Spiritual Parables sometimes present the 'rich' person as a hero of justice, sometimes as a miserly villain.  Today's Parable from the Beloved Son of God has mighty imagery.  The extravagance of the rich man is played off against the utter destitution of the poor man.  The rich man is not a miser.  His problem is that he is numb to the presence of the poor and inattentive to their needs.  While Lazarus starves, he has Sunday lunch seven days a week.  Where Lazarus is covered in sores, the rich man is covered in the finest threads.  Lazarus lies at his door and it is a door that never opens.  The rich man needs to become more sensitive to the poverty and suffering in front of his eyes.
 
Death brings a reversal.  The rich man is given a proper burial while beggars rarely are.  But instead of saying that the body of Lazarus was devoured by beasts, the story has angels carry him to the bosom of Abraham.  Now Abraham was a rich man of the first kind - generous, heroic and a master of the art of hospitality.  No poor person would ever have lain unnoticed and unattended at his door.  His door was open and the poor would have been clothed and sat at his table.  
 
In some teaching stories, when the rich man finds himself in hell he sees the error of his ways and asks for a second chance. But this story does not go in that direction.  The rich man is not interested in repentance or second chances. When he asks 'Father' Abraham for help,  he is told that the real children of Abraham are those who feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, and create for the lonely a home, a community where they belong.  The rich man will not get the hearing he wants. Notice too how he can now see Lazarus very clearly and that he calls on him for help!  Abrahams' reply gives no explanation for the reversed situation but he empties the rich man of his last vestige of hope by pointing to the uncrossable gulf that makes help impossible.  The time before death is the time for repentance.  The message of the story is clear.  Don't waste your precious time: repent NOW!
 
The rich mans' torment cannot be relieved but he might be able to save those he loves from the same fate.  But his request to send a resuscitated Lazarus to warn them, only galvanises the storyteller to drive his point home all the harder.  The way of  change  is  not  to  fear  the  future  but  to  listen  and  act  on  the  prophets  call  for  justice  now.   The  rich  man  is  not convinced.  People will change if they see something spectacular, like say, a resurrection.  Abraham is now the one who is not convinced.  Moses and the Prophets are the key to understanding the life, death and resurrection of the Beloved Son of God.  They don't need something more.  They must attend to what they already have.  The story ends by stating clearly that the rich man’s fate was sealed when he refused to listen to Moses and the Prophets.  They were absolutely clear that caring for the poor of the earth is the only show in town.  But the rich man misunderstood his wealth and saw it as an advantage over the poor. When he did this, he put himself at odds with God's purposes.
 
This story, although it unfolds and is told in the afterlife, is not intended by Jesus to scare his hearers, or to try and paint a picture of life beyond the grave.  The real target of the story are the assumptions and attitudes of people living here and now on planet earth.  Vivid stories about heaven and hell are told to make clear the truths that may be obscured in the murky dealings of the world.  The way the world works is not the way God works.  The class systems and social arrangements of the world are not sanctioned by eternity.  Any theology that sees wealth as a blessing from God and poverty and sickness as a divine curse is mistaken.  And if this theology is used to keep the gap between the rich and the poor as wide as possible it is insidious.  The Beloved Son of God teaches His disciples to rearrange the wealth of the earth in such a way that all people share in them.  Abraham thinks the rich man should have known this all along - and he is right.  There is no excuse for his appalling  behaviour.   Something  more  is  not  needed.   There  is enough already.
 
The directive to bridge the gap between rich and poor is clear; but how we should do it isn't always so clear.  Change can only come from those who have heard the Parable and ask themselves, how, in this situation change can be created.  Every disciple has to know how to translate spiritual truth into social fact.  On one side of the door,  the  rich  Feast,  on  the  other  side  of  the  door,  the  poor starve.   Who  holds  the  Key?   The  answer  is  to  be  found  in  the universal truth that doors can only be opened from the inside.

A dishonest 'manager' has been caught in the act of stealing.  He sees his life unravel and visits to the jobcentre don't hold out much hope that things will improve.  Then, like the wasteful son in the Parable of the Prodigal Father, this man reviews his situation and comes up with a survival strategy.  His back is to the wall and he's not going down without a fight.  His  strategy is to seduce others to collude in his dishonesty.  He tells himself, that once the trap is sprung, he can enjoy their support for a long time to come.  Sound familiar?
 
With His usual creativity, the Beloved Son of God - having just painted a surprising portrait of what God is like for the wasteful son - portrays the dishonest managers' employer in a strange light.  His only response to the loss he has endured is to praise the dishonest manager for his cleverness and cunning!  A bit like those scenes from a mystery film where the detective from Scotland Yard gazes into the empty bank vault and says of the robbers,  "Credit where credit is due.  They knew what they were doing".   
 
Keep in mind that the Parables of Jesus are about spiritual matters.  The dishonest manager knew how to survive when his physical and social life was threatened.  The disciples of Jesus need to have the same 'wisdom' to act decisively when their hearts are at stake.  The Children of the Light appear to Jesus to be lacking in this regard.  They are threatened on all sides.  Powerful internal and external forces are at work to lead them astray. If they are not alert to these, if they do not have a plan which galvanises them into action, they might be swept away by the darkness.
 
