We all know the plot line. The grief-stricken widow, totally adrift with no idea what to do, hires a medium to contact her dearly departed from beyond for reassurance and guidance. From there the plots diverge, she gets closure to her issue, she goes in deeper, the medium fleeces her for everything she has, or they unleash something guaranteeing the next four movies in a horror franchise.
Does it really solve anything? Erm, no.
Today's Gospel for Mass (Luke 16.19-31) is possibly familiar to people: rich man, poor beggar, both die, rich man is in hell, poor man is in heaven. The easy interpretation is that ignoring the poor puts you in the eternal hot seat and that God cares for those who were marginalized and ignored.
All true...but that is not all of it.
The rich man in this parable begs for a message to go out to his clueless brothers that his fate will be theirs if they do not reverse course. He also offers, in the style of Jacob Marley, to go back and scare the Dickens out of them (sorry, I could NOT resist). This is where God tells the rich man a rather sobering truth.
They won't get the message.
Scrooge got the message, but Scrooge was a fictional character out of a story ultimately about repentance and redemption. The parable of Dives and Lazarus (a/k/a Rich Boy and He-Who-God-Helps) takes a darker turn. God lets the rich man know that He had been telling the rich man's brothers, and the rich man too, all their lives through the Law and the Prophets how to prevent eternal sundering from God through care for those around them, even the least. If they didn't believe Moses, Elijah, Elisha, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, etc., then an apparition would do little good, in fact, the brothers would likely write it off as, "There is more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!"[1]
Our Lord's point is that the entirety of the message of the Gospel can be found, if one pays attention, in the Law and the Prophets. His message emphasizes what was already laid out there. In this parable, He states that even were someone to come back from the dead (as He did after His Death at the Resurrection), if they would not believe Moses and the Prophets they will not believe Him.
It is a theme we encounter in Scriptures again and again. While faith saves, faith without care for the poor and downtrodden around us is no faith at all. The Law stressed that. The Prophets all had much to say about that. The Gospels say that. The Holy Apostles in their Epistles tell us that. If we believe in Jesus and His atoning work, then we must show it. The witness of millennia tell us this. If we don't get it, a séance or a haunting isn't going to drive the point home, only openness to the message of the ages. Let us not be deaf to it.
[1] Dickens, Charles, A Christmas Carol, London: Chapman and Hall, 1843, Open Books, 2007, p. 24