Genocide can never be reversed. A murder victim can never be unmurdered. A rape victim can never be unraped.
A stage 4 cancer patient denied chemo and radiation can never get back to stage 1 or to being cancer free.
Jesus of Nazareth crafted a parable that should have terrified any filthy rich people who heard him tell the story. It only had two characters. One was a grotesquely rich guy who fed his face sumptuously every single day; or maybe his servants fed him.
The other character was an abjectly impoverished beggar with a skin disease; no money for doctors. The only relief he got was when wild dogs crept up to him and licked those sores.
Jesus irritated (yes, intentionally) any rich listeners he might have had by not naming the rich guy and giving the beggar a name, Lazarus, which meant “God has helped,” though no one believed that, especially Lazarus.
Lazarus asked the rich man to throw him some table scraps, what he did for wild roving dogs. (no pet dogs in that time and place). Rich guy kept feeding the stray dogs that were generally despised scavengers but let Lazarus go hungry.
Soon, no surprise, Lazarus died. Rich guy didn’t even miss him.
Remember the meaning of the name Jesus gave him? God has helped. Well yes. Lazarus awakened out of death in paradise.
Anonymous rich guy kept stuffing himself into an early tomb. Poor people in the crowds to whom Jesus told this parable, the vast majority of his listeners, wanted to cheer. Maybe they did.
Rich guys wakes up out of death not in the opulence to which he had been accustomed, but in the most God-forsaken place he’d never imagined. Barren, waterless desert. Perpetually dreary.
At first, rich guy still thought he was entitled. Had the audacity to call out to Lazarus to get him a sip of water and get his rich brothers the facts about where greed and hatred of strugglers get you. Seriously? Yes.
MAGAts won’t preach this to their oligarchs, politicians, and other filthy rich types.
A voice comes from Lazarus’s new neighborhood speaking into the darkness, “Way too late. No water and no errands. This realm is unconnected to those on whom death has not yet called.”
It is a parable about evil that can never be fixed, reversed, undone in the next realm or in this one. A starving person loses the capacity for eating before death overtakes her or him.
Our nation, our world, is filled with irredeemable people who have gone just this far with their evil.