The Rich Man and Lazarus 19 “There was a rich man who was ...

The Rich Man and Lazarus
19 “There was a rich man who was dressed in purple and fine linen and lived in luxury every
day. 20 At his gate was laid a beggar named Lazarus, covered with sores 21 and longing to eat
what fell from the rich man’s table. Even the dogs came and licked his sores.
22 “The time came when the beggar died and the angels carried him to Abraham’s side. The
rich man also died and was buried. 23 In Hades, where he was in torment, he looked up and
saw Abraham far away, with Lazarus by his side. 24 So he called to him, ‘Father Abraham,
have pity on me and send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue,
because I am in agony in this fire.’
25 “But Abraham replied, ‘Son, remember that in your lifetime you received your good
things, while Lazarus received bad things, but now he is comforted here and you are in
agony. 26 And besides all this, between us and you a great chasm has been set in place, so
that those who want to go from here to you cannot, nor can anyone cross over from there
to us.’
27 “He answered, ‘Then I beg you, father, send Lazarus to my family, 28 for I have five
brothers. Let him warn them, so that they will not also come to this place of torment.’
29 “Abraham replied, ‘They have Moses and the Prophets; let them listen to them.’
30 “‘No, father Abraham,’ he said, ‘but if someone from the dead goes to them, they will
repent.’
31 “He said to him, ‘If they do not listen to Moses and the Prophets, they will not be
convinced even if someone rises from the dead.’”
I opened my commentary when I was going to preach on this text a couple of years ago and
the first words I read made my heart sink a little. The commentator suggested that not
many of us know what it is like to be a beggar living on the streets and neither do many of
us know what it is like to live in a palace.
I thought that was a bit ironic, as just a few days before I had been having a chat with a very
articulate young woman who was a regular member of our Grassmarket Community Project
and who had had experience of being homeless and begging on the streets since she was
about 14 years old. She had expressed passionately to me how it felt to be a non person. “I
don’t really care if people don’t give me money, what is really upsetting are the people who
ignore you, or give the impression that they would rather you did not exist”. She was
expressing a concern that people thought of her as an embarrassment, that some despised
her, or worse still some people clearly gave the appearance that as far as they were
concerned she was not there. She longed for the human connection, even just a smile or an
acknowledgement that she was a human being too.

I wanted to say to the person who’d written the commentary, “yes, you are right, few of us
know what it is like to be Lazarus, but it would not take you long to find someone who does
know. Even in our modern society, there are people who could tell you exactly what it is like
to feel like Lazarus”.
Indeed, before all of this I had just been reading about Prince William who had spent a night
on the streets of London sleeping rough, just to get a sense of what it is like for people. He’d
done this quietly and without publicity and I had thought, all credit to him for seeking to get
a least a sense of how it must feel to be so vulnerable.
I guess that one of the most important aspects of our work in the Grassmarket Community
Project is to connect people whose lives would otherwise hardly ever overlap and transform
attitudes. In making connections we don’t just transform or “fix” the lives of beggars like
Lazarus, we also hope to challenge and transform the imagination of the helper. We
facilitate that human connection where community is built in a way that never happened
between the Rich Man and Lazarus. Dostoevsky once wrote these words that could have
been an appeal to this rich man and other like him who simply disregard throughout their
lives the plight of their fellow human beings, “Man, man, one cannot live quite without
pity!” Perhaps it is true that we cannot become fully human and fully alive without that
capacity for making the human connection.
Compassion, empathy, the capacity to enter into another’s sorrow and pain or else share
their joy and laughter is an essential human quality, without it we cannot be fully alive. In
order to hurt others we have to immunise ourselves against such connections and this is
what the Rich Man (Dives as some sources call him) has successfully accomplished
throughout his life. He has refused to notice the beggar at his gate, he has failed to see the
lines of experience and suffering that can give dignity and character and even a kind of
beauty to the human face. Even the dogs gave Lazarus more comfort by licking his sores
than he got from Dives.
So, my commentator was right up to a point, we do not know what it is like to be a beggar,
but when we humanize the other rather that objectivising them we can begin to share
something of their experience and humanity and we can be moved.
My friendly commentator then went on to talk about the Rich Man in his fine palace. He
declared that not many of us know what it is like to fare sumptuously every day, to wear
fine clothes and live in the lap of luxury. Well, this is true. But the irony of all of this was not
lost on me as this was the very text that the Lectionary had given me to preach on for the
Sunday on which I was due to lead worship in the presence of Her Majesty the Queen!
If ever there was a human being on the planet who knew what it was like to live like the Rich
Man in our story, it was her!

