26th Sunday 2025
Amos 6:4-7; 1 Tim 6:11-16; Luke 16:19-31
How does that parable of the rich man and Lazarus strike you? Does it encourage you? Does it alarm you? Does it leave you unmoved? I have to say that it frightens me.
Why should that be? It frightens me because the rich man isn’t a bad man. He doesn’t ill-treat Lazarus, doesn’t shout abuse at him, doesn’t have him arrested. Even in Hades he is concerned for the well-being of his brothers. There is something quite likeable about him, and yet he is condemned.
What are his faults? Essentially they amount to complacency, insensitivity, lack of awareness. He falls into the same category as the complacent, self-centred, self-indulgent people who are condemned by the Prophet Amos. They live in luxury with no concern for the well-being of others, and particularly of those closest to them.
(Incidentally, I am not thrilled by the expression “those who stretch themselves out”. It sounds like some form of aerobics. The Jerusalem Bible expresses it as “those who sprawl”, depicting it as another instance of luxurious idleness, which I find easier to understand.)
That luxurious idleness, the fault which Amos targets, is the fault too of the rich man of the Gospel. It blinds him to the presence, indeed the very existence, of the poor man Lazarus. Even the dogs show more awareness, comforting him by licking his sores. By the rich man, Lazarus is every bit as overlooked as the crumbs falling from the table. It is even possible to imagine the banqueters feeding the leftovers to the dogs, while Lazarus remains unnoticed until he fades away and dies. It is what the moral theologians call “culpable ignorance”, an ignorance for which there is no excuse, and its outcome is punishment in Hades.
The relevance to us of this parable strikes me as disturbingly, worryingly clear. In our world today there are more Lazaruses than you could shake the proverbial stick at—try expressing that without ending your sentence with a preposition. They are to be found in the streets of our cities sleeping in doorways. They risk death, trying to cross the Mediterranean and the English Channel in leaky boats. They lie starving in the bombarded hospitals of Gaza; bleeding from the assaults of jihadists in Syria, in Nigeria, in Mozambique; mortally wounded by civil war in Sudan and South Sudan; languishing in the prison camps of Russia and Belarus; hiding from the raids of the Border Force in the United States.
Lazarus is everywhere. If, as the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins so beautifully and so truthfully wrote, “Christ plays in ten thousand places, lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not His,” so Lazarus, and indeed Christ, struggles in ten million places, wasting in limbs and anguished in eyes not His.
What is our response? The response of governments is to slash overseas aid, thus ironically multiplying the numbers of refugees prepared to risk their lives, not as the naysayers claim, in order to live in luxury at taxpayers’ expense, but to eke out a fear-filled existence among a hostile population.
In many ways, we are more blameworthy than the rich man of the parable. Unlike him, we are not unaware of Lazarus’s existence, his presence both at our door and on the other side of the world. Our society is familiar with Lazarus, and despises him, yelling at the government to “look after our own”, but then decrying attempts to do even that.
If the rich man went to hell for culpable ignorance, what about us who cannot claim his excuse? Even the one who rose from the dead has come back to warn us as the rich man begged would happen. What response are we making to Him, present in all the Lazaruses of the world?
