The chasm between the rich...
Illustration
The chasm between the rich man and Lazarus is even more of a reality in our own day than when our Lord first told this parable. Robert Heilbronner has reminded us that more than a billion of our brothers and sisters on this planet live with an annual income of less that $200 a year. He invites us to consider how it would feel by taking all the furniture out of our home, except for a few blankets. Then empty the cupboards, except for some flour, sugar, salt, a few potatoes, and some fried beans. Next we are asked to dismantle the bathroom, shut off all water, take out the electrical wiring, in fact, take away the house itself and replace it with a shack or a tool shed. Cancel all newspaper, book, and magazine subscriptions. Eliminate all bankbooks, stocks, pension plans, life insurance, and the rest. Think of the land on which you live as your only viable means of support and begin cultivating a crop, knowing that the landlord will take a third of your earnings and a tenth will go to the moneylender. Then finally, he suggests, we lop off about twenty-five to thirty years of life expectancy, and you begin to have a rough idea of how more than a billion human beings in our world who are poor must live.
