The Anesthesia of Wealth
Luke 16:19-31
I used to assume that one could predict another person’s level of compassion and understanding toward someone else who was living with abject poverty based on politics. That assumption, I have come to learn, usually ends up with us assuming that the opposite side of the political spectrum from where we are has the wrong beliefs about that person and their experiences.
As a pretty solidly left-leaning individual, I began to carry an assumption with me when I was living in Texas that it was the conservatives who were heartless toward people experiencing homelessness, for instance.
And then I moved to Denver, and I was proven 100% wrong. Turned out that the mostly left-leaning democrat city council of Denver was just as ruthless in their response to homelessness as the city of Dallas. And I also found that some of the most actively compassionate organizations, churches, and individuals responding to poverty were more conservative than me. Life is poetic.
At the end of the day, I have come to learn that it was never about political ideology. Instead, I have realized that the loudest “not in my back yard” and “put them in prison” voices on both sides of the political spectrum had something else in common that wasn’t politics: how much wealth they possessed.
I think that we need to revist and reconsider what Jesus was talking about, over and over in scripture, in his criticism of wealth. Whether he says, “you cannot serve God and wealth,” (Luke 16:13) or tells the fairly obvious moral parable about the rich man and Lazarus, Jesus was repeatedly critical of the way wealth affects us. “It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than it is for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God.” (Matthew 19:24)
What is Jesus getting at? Is it really as simple as believing that having a lot of money is morally bad? That rich people are awful? I would say no, because I have also learned in my short life that nothing as significant as humanity is simplistic and so our view or morality shouldn’t be either.
But I do think we have to evaluate the effect that the pursuit of wealth and the preservation of wealth has on our spiritual health. Because while not all rich people are bad and while money isn’t evil in and of it self, wealth is something in our lives that can make it so easy for us to ignore the suffering of our neighbor. Don’t like looking at poverty? You can afford to live somewhere that poverty can’t have access to!
Wealth is a lot like anesthesia, it numbs us from the pain we are witnessing our neighbors experiencing. And over time that numbness leads us to unfair judgment and even dehumanizing people whom we don’t understand. Wealth helps us become so anesthetized to the suffering of our neighbor that we cannot imagine having that experience ourselves.
The more wealth we possess, the farther away we are in our own lives from people who struggle with poverty. Money gets in the way of us being in community with all people and tends to narrow the diversity of people whom we might consider as our neighbor. And that was the indictment of the rich man who had Lazarus wasting away at his gate. In Luke 16:19-31, it is important to note that the rich man wasn’t described as cruel to Lazarus. The rich man didn’t attack Lazarus. As much as we can tell, the rich man just ignored Lazarus. His wealth made that possible—he had gates and a wall surrounding his home that kept Lazarus far away from him.
In the USA, I think the “American dream” has been sabotaged by the pursuit of wealth we mostly don’t need. And we get swept along, if we have wealth, by the temptation of wanting more and more of it. The more we have, the farther away from people who have less than we do we get.
But the stark spiritual truth is that money, at the end of the day, doesn’t matter near as much as how we can love our neighbor. Don’t wait too long to be in service to your neighbor in need. Money doesn’t exist on the other side of the grave.
