Day Nineteen

Day Nineteen // March 18 // Indifference

“Love cannot endure indifference. It needs to be wanted. Like a lamp, it needs to be fed out of the oil of another’s heart, or its flame burns low.” – Henry Ward Beecher –

One of Jesus’ most troubling parables is found in Luke 16. In the parable, entitled “The Rich Man and Lazarus,” we read of a certain rich man who had ignored the beggar, Lazarus, at his gate. While living in unquestioning luxury, he had missed the needs right in front of him; and, at the end of his life, the rich man finds himself in hell. The story is troubling because the rich man was not mean or intentionally cruel; we could justify in our minds his eternal outcome if he were. But, in fact, he never mistreated Lazarus. He never kicked him. He never chased him away. He never lectured him about getting up and getting a job. Still, his unacted

upon cruelty was not enough for him to escape his fate. Why? What did he do that was so horrible that he should deserve such a terrible sentence? He acted as though the circumstances of Lazarus’ life were supposed to be that way. He accepted it all without question. It never occurred to him that the fate of Lazarus’ birth and the conditions of his life could be changed. Lazarus, therefore, became not a part of suffering humanity but just a part of the landscape. In a word, the rich man was indifferent: indifferent to Lazarus’ plight, indifferent to his hunger, indifferent to his needs. He was the neighbor who he’d never met… let alone loved.

When we let the fruit of kindness rot into indifference, we thrust ourselves into a troublesome danger zone. We accept the status quo. We give the crushing problems of the world quick recognition, only a passing glance as we immediately think: “Somebody somewhere ought to do something about that.” And we overlook the fact that that Jesus says to us: What will you do about that?

In a classic Garfield cartoon: one cold winter night, Garfield looks out the window and sees Odie the Dog peering through the window. Garfield thinks to himself: this is horrible. Here I am in the comfort of a warm house, well fed, and there’s Odie outside, cold and hungry, begging to get in. I can’t stand it anymore. I just can’t stand it. And with that thought, he goes over to the window and closes the curtains.

How often do we do that? We see problems, dysfunction and suffering that we don’t want to deal with, and we simply close the curtains. Jesus is crystal clear in the parable of the rich man and Lazarus. It’s not our badness that will send us to hell; it’s our lack of goodness. It’s our lack of trusting in and following after Him. It’s how we close the curtains on those who represent suffering humanity. Maybe we suffer from compassion fatigue. Maybe life has unintentionally calloused our hearts. Lent calls us to eat deeply from the fruit of kindness and compassion, to peel back the brittle layer that has grown on our souls… remembering that, at the end of the age, we will be judged by our love.