Lazarus and the Rich Man Discuss El Niño (Luke 16)

CLIMATE BIBLE STUDY: September 2023  

The Parable of Lazarus and the Rich Man, Workshop of Domenico Fetti. 

by Lowell Bliss

Director, Eden Vigil Institute for Environmental Leadership, WCIU

“The window of opportunity to take action on the climate is rapidly closing.” That’s been a phrase we’ve heard for a couple decades now, I suppose. If there is any truth to it, then we should allow that there will come a time when the window is closed, or closed to such a small aperture that it’s hard to get our fingers under it, hard to get enough leverage under it to open it further. In a recent podcast interview, acclaimed activist Bill McKibben identified a particular window of opportunity and even put a time frame on it: “the next 18 months feels like the key moment,” he said. The particular insight behind this statement is unique, and makes for, in my mind, an allusion to one of Jesus’s more curious stories: the Rich Man and Lazarus in two different parts of the afterlife (Luke 16: 19-31).

McKibben’s first calculations are familiar: “Physicists have told us that if we want to have any chance of meeting those climate targets we set in Paris, which are none too aggressive, we'd need to cut emissions in half by 2030, which by my watch is six years and four months away. And that means that we'd have to basically do the work in the next couple of years.” When I think about what will be determined in the next 18 months, I’m also mindful of the future of American democracy at the far end of elections and court cases. The presidential and congressional elections in 2024 will determine much about America’s participation in the Paris Agreement, let alone that country exercising any leadership in climate action. McKibben does mention this elsewhere in the interview, but here, he wants to highlight the significance of El Niño. He says:

This coincides with this extraordinary El Niño now dawning on the planet that's going to keep raising the temperature at least for the next 18 months. And we're going to see things that we have never seen before. That'll be tragic. It will be grim. And it will also be a test of our maturity as a species.

Can we take in that spectacle and say, okay, we have to do this? We have to do this in the same way that we had to fight fascism in Europe in the middle of the last century and we had to do it then. That's the question. And I think we'll find out. I think, right, not to put too fine a point on it, Chris, but it seems to me that climate change is a kind of test of whether the big brain was a good adaptation or not. It can get us in a lot of trouble. And now, we'll find out if it can get us out of that trouble. And my guess is that the answer lies less in the size of the brain in the end than in the size of the heart it's attached to. This is gonna be ultimately, there's plenty of questions of self-interest and self-preservation, but there are also deep, deep questions about human solidarity that we're going to answer one way or another in the next few years.

There’s a part of Jesus’s story in Luke 19—there’s some debate over whether it qualifies as a parable—that is about human solidarity. It begins in what we might call the “here and now” with a certain rich man clothed in finery and eating the best food. A beggar named Lazarus, covered in sores, sits right outside his house. John Calvin in his commentary on this passage is outraged: “What could be more monstrous than to see the dogs taking charge of a man, to whom his neighbor is paying no attention; and, what is more, to see the very crumbs of bread refused to a man perishing of hunger, while the dogs are giving him the service of their tongues for the purpose of healing his sores?”

But then the scene changes to what we might call the “then and there.” Both men have died. The rich man is in torment, but across the chasm, he can see Lazarus at the banquet table of Abraham’s comfort. The rich man asks that Lazarus be sent to “dip his finger in and water and touch my tongue” to relieve his suffering, but the chasm cannot be crossed. He then appeals, “Abraham, then please send Lazarus to my father’s home. Let him warn my five brothers, so they won’t come to this horrible place.” Abraham’s answer here is different. He does not say that the chasm between life and death cannot be crossed, as if it is impossible for someone to come back from the dead and speak. (The final verse in this story, v. 31, seems like an allusion to Jesus’s own resurrection.) Abraham’s answer to the rich man’s request for sending a warning is: they have had all the warning they need in Moses and the prophets. If they won’t heed to what they have heard in the here-and-now, they won’t listen to what the then-and-there might say to them.

According to McKibben, we could imagine that the next eighteen months of El Niño are like the visitation of an eighteen-month block of time from the future, post-2030. We can converse with it like Scrooge did with the Ghost of Christmas Future, like the rich man’s brothers could have if Abraham had sent Lazarus. The big difference is that Lazarus would only have brought words, whereas Dickens' ghosts brought a vision-like experience.  And what are these El Niño months with their hurricanes, heat domes, and wildfires if not an experiential and physical taste of torment, felt in body, mind, and soul?

That distinction might be the very thing that saves us from the despair hanging over this story: “they won’t listen.” The ironic thing is that through Jesus’s artful storytelling, in a sense, Lazarus was sent back from the dead. The rich man’s brothers did have a chance from hell and paradise, from the then-and-there, from the future. Connections were made from the then-and-there to the warnings of Moses and the prophets operative in the here-and-now. It was all made alive because Jesus the activist chose to be a storyteller. The next eighteen months are going to tick by as surely as the moon goes through its phases. El Niño is also surely going to be with us like an all-too-real apparition from our future. What is not yet determined is whether the heart of humanity will be increased in proportion to the challenge that our “big brain” has created for us. Let’s work harder than ever in the next eighteen months to help our fellow citizens of the here-and-now interpret the story of this moment.

“It’s a horrible burden at some sense for all of everybody who’s alive now to deal with that,” McKibben says of the next eighteen months, “but it’s also a tremendous privilege to get to deal with that, and to answer deeper questions than any human beings ever had to answer about what our point is here on this planet.”