A few Sundays ago, many church services featured Jesus’ parable about the Rich Man and Lazarus. Like most of Jesus’ parables, it’s a hyperbolic story intended to drive home a specific point. It is not a comprehensive or systematic description of the geography and demographics of the situation that awaits us in eternity. Lazarus is there as a contrast to the rich man. Lazarus has a name. The rich man does not. Lazarus’ brutal poverty outside the rich man’s gates highlights the rich man’s self-absorbed luxury. It does not make Lazarus righteous, but it does show the rich man to be profoundly unrighteous. Given the present and widening gap between the rich and the poor in our time, Jesus’ description is unsettlingly contemporary.
According to one report, to be in the top 1% of income earners globally, you only need to take home $60,000 to $70,000 per year after taxes. Furthermore, 1% of the world’s population controls 47.5% of the world’s wealth. So 1% of the global population owns nearly as much as the other 99%. Almost everyone reading this is close to that 1% income bracket. Even most students at Valpo, who are not making this kind of money, have someone in their corner who is, and they expect to earn this kind of income, if not more, when they graduate. So when Jesus says there was a wealthy man, he might be speaking to us.
What is critical, however, regarding the description of this rich man is that it reveals what he considered most important in life. The purpose of this man’s life is his ability to gather riches for his own comfort and pleasure. The situation of Lazarus is there to highlight this in contrast. The Rich Man’s pleasure was more important and of greater purpose than his neighbor’s need. The problem with the Rich Man’s priorities is that he has valued something that doesn’t last.
Despite our wealth, we are likely appalled by the rich man’s priorities. He’s a caricature of greed and, for that reason, easily dismissed. But I think we live our own version of his life of compulsive consumption. I believe we are enmeshed in it.
I think Valpo’s culture is one of overextension; students, faculty, and staff are all working hard and doing more with less. It’s not a new thing. Years ago, a friend on the staff joked, “What do you call someone at Valpo who works 70 hours a week? Answer: A slacker.”
Now, anyone who pays attention to the broader culture knows that this isn’t strictly a Valpo thing. We are living in a culture that is obsessed with productivity. We are producers and consumers of stuff and ideas. It’s just the way things work. Maybe it’s the Protestant work ethic, or perhaps it’s something else. It might also just be a few hundred years old – this way of living.
On August 27, 1859 (just 25 days before the opening of Valparaiso Male and Female College), Edwin Drake drilled the first commercial oil well near Titusville, Pennsylvania, marking the beginning of the oil industry and the advent of our energy-intensive carbon economy. In her recent book Of Modern Extraction: Experiments in Critical Petro-theology, Terra Schwerin Rowe observes, “More measured, moderate, or fluctuating patterns of life, speech, and thought, and contemplative activities, restful states, or meandering modes are treated in energy-intensive economies and societies as pathological, immoral, deficiencies of a fulfilled, healthy human body.”2 It seems that if we’re surrounded by machines capable of virtually unlimited work, we don’t work less; we work more. To sit idly by while the rest of the world is producing is to waste our time, maybe even our lives. What’s more, poverty isn’t just unfortunate, much less unjust. In a petroculture, poverty is often regarded as a moral failing.
Does this ring true for you?
The rich man in Jesus’ story comes to his senses in the afterlife. He asks that Lazarus be sent back from the dead to warn his brothers to change their ways. Father Abraham is bleak in his response: “If they do not listen to Moses and the prophets, neither will they be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.” The irony is that this is a story told by one who will come back from the dead against his money-obsessed critics!
The apostle Paul writes that while we were yet dead in our sins, Christ died for us. Jesus, the teller of outrageous, made-up stories, does something even more outrageous. He offers his life, his real life, as a sign of the cursedness of creation. He is broken for a broken world, and he dies. He dies an impoverished, beaten, and sore-covered man outside the city gates. He is the true Lazarus, and by the mercy of God, this Jesus returns from the dead to effect and announce the coming restoration of all of creation, and you are a part of it. Paul identifies this action as proof of divine love.
This love, not productivity, is your purpose.
You don’t need to produce to make something of yourself. You are already made and redeemed. The value of your life is Jesus’ own righteousness. Your work, classes, and ability to achieve your goals are good. This drive to overproduce and overconsume as though our lives depended on it is a false god, and like all false gods, it is killing us.
Following Jesus will have its implications. It may cause you to reevaluate your priorities. It may prompt you to ask tough questions of yourself, our culture, and our approach to doing business.
– Pastor Jim
Dr. Schwerin Rowe will speak on April 14, 2026, at 2:45 p.m. in the Harre Union Ballroom as part of the Institute of Liturgical Studies. Registration is free for Valpo students, faculty, and staff. Watch this newsletter for registration information.
Rev. Katherine Museus and Rev. James A. Wetzstein serve as university pastors at the Chapel of the Resurrection at Valparaiso University and take turns writing weekly devotions.
- Photo Credit: Marcin Wichary from San Francisco, U.S.A. – The first gas station, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7367672 Ambler’s Texaco Gas Station on Route 66 in Dwight, Illinois, USA
- Rowe, 2022, p. 31.