Specifically, the Divine Teacher suggests that we should not allow money to make us dishonest.  Put simply, if we use it for the service of Love we will have mastered it.  But if we swap the first commandment and make money our first love it will have mastered us!  And He knows that if we try to build our security on what we own it will fail us.  It's only use, in Kingdom terms, is to see it as a resource that builds community.  If we use our resources to relieve the suffering of others, and to strengthen the bonds of friendship in our community, we will have used them in the way God intended.
 
Our trustworthiness with the baubles of earthly 'wealth' is a sign that we are doing well with the genuine riches of the Kingdom.  Becoming a person who can be trusted is a step in the right direction, which will allow the Spirit of God to reveal the deeper richness in our own soul.  In both cases, it seems that for Jesus, our spiritual growth cannot be pursued in isolation from the life that we are living, and the people we are living with here and now. We have to choose, in this context, what is most important to us and make everything else a servant of that choice.
 
This choosing is very important. We must choose friends who are not just spiritually surviving but thriving!  Instead of hanging around people who collude with our sin, we have to hang around people who inspire us to be the best that we can be.  Sometimes our friends, if we let them, can see us more clearly that we see ourselves and sometimes they have the answers that we cannot yet see.  This is why, in our friendship group,  we  should  have  at  least  one  person  who  loves  us unconditionally  and  at  least  one  person  who  can  challenge  us  to continue to grow. These guides will help us to be more alert to what is destroying our spiritual development and help us to act effectively to guard the treasure in our soul.  
 
If, after reading this, you are asking yourself if you have lost some of the music of the Gospel in your soul, stop what you are doing and don't go on until you find it again.

'Tax  Collectors  and  sinners'  are  a  social  group  of  people  who  have  been  excluded  from  the community.  'Pharisees and scribes' are a social group of people who have not been excluded from the community.  These complain that Jesus is welcoming those who have been excluded and is eating with them.  Is He approving of their sin?  They think He is!  But while they fear Jesus has gone over to the dark side, Jesus clearly sees Himself bringing the two sides together.  He was a person of reconciliation in a world that had accepted, and may have even enjoyed, divisions.  Jesus is struggling to pull together what others wish to pull apart. 
 
He offers two parables for their reflection.  The first about a wandering and lost sheep, the second about a lost coin.  So He knows they are lost.  But what is new is that He is searching for them, including them in the community of the 'already found' and inviting the community to a celebration of their inclusion.  Notice how Jesus wants his listeners to recognise the parables in their own experience. ' Which of you....' 'What woman ....'. Jesus seems pretty sure that His parables are revealing something about the best in human nature. 
 
Then it gets even more interesting.  In Sacred Scripture numbers are very symbolic.  One hundred and Ten connote  completeness,  fullness  and  wholeness.   There  is  a  pull  in  every  human  heart  towards  this wholeness.  The shepherd and the woman of the parables are creating a social wholeness which will open the door to spiritual wholeness - the integration of heaven and earth.  All Jesus can see is that His community is split into two camps and they must re-engage in the struggle for community.  The shepherd seeks the One sheep to add to the ninety-nine.  The woman seeks the one coin and adds it to the nine.  In this way, a divided community can become whole.  
 
This longing to find the missing one represents the realignment of God with Creation.  God wants unity.  This is why the angels rejoice much more when a whole is created by the inclusion of what was excluded than when  an  incompleteness - even  a  just  incompleteness  -  leaves  the  community  short. The  synchronised rejoicing in heaven and earth is The Sign that things are the way they are meant to be. 
 
I find myself smiling as I watch, listen and contemplate this strange behaviour of Jesus.  And I also find myself seriously challenged by His teaching.  It's too easy to accept the loss of relationships as inevitable.  When we fall out with and lose family, friends,  neighbours,  work  colleagues  and  even  members  of  our  own  parish community, when we lose our creativity and energy to do something to fix it, when we lose our desire to contribute to the wellbeing and future of all creation, we may have been overly impressed by the inevitability of loss.  We may just shrug off our losses rather than searching for and reclaiming them.  We can become numb to the 
pain of missing what was once crucial to our lives.  Instead, Jesus, the Beloved Son of God is not resigned.  He is searching the wilderness and sweeping the house.  He will not settle for loss. "For the Son of Man came to seek out and save the lost." (Luke19:10). And He does not see these as private reunions which take place behind closed doors.  When He finds the One who restores completeness, the whole community are gathered.  One whole, invites and creates another whole! Getting back what we have lost,  receiving  into  our  heart  and  soul  what  makes  us  complete  overflows  into  party  time.   This  joy  is contagious and the whole community are infected.  Perhaps it is the same Angels rejoicing in heaven who spoke to the shepherds at His birth and said, "Good news of great Joy for all the people." (Luke 2:10)  
 
Throughout the timeline of our lives, we walk with one another, and there are times in everyone's life when there is a getting lost and a coming home, of not being there and suddenly being there again.  Jesus is an artist  of  relationships  and  his  exquisite  teaching  creates  the  spaces  we  need  for  spiritual  encounters  to happen.  It seems that when we pursue reconciliation, the angels are quick to get in on the act and all creation comes along for the ride.  I guess the question is, who needs to come off my hit list!