Click here to listen to audio file of Matins & Ante-Communion for the First Sunday after Trinity
“This commandment have we from him, that he who loveth God love his brother also.”
And if we don’t? Then we have the powerful story of our denial of God’s love by our complete neglect of one another. Lazarus is lying at our feet. How we deal with one another is entirely grounded in our relation to God. Make no mistake, the parable of Lazarus and Dives, the rich man, speaks directly and profoundly to the forms of “the malaise of modernity.” The term is not mine; it was used a long time ago by Charles Taylor, Canada’s ‘pre-eminent’ philosopher. We live now in the collapse and disarray of the institutions that in their truth contribute to the dignity and ennobling of human existence. This compels an awakening of an ethical attitude towards the world of which we are a part; a corrective and critique of ourselves.
The lessons for the First Sunday after Trinity are particularly instructive and challenging. The Epistle reading from 1 John 4 encapsulates the meaning of Trinity Sunday quite profoundly. It is remarkably simple: “God is love; and he that abideth in love abideth in God, and God in him,” to use the older translation that remains in the Scriptural sentences as the refrain of the Trinity season. It is at once so familiar as to be completely overlooked and ignored. Perhaps that is why we need the accompanying Gospel reading from Luke 16 to point us to the radical meaning of the commandment to love, paradoxical as that may seem. For the parable is a telling indictment of our neglect of God through our neglect of one another. The point is not that the world is a problem; we are the problem. We create the gulf, the abyss between ourselves and God, between ourselves and the world, and between one another through our indifference and neglect.
The dangers are very real. This week has confronted us with the heart-breaking spectacle of the unmarked and concealed graves of native children who died in the Residential Schools system, neglected and ignored by those to whose care they were entrusted. It is a sad story and another blow to the quest for respect and dignity of Canada’s native peoples, many of whom remain deeply committed Christians, hence the touching spectacle of love and compassion in the placing of children’s shoes on the steps of churches. It makes visible the desire to be seen and remembered, and not to be neglected and ignored.
The parable is about the realities of neglect and indifference. It turns us to the literal ground of our lives; Lazarus on the ground at our feet. In that sense, the First Lesson at Matins from the Book of Joshua complements the Gospel. The Book of Joshua is about the conquest of the promised land but as the lesson makes clear that is entirely based on God’s Word and Will as the defining feature of Israel.” Be strong and of good courage; be not frightened, neither be dismayed; for the Lord your God is with you wherever you go.” Words which have a certain power and resonance for us in the present. Just so the Second Lesson from Mark makes clear that the land is also a place of teaching and healing, indeed, spiritual healing. Jesus teaches “as one who had authority”, the ultimate authority of God, the one who raises to life and casts out demons.
Lazarus lies on the ground at our feet, ignored by all except the dogs who alone show compassion on him, “[coming] and lick[ing] his sores.” Ignored by us but not by the dogs, nor by God, Jesus suggests, Lazarus becomes the parabolic witness to the radical nature of our neglect of one another which means that we also neglect, deny and reject God. As the parable unfolds we are shown that this is about our refusal to hear “Moses and the prophets” and as such unable to be persuaded even “though one rose from the dead.” This points to the deeper malaise of our humanity in its rejection of the truth. “Men give voice to their opinions,” Augustine remarks, “but they are only opinions which like so many puffs of wind waft the soul hither and thither and make it veer and turn; the light is clouded over and the truth cannot be seen although it is before our very eyes.”
The deep message is that God is present with us in our lives with one another. The teaching that is healing and life is before us but we reject it and deny it. We create the gulf, the abyss between ourselves and God and one another in our indifference to one another, not God. The reading plays on the paradox between what is seen and unseen; Lazarus at our feet and Lazarus in heaven. This illustrates the question of the Epistle. “He that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen?” It has a strong ethical force and power. We feel it – perhaps.
