what is preventing us ... 26th Sunday C 2013

The issue at hand in our gospel today is not simply that the man is rich or that he has no compassion for the poor man.  The issue at hand is that the wealth of the rich man is preventing him from seeing or relating to Lazarus as a fellow child of God.  If you notice even if he was already in the afterlife, his status as the rich man made him assume that he can order around those at the lower economic bracket – he told Abraham to tell Lazarus to do this and that for him.  He could not even talk directly to Lazarus but he assumed he could talk directly with Abraham.  Ka-level sila ni Abraham, pero indi sila ka-level ni Lazaro.

It is a warning that there are things in our lives that are preventing us from seeing and relating with others as fellow children of God.  Now what is that in your life?  What is it that is preventing you from seeing and relating with others as a fellow child of God?   In the gospel it is wealth, and the status and the ranking it created in people.  Defined by wealth, the upper class matters more than the lower class.  Defined by wealth, the upper classes had the lower classes in their hands.

In the first reading, it is worst - it’s a dog eats dog world.  Here relationships are defined by utility.  People are used for business profit and eventually for one’s own personal well-being and convenience.

What is preventing you from seeing and relating with others as a fellow child of God, as a brother or sister in Christ, what is it that separates us, what is it that distances us, what is it that makes us feel that we are not of the same class, we are not of the same level?  Is it our status as religious?  Is it the feeling of holier than thou superiority?  What is it that is preventing us from seeing each other as equals?

When the pope came to Iloilo I was 2^nd year high school in the seminary.  And I remember very well the preparations.  There was a debate as to where he will pass from the Archbishop’s residence back to the Mandurriao Airport then.  There were two alternatives.  One was go to the seminary and ride a helicopter from the seminary to the airport.  For this they painted the façade of the seminary – newly painted, but only the façade.  The alternate way to make the pope pass through Desamparados, Taft North and Calubihan - all by the side of the Dungon Creek in Bakhaw.  These were all squatters area then, a squalid sight.  So they set up a wall made of bamboo mats or amakan and painted these white, covering both sides of the street.

Destitution disturbs, misery upsets us, we build whitewashed walls so that our ignorance will numb us from disturbing sights.  Misery should have aroused compassion, but we prevented that because compassion becomes a disturbing feeling.  By preventing compassion, by equating compassion to disturbance, we are killing that which makes us genuinely human. Let us not hide our vulnerabilities, let us not whitewashed them, for these will teach us compassion.

What is it that is preventing us from seeing and relating with others as a fellow child of God?  What is preventing us from developing compassion?