by CCW | 7 June 2015 14:34
“God is love; and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God and God in him.” Familiar words perhaps, though we know them better through the scriptural sentences in the Offices for the Trinity season with the word, “abideth” rather than the King James version, “dwelleth.” Either way the phrase captures the essential point of the Christian Faith – our being with the God who dwells with us. We live in the love of God without which we do not live at all. Something of the radical meaning of our communion with God is wonderfully and, perhaps, terrifyingly set before us on The First Sunday after Trinity.
We either live out of what we have been given to behold – “a door opened in heaven,” as we heard last week – or we are, quite literally, it seems, in Hell. To live out of the love of God as Trinity governs how we look at one another and treat one another. As today’s epistle reading from 1 John and the Gospel parable from Luke make clear, heaven and hell are right here in how we hear and see; in short, in how we think God and how we regard one another. “If a man say, I love God, and hateth his brother, he is a liar: for he that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen?” To love God means loving our brother also.
The parable makes it clear that this ethical principle has its basis in the Jewish Scriptures spoken of here as “Moses and the prophets.” What does that mean? Simply that the love of God and the love of neighbour belong to the essential ethical insight of Judaism which is carried over into Christianity. In telling this strong and powerful parable, Jesus convicts both Jew and Christian alike of the way in which we betray God in ignoring one another. Lazarus lies at our feet. Do we simply walk over him or do we care for him? “Our life and death,” one of the desert fathers says, “are with our brother.”
How do we love one another? It is the question that challenges us always. The profound teaching of the Epistle is that it has altogether to do with our being with God and placing one another in the love of God. The meaning of that love is shown in Jesus’s death and resurrection. “In this was manifested the love of God towards us, because that God sent his only-begotten Son into the world, that we might live through him.” God’s love is absolutely and essentially prior; we have no love apart from God is the radical point. “Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us,” loved us while we are yet sinners, “and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.” Familiar words, too, that echo the Comfortable words of the Liturgy that prepare us for our sacramental participation in the life of God at Communion. Because of Christ’s atoning sacrifice, his “propitiation for our sins,” we are no longer simply defined by sin but by God’s love. We are repeatedly called “Beloved,” those whom God loves. John, then, signals the ethical imperative that arises from the revelation of divine love: “Beloved, if God so loved us, we ought also to love one another.”
How? Only, it seems, by our attention to what has been revealed in Jesus such that what we see and know lives and moves in us over and against our fears and hatreds. Fear and hatred betray the love that is revealed, to be sure, but the commandment “that he who loveth God love his brother also,” has its further extension and meaning in the parable which Jesus tells.
Luke is the Church’s spiritual director for most of the year, and most especially in the Trinity season. The parable of Dives and Lazarus – Dives means rich man – is about the deeper meaning of our dwelling in the love of God and God’s love dwelling in us. What is it about? Prayer and service are the ways in which we act out of what we have been given to see in the fullness of the scriptural revelation of God. It is about placing one another in the love of God.
The parable illustrates powerfully the idea that in ignoring one another we separate ourselves from the love of God. The ethical imperative to love belongs to the essence of love itself – to God’s love. It is either lived in us through our actions and lives with one another or we are dead, utterly dead to God and one another. There is “a great gulf fixed” by us when we ignore the humanity of Lazarus, the humanity of one another, that lies before us, however confused and troubled that world of our humanity is.
We confront the many, many ways in which we lose our humanity in our world and day economically, socially, politically and technologically through the systems of thought that devalue the individual as the French philosopher, Michel Henry, notes. Can there be a more powerful picture of that than what the parable presents? Lazarus lies at the gate of the rich man. He is ignored by all except the dogs who come and lick his sores. He desires, the parable says, simply “to be fed with the crumbs which fall from the rich man’s table.” The problem is that for Dives it is as if Lazarus doesn’t even exist; it signals the ultimate devaluation, the ultimate betrayal of the subjective life of the individual.
The parable seeks to illustrate the radical ramifications of that devaluation of the individual for each and every age. It means that we are ourselves devalued and dead to ourselves and in ourselves. We are but the walking dead. In ignoring Lazarus we deny the real truth and dignity of our own humanity, a truth and dignity which is opened out to us in the ethical imperatives of the great religions of the world about the love of God and neighbour in one way or another. For Christians that teaching is concentrated in Jesus Christ, true God and true Man, but as the parable which Jesus tells makes clear, that doesn’t simply mean that Law is superseded. In fact, the parable suggests strongly, I think, that we can’t really make sense of Christ’s resurrection without “Moses and the Prophets,” without locating the Christian story in relation to other religions as well.
The Christian story is necessarily situated within the context of Judaism but also within Greek philosophical culture and Roman law and order. By extension, the Christian story necessarily engages with other religions and cultures. The ethical imperative arises from the spiritual understanding of God in his self-relation which is the basis of his relation to all else. We live in and act out of the mystery of God or we do not live at all.
In the parable, Jesus suggests that the Lazarii of the world whom we ignore in our families, in our communities, in our world, are not ignored by God. They are known and embraced in his love. We only live when we recall the embrace and love of God for us; that and that alone compels us to the love of one another, placing one another in the divine love in prayer and service. We find the true worth and dignity of our humanity in our communion with God.
It would be enough, like Lazarus or like the woman of Canaan, to want to be fed, like “the little dogs,” as she puts it, with “the crumbs which fall from their masters’ table.” But God in the extravagance gives us something more. We are invited to the heavenly banquet of divine love. Lazarus is there, too. If we ignore him, we will find ourselves afar off in the Hell of our self-inflicted torments, having betrayed our humanity altogether. In ignoring “Moses and the prophets” we ignore the ethical teaching which Jesus reminds us in the parable.
Fr. David Curry
Trinity I, 2015
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2015/06/07/sermon-for-the-first-sunday-after-trinity-5/
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