So, my commentator was not exactly being helpful, but I felt that the text was too much of a
providential gift not to preach on.
I found myself drawn to these concluding remarks from the mouth of Abraham, “even if
someone should rise from the dead, they’ll pay no heed”. What, I wondered was Abraham
getting at? I found myself suggesting that even religious people, even those who
acknowledge a doctrine like the resurrection of the dead, even those who can swallow the
whole institutional banquet of faith might still sometimes not “get it”. I suggested that faith
is as much a heart thing as it is a head thing – not just a matter of propositions and doctrines
but something that we feel with an inner organ of the heart. After all, did not the Lord
declare through his prophet Jeremiah, “I will set my law within them and write it on their
hearts”.
So maybe there are religious people who are a bit like Abraham suspects the Rich Man and
his brothers to be, they know who Abraham is, they are probably upright and faithful
citizens who visit the Temple regularly and outwardly do all the right things as people of
faith, but they are people who also pay no heed and have not switched on this inner organ
of the heart where the Lord has placed his law in a new covenant relationship.
After this service at Crathie Kirk, I was being quizzed before lunch back at Balmoral Castle as
we tucked into a stiff and very welcome gin and tonic by a worshipper who’d heard the
sermon and clearly wanted to hear more. “Are you really saying that there are people who
are fully signed up members of the church who still might not get it”, he asked? “Yes”, I
replied, “that is exactly what I was saying”. The wonderful Duke of Edinburgh, who was
standing with us piped up at this point, “absolutely right” he boomed, “like 80% of the
people in the bloody church this morning!”
Your should be aware that for a relatively remote rural parish Crathie Kirk is remarkably well
attended, especially when the Royal Family is in residence at Balmoral. It also struck me as a
bit odd that most people sat at one side of the Kirk, the side at which they could get a good
view of the Royal Pew!
As many have said, we cannot really hear the Bible stories unless we hear them as stories
about ourselves. And it would be true of most of us that we have all been a bit like the Rich
Man, oblivious to the people and circumstances around us. The challenge is to avoid
cultivating a deliberate immunity.
My guess is that Jesus came not to found a new religion with all its pomp and power, its
institutions and hierarchies, its authority structures and hierarchies in which people find
ways of insulating themselves from others and ways to do others down. Rather, he
announced something much more radical.
Throughout the whole of his ministry Jesus stayed among the ordinary simple people of
rural Palestine. Only rarely did he venture to the seat of power at Jerusalem, the Temple.

And there, of course, in the epicentre of power, he met those who plotted to do away with
him. Jesus lived the life of a simple Galilean peasant. In a world of extravagant wealth he
chose to live simply. In a world that makes a virtue of celebrity, he chose to give his
attention to the disregarded and treat all, high and low alike with the same reverence and
tenderness. In a world where people enjoyed exercising power and control, he renounced
power and walked humbly with his God, loving mercy and doing justice.
He came, in the words of Greek poet, “to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the
life of the world”. This remains our task, the task of Christ’s church, which seeks to be the
Christ to the world today. And of course we have to allow our hearts to be broken and
moved by what we see around us, for there is so much still to do. We may not accomplish a
new world order of usher in the kingdom, but we must not remain unmoved and inert.
Let me conclude with some words from CS Lewis that are an appeal to this inner organ of
the heart where the Lord has placed his law and which we must not allow to remain always
hard and immune: “Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possible broken. If you
want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap
it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in
the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it
will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.
To love is to be vulnerable”.
This is Jesus message to us from the story of the Rich Man and Lazarus. We may not know
what it is like to be a beggar or live in a palace, but our task is to awaken that inner organ of
the heart where the Lord has put his law and begin that journey towards awareness,
compassion, pity and feeling that is the only hope for the world to overcome the hatred and
cruelty that so often erupts to tear communities apart.
Amen.