“SALVATION OF THE RICH AS MISSION IN THE GOSPEL OF LUKE”

Rev. Fr. Thomas D’Sa*is the director of NBCLC, India

To be true to her mission, received from Jesus, the Church’s preferential option should be for the poor.  The Church is growing in her efforts to identify herself with the poor, in her desire to come up to the expectations of the Gospel.  If not properly understood, this concern can lead to tensions between the rich and the poor.  The ‘honest’ rich who are sincerely interested in the life of the Church may sometimes feel neglected.  If the Gospels have to be understood and accepted as Good News, then we must try our best to resolve the tensions between the rich and the poor and guide them to live in mutual help and cooperation as was done by the early Christina community in the Acts of the Apostles (2:42-47; 4:32).

The Church today is involved in a lot of social work in order to liberate the poor from their economic, material and spiritual oppressions, often with the help of money from ‘distant’ sources.  The beneficiaries are mostly and ‘supposedly’ poor people.  My endeavour in this article is to draw attention to the fact that we have certain obligations towards the rich in our ministry, even while we maintain the Church’s preferential option for the poor.  Luke shows Jesus’ interest in the rich by demonstrating the possibility of their salvation.  I would analyse the way in which Luke goes about encouraging the rich to enter the path of the Gospel.

A cursory look at the Gospel of Luke shows that there is in it a lot of material that refers to the difficulty and even to the impossibility for the rich to be saved.  This is particularly evident in the Beatitudes and Woes (6:20-26), in the parables of the Rich Farmer (12:13-21) and of the Rich Man and Lazarus (16:19-31), and in the well-known Synoptic statement: “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of God” (Lk 18:25).   Why do the rich find such disfavour in the eyes of Luke? ...

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