“There was a rich man who dressed in purple garments and fine linen and dined sumptuously each day. And lying at his door was a poor man named Lazarus, covered with sores, who would gladly have eaten his fill of the scraps that fell from the rich man’s table.”
Capitalism is defined as a financial system in which trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit, instead of by the state. There are problems with the definition. To begin with, the state is itself devised by those who control the trade and industry system and not separate from it. Also, controllers operate their combined financial political system not for profit but for plunder, the plunder of poor people like Lazarus in the Gospel. Capitalism thus cannot be regarded as an economic system because ‘eco’ (oikos in Greek) means care of the home and capitalism does not give care to the home. Private wealth controlling a system of trade and industry is a system that politically and financially exploits our home, all life really. Capitalism exploits the entire earth for its resources and exploits people as usable resources too. Under capitalism everything becomes a commodity, exploited for its market value. Those people or things without market value are abandoned. People are abandoned because they are disabled or elderly or made valueless by already having been used up by the capitalist system. Such is the case with Lazarus used up and abandoned by the rich man in this Sunday’s Gospel. There is an irony in Jesus’ parable as he proceeds to tell us about rich people using invisible poor people for plunder. Even after the rich man’s death, he is still looking past Lazarus but still wanting to use the poor man, “Send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue,” Capitalism is eternal in its use of those who are poor for the benefit of those who are wealthy. The inequality is the nature of capitalism because capitalism originates in slavery. Capitalism did not start with Adam Smith. It started millennia back. Capitalism started as the ancient slave system in which trade and industry were controlled by private owners of human beings who used them and their labor for capital. Free markets originated in free labor from captured slaves plundered by War Lord masters. Millennia later, capitalism remains a slave system with slight reforms. Capitalism is slavery, a system of trade and industry controlled by private / state wealth owners for plunder. Jesus will have none of it.
Jesus’ teaching on riches, prominent these last three Sundays, is entirely clear. When we gain riches, we lose relationships. When we gain money, we lose people. The question is not whether we should give charity to those who are destitute, or the degree to which we should judge them as unworthy. The question is how to change a system that habitually makes people destitute and manipulates us into thinking such people are unworthy. Jesus’ parable does not induce guilt but rather action on behalf of those used by the capitalist system that exploits us all. How has it come to be that a nation such as the U.S. is considered ‘Christian,’ when it has made millions upon millions of people into poor Lazarus’ while it rationalizes and even heralds rich men walking past them.
Prayer: Dear Jesus, into every person’s eyes I look, may I see you looking back.
Question: What simple routines can I begin that connect me with those used up and abandoned?
September 29, 2013 – Gospel Luke 16:19-31 Twenty Sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time