...and the Dogs Licked His Sores

The Rich Man and Lazarus (undated Orthodox icon)

Two friends, in two completely different circumstances, have quoted Jesus’ parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus (Luke 16:19-31) at me recently. This forces me to turn inward and contemplate one of Christianity’s more opaque passages. This narrative, which only appears in one Gospel and has no explanatory text, doesn’t easily admit one-to-one interpretation. It reads more like modern literature than religious text, meant more to disquiet readers than enlighten souls.

The rich man—nameless in the text, but christened Dives in the English theological tradition—lives comfortably inside a fortress-like enclosure, never having to see the squalor around him. Jesus contrasts Dives’ comfort with Lazarus’ suffering. Not only is Lazarus hungry, he is “covered in sores,” presumably leprous, which makes him ritually unclean under Jewish law. He’s so unclean, in fact, that “dogs came and licked his sores.” Dogs, under Abrahamic law, are filthy scavengers.

In other words, Jesus doesn’t contrast here between rich and poor. He contrasts between a man so rich he never needs to touch the ground, and a man so poor he can’t get off the ground. One lives so richly rewarded by this world’s standards that he never needs to participate in this world, and the other must plead for crumbs so he doesn’t leave this world prematurely. Despite this, they’re separated by one thin door, and when the time comes, they seemingly die simultaneously.

Read from a conventionally middle-class moral position, the story seemingly culminates in rewards for earthly suffering, and punishment for earthly indifference. That’s how my childhood preachers interpreted this story. Lazarus ascends to heaven, not because the poor are particularly righteous or deserving, or because pain creates holiness, but because God favors the poor, and casts away those who don’t use God’s earthly blessings to assist the needy. Seemingly straightforward.

Except, as I’ve recently become conscious of widespread systemic ableism in Western society, the story has unwelcome creases. Jesus doesn’t only make Lazarus poor, he also makes Lazarus sick, and so thoroughly sick that he’s vulnerable to scavenging bottom-feeders. But Jesus seemingly offers the ultimate counsel toward patience. Wait your turn, he seemingly says; in the afterlife, God will comfort the afflicted, and consign everyone else to Hades. Just shut up and wait.

The Rich Man and Lazarus
(Sir John Everett Millais, 1864)

In practice, that’s how Christian theologians have utilized this story. Shut up and remain patient, countless bourgeois ministers have asserted, and eventually, God will reward your patient suffering. Those same ministers counseled Dives’ luxurious descendants to gift charity from their surplus, an attitude that still survives whenever you hear anybody say, “charity belongs to the church, not the government.” But an economy based on resource hoarding never gets truly fixed.

Because of Lazarus’ leprous sores, lepers’ hospitals in Victorian England were termed “Lazar-houses.” Mostly run by religious charities, these hospitals let professional Christians scoop lepers off the street, so they wouldn’t beg at the gate. But they walled lepers inside massive, fortress-like sanitoriums. Where Dives lived inside his palace, and Lazarus begged on the street, wealthy Victorians walked the street unmolested, while lepers lived inside their Lazarettos. The upshot remained unchanged: Get them out of sight!

These aren’t historic oddities. Nancy Isenberg describes the degrading language America’s founders, including Thomas Jefferson, used to describe chronically impoverished and ill White people. America’s last “Ugly Laws,” which saw people jailed for being poor, disfigured, or unpleasant to look at, weren’t repealed until 1975. P.T. Barnum built his entertainment empire by displaying disfigured, congenitally disabled, and otherwise outcast persons in his “freak show.” Barnum’s “freaks” accepted this treatment because, otherwise, they had no means to earn a living.

Conventional bourgeois interpretations of the parable focus on Dives’ earthly prosperity, and everything he loses. Middle-class pastors warn parishioners to remember the poor, and to provide sustenance from their worldly excess. Perhaps this interpretation isn’t unfair, since Jesus himself focuses his greatest word count on Dives, and everything Dives lost. But Jesus himself isn’t neutral. Jesus does something disability rights advocates deplore: he reduces Lazarus to a mute prop, with no agency, in his own story.

Jesus undoubtedly intended this story for rich audiences. Luke’s Gospel is uniquely blunt in scolding the wealthy: where Matthew’s Beatitudes promise blessings to the poor, Luke’s parallel passage promises punishments to the rich. These warnings remain as relevant today as when Jesus spoke them. Yet in targeting the rich, Luke’s Jesus strips agency from the poor. Jesus makes Lazarus an object of rich people’s pity, and disability advocates know, pity is one step removed from contempt.