in the ancient sense of being humbling.
The parable of Lazarus and the Rich Man is a dark comedy about trading places all wrapped up in the mystery of God’s judgment. It’s a simple story. The rich man had a sumptuous life but he ignored the misery of poor Lazarus the homeless beggar outside his door. At death they trade places, the rich man now lives trapped in torment, and Lazarus was embraced and cared for by Abraham, the greatest hero of God’s people, he receives the legendary hospitality of Abraham.
The question at the end the story is whether the rich man’s five brothers will listen to the Law and the Prophets demand for hospitality and care for the poor and the powerless. Will they repent in time? And the question is extended to us as well, will we learn the lesson of the great reversal of fortune before it is too late?
If we live lives that ignores the suffering of others, especially the poor, a life without mercy, then our eternity will be one without mercy.
However, if we live a life of mercy, then our eternity is one of mercy.
We either fashion or own eternal prison in this life or we build a palace of mercy.
The lesson is straight forward and the question is left up to us to answer.
What interests me in all of this is Luke’s vision of God’s judgment, the reversal of fortune, trading places. It says something about who God is.
If you think about it the Gospel is ultimately a story of God trading places, of God reversing God’s own fortune, taking our place, our sin, our death, our slavery that we may share in God’s freedom, God’s life, God’s glory.
What is most striking about the parable is the rich man’s bondage to his own wealth and pleasure, blinding him from seeing Lazarus. Even in his torment beyond death the rich man can’t talk to Lazarus, he only talks to Abraham, asking Abraham to order Lazarus around. He still has no concern for Lazarus, no concern for the poor. He is stuck and blind, he still doesn’t get it.
This is a story of human lostness, of our inability to change, of being enslaved to always making the same mistake over and over, of the poor always being left out and forgotten.
As the Apostle Paul says, “Who will deliver me from this body of death?”
Is there grace in this life to set us free now?
To change our set patterns of consumption and comfort? How do we knock down the locked gates that separate us? Will the poor be more than a burden, more than a tax break? Will they become people that we see and name, in whom our salvation is all interwoven?
The Gospel of redemption is that God has traded places with our stuck ways. There is grace to change, the very power and freedom of God has been given to us.
All these walls that we feel stuck behind, that we hide behind; they don’t have to be the limit anymore.
Jesus has broken down the gates of hell and set the captives free.
It’s time to invite Lazarus over.