In other words, there is a profound sense of unity in and through the differences that belong to human life. It is not just about who is poor and who is rich. At issue is how we treat one another; in short, how we use what is given to us in our relations with others. Lazarus desires nothing more than “to be fed from the crumbs which fell from the rich man’s table.” The clear sense is that Dives, the rich man, is completely oblivious to the needs of Lazarus. It is as if he doesn’t exist. In that indifference and neglect lies the failure to understand what is unique and special about everything in creation, including himself. It is all grounded in God both in terms of the difference and the unity of all things. This is the necessary tension: to hold in balance God and the world, and God and man, which balance is ultimately embodied in Christ as true God and true man. The teaching is dialectical; a holding together of opposites in a profound synthesis and a refusal to allow things to fall apart into separation.
I have been reading Hans Urs von Balthasar’s remarkable treatment of a great synthesizing and systematic 7th century thinker, Maximus the Confessor (Cosmic Liturgy: The Universe According to Maximus the Confessor). God, Maximus says, “draws up all things that are naturally distinct from each other and binds them to himself as their cause, their origin and goal; and through the power of this relationship to him as source, he lets them also be drawn toward each other;” nota bene, drawn to God and drawn to each other! The paradox of synthesis, the holding of things together in and through their distinction, as von Balthazar observes, is that it “unites creatures by distinguishing them and distinguishes them by uniting them”. God is “the cause of all that is,” Maximus states, “secretly and unrecognizably binding all things together, yet dwelling in each being in a different way,… hold[ing] the individual parts of the whole together, in itself and in each other, unconfused and inseparable, and allow[ing] them, through this very relationship of creative unity, to live more for each other than for themselves.”
The malaise of modernity consists in the disenchantment of the world through our technocratic reason which reduces everything to things, to objects that are simply there for us to manipulate, to use and destroy or to neglect and ignore, unable to live for each other. The counter to this lies in a radical rethinking of nature and ourselves in relation to nature and to one another. Maximus provides one of the strongest affirmations of nature as the counter to seeing the world as evil. It is about seeing the world and our humanity in God. This speaks to our current confusions where there is more and more fear at a point where there is less and less to be fearful about. The Covid-19 pandemic risks becoming a pandemic of fear itself where everything is seen as threatening and dangerous including one another. We either see the other as a threat or we don’t see them at all, indifferent to one another and to our need for one another. Either way there is an abyss that separates us from one another and from God. In a way, it all comes down to what we see and hear, or rather don’t see and hear.
Christ is the ultimate synthesis of heaven and earth, of God and nature, of God and man, the one who bridges “the endless chasm between God and the creature without a confusion of natures” (von Balthasar) and without a fatal separation. In a way, what this Sunday inaugurates is the pageant of the Trinity season as the dialectic between the transcendence and the immanence, the distance and the nearness, of God. For God is beyond all things and yet in all things. The Gospel parable complements the Epistle reading about the spiritual necessity of holding to the synthesis of God and world, of God and man, in Christ.
It means seeing ourselves in Lazarus for that is to see ourselves as God sees us at once on the ground and in the bosom of Abraham, to use the biblical metaphor, or as Christ sees us in himself, to speak theologically. But it also means seeing ourselves in Dives, himself a critique of ourselves. In Dives, the rich man, we see what separates us from one another and from God. Dives fails to see God in Lazarus, fails to see what even the dogs see and know, a fellow creature and as such known and loved by God and in God.
The parable which Jesus tells is really about himself as the one in whom the seen and the unseen, the divine and the human, are united, “unconfused[ly] and inseparab[ly]”, to echo Maximus’ use of the language of Chalcedon. Christ is with Lazarus both on the ground and in the bosom of Abraham. Lazarus is in Christ. And we are bidden to see Christ in one another and one another in Christ. That means to attend, as John teaches, to the Word of Christ and to his commandment to love. Only so may we learn to live in the love of God. That love compels our love of one another “because as he is, so are we in this world.” That is to be enfolded in love, the very opposite of neglect and indifference.
“This commandment we have from him, that he who loveth God love his brother also.”
Fr. David Curry
Trinity 1, 2021
(under lockdown restrictions)