Day: June 22, 2025

“He who loveth God love his brother also.”

“The rich man also died, and was buried: and in hell he lift up his eyes, being in torments,” Luke tells us. Wow. Where is the love in that? It seems that we have gone from Heaven to Hell in the blink of an eye, from the wonderful vision of Heaven in the celebration of God as Trinity to a vision of hell. “Behold, a door was opened in heaven.” A door, not a window, a door through which we enter into what we see and hear.

And what did we see and hear? A vision of heaven, a vision of worship through the images of Scripture. The four and twenty elders, symbolic of the witness of the Old Testament to God, and the four living creatures, symbolic of the witness of the four Gospels of the New Testament, united in the worship of the Trinity. But how do we come to such a vision of God as Trinity, as absolute self-giving love? Through Jesus Christ, the Incarnate Son, “the Word made flesh [who] dwelt among us” who is in the bosom of the Father and makes God known to us as Trinity. A fullness of Revelation.

In John’s Epistle this morning we hear about God as love, indeed that “God is love; and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God.” We know this as the refrain of the Trinity season as the abiding love of God. Abiding and dwelling are synonyms. John’s Epistle is a treatise on love. It opens out to us something which is heavenly in contrast to hell. Why then the Gospel reading from Luke in the parable of Dives and Lazarus? How do we reconcile that story with the idea of becoming what we behold?

“There was a certain rich man,” Dives. That is not his name. Dives simply means the rich man. He is defined by his worldly wealth; not named, but only identified in terms of his economic status, one who is “clothed in purple and fine linen, and fared sumptuously every day.” Who is Lazarus? “A certain beggar,” but he has a name, an identity beyond his circumstance and situation. He lies at the gate of the rich man, “full of sores, and desiring to be fed with the crumbs which fell from the rich man’s table.” Yet he is completely ignored by the rich man; only “the dogs came and licked his sores.” It is a graphic picture. There is a compelling contrast between the unnamed rich man and the named beggar, between the compassion of the dogs and the utter indifference of Dives, the rich man. Another dog story, it seems, much like the Canaanite woman who reminds Jesus that “even the little dogs eat of the crumbs which fall from their master’s table;” what Lazarus desires but more than what he gets. It is all in the contrasts.

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