Day 16: The Shrewdness of Mercy
March 5
by Josh Pacheco (check out Josh's Substack, too!)
Readings:
Reflection:
After you read the scriptures HERE is a video of a reading of this devotional.
One of my favorite things about Jesus is that he often responded to people’s inner conditions with stories, not answers. Prior to our parable given in this text, the chapter started with another masterful parable describing, amongst a good few other lessons, that there may be something for disciples to gain from observing the way worldly people deal with each other. He praises a shrewdness and foresight that, while employed by less than admirable characters in the story, still shows us that there are wise and beautiful things to observe even in people and places we may not have expected to find them.
This incenses the Pharisees, for they cannot understand how a legitimate Torah teacher would actually call his disciples to look for wisdom “outside” of the kingdom, for WE are the holy ones! The world should look at us… right? To this very attitude, Jesus responds in kind with the parable in our text today.
Our parable describes a man so blinded by his wealth and status that he fails to recognize the state of a man so blatantly suffering and in need directly in front of the gate of his home. Immediately, the description of this wealthy man already firmly places the first few verses of our text from Jeremiah 17 in view:
“5 Here is what Adonai says:
‘A curse on the person who trusts in humans,
who relies on merely human strength,
whose heart turns away from Adonai.
6 He will be like a tamarisk in the wastelands —
when relief comes, it is unaffected;
for it lives in the sun-baked desert,
in salty, uninhabited land.’”
I see described in our parable a man whose heart has become a destitute tree alone in a desert wasteland. So destitute, in fact, that when an opportunity for relief arrives, the heart is unaffected. In this case, I see Lazarus as that very opportunity. He has arrived as an opportunity for this destitute tree to bear some kind of fruit, to be relieved from its barrenness, and yet this tree pays no mind to relief.
Shall we say that our Lord is opposed to wealthy people and that they are inherently evil? Far be it from us to do so! Here is the visible image of a man “who relies on merely human strength, whose heart turns away from Adonai”. It is not his wealth that makes him the antagonist in this parable, but that wealth has so blinded him to the opportunity to take care of his neighbor that his very inaction renders the judgment.
This is the sin Jesus takes on with this brilliant parable, and the diagnosis is severe. So severe in fact, that when these two men go to their eternal habitations, the rich man begs Abraham that Lazarus (the man he refused to help while alive) might appear to his five brothers and warn them of the coming judgment, perhaps to change their behavior. Abraham disagrees, for he knows that if a man will not listen to the Law and the Prophets, then even the resurrection from the dead will not stir them from their stupor.
Chilling, is it not? Is our Lord not painting a portrait of us? Would I be too far afield in interpreting that Jesus may not be speaking only of the wealthy in the financial sense? How wealthy were the Pharisees in knowledge of the Torah? And how much had that knowledge benefitted the people whom Jesus had described in verse 16 as “forcing their way” into the Kingdom of God? Well, it seems very little, so little in fact that this wealth of knowledge was actually trying to keep them out!
Verses 7-8 of our text from Jeremiah 17 are what should stir us, that in our trust of Adonai we might become fruitful trees that bless the sojourners. While we may not all experience wealth, to know the Father is wealth enough, and should this wealth not be spread generously to our neighbor? Jesus commands the very knowledge described of Adonai in verses 9-10 of Jeremiah 17, and uses it masterfully in this parable to diagnose what’s going on in the heart. I pray we might use this diagnosis to ask, “Whom will the Lord ask me to bless today”?
Song:
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