OT XXVI [C]: Am 6:1a, 4-7; 1Tm 6:11-16; Lk 16:19-31

We often hear people say that they will get to heaven because they haven't committed any really, really heinous crimes. "I'm a good guy," they say, "I haven’t murdered anyone or sold weapons to terrorists." This attitude is not a Christian one. We do not go to heaven because we do not do any grave sins. We go to heaven because Christ wants us there and we live according to his commands pleasing him doing good and avoiding evil.

As Jesus teaches us in this story of Lazarus and the rich man, salvation and eternal life are not just about avoiding so-called "big" sins. That's a negative, passive approach to life. But Christ is not passive. Christ is active. He came to earth to save us. He took the initiative. He came to seek out the lost sheep. He came to light the fire of faith in a dark world. Being a Christian means following in those footsteps. It means much more than simply avoiding gruesome crimes.

Being a Christian means living like Christ, living for his Kingdom, living for others. It is interesting that when Jesus was asked which were the most important commandments, he didn't choose the negative ones, the "thou shalt not" ones. Instead he listed two active, positive, creative commandments: love God with all your heart, and love your neighbor as yourself.

The rich man in this parable had no particularly damaging "sins of commission" on his résumé. He was a pretty good guy. And yet, he failed to enter into eternal life. Why? Because of his "sins of omission". Day after day, he closed his heart to a neighbor who was in dire need of help. He spent his life becoming an expert in self-centeredness.

There is a story told by a rabbi. One day a certain old, rich man of a miserable disposition visited a rabbi. The Rabbi led him to a window. “Look out there into the street. What do you see?” asked the rabbi. “I see men, women, and children,” answered the rich man. Again the rabbi led him to a mirror. He asked, “Now what do you see?” The man replied, “Now I can only see myself,”.

Then the rabbi said, “Look, in the window there is glass, and in the mirror there is glass. But the glass of the mirror is covered with a little silver, and no sooner is the silver added than you cease to see others, and you see only yourself.”

That is the problem with most of us. When we begin to love money and wealth and life’s luxuries, we become insensitive to the needs of others. The moment we stop seeing the misery of the one next to us we become self-centered.

In 1993, Steven Spielberg came out with a movie called Schindler's List. It's a true story of a rather mediocre Catholic businessman, Oskar Schindler, who lived in Poland during World War II. When the war started, he saw it as an opportunity to make money. He made friends with some of the German officials and worked out a deal with them to use Jewish prisoners as free labor for his munitions factory. Since he didn't have to pay his workers, he was able to rake in a handsome profit. But little by little his eyes opened to the horrors of the Nazi regime. His heart changed, and he started using his factories and his connections with German officers to save his Jewish workers from the Holocaust. He used the money he had made during the early part of the war to "buy" more and more Jewish workers, just so he could save their lives.

By the end of the war he was as broke as he had been at the beginning, but he had managed to save hundreds of Jews from being massacred.

In the last scene of the movie, when the Germans are fleeing as allied troops approach the town where the factory is located, we see Schindler surrounded by the workers whom he had saved, and they are thanking him. But then Schindler starts to cry. He looks around at the faces of the people he saved, and he tells them, "I could have done so much more." He holds up his gold watch, and says, "This could have bought someone's freedom." He cries out that if he had started sooner he could have saved twice as many. Every face he sees makes him think of another face that he could have saved if he had been less self-centered. He is completely distraught. Schindler had experienced firsthand the destructive power of the sin of omission.

A Sunday-school teacher asked the class, "can any of you tell me what are sins of omission?"

"Yes, sir," said the small boy. "They are the sins we ought to have done and haven't."

We know sin of omission is not that, it is the omission or failure to do the good we are obliged to do. In the confiteor in the beginning of the Mass, we said, in what I have done and in what I have failed to do, through my fault… Sin of omission is as grave of a sin as sin of commission. But we seldom focus on them.

One way to avoid falling into the sin of omission is simply to purposely keep our eyes open for opportunities to serve those around us. Even making the commitment to perform at least one voluntary, selfless, Christ-like act of service every day can help keep the passive, sin-of-omission mentality at bay. Imagine if the rich man in the parable had been granted another chance, would he have changed, and been able to change his own brother from Hell? We do not know for sure, but Jesus said, they have the scriptures as warners for them. There is no greater warning than God’s own warning in the Scripture. How are we taking those warnings? Let’s pray today that the Lord may grant us the clear eyes and wisdom to look at and understand God’s clear warnings to us and not fail to look at the Lazaruses in our community.