“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.
The contrast is made even greater by what follows, which is a way of seeing each from God’s perspective. It is about heaven and hell, here and now. The point of the parable is that heaven and hell are present realities in our souls. In the parable, a story told with a meaning, Dives is in Hell “in torments.” Lazarus is in “Abraham’s bosom,” an image that recalls the Abrahamic covenant through which all nations are to be blessed; in short, an image of Heaven, of blessings instead of torments. They are complete opposites and there is an unbridgeable gap between them.
Why Dives in Hell? Because in neglecting Lazarus, he neglects God. There is the inescapable connection between the love of God and the love of neighbour. This is the great ethical insight and teaching. In neglecting the one, we deny the other. Dives has forgotten that Lazarus is his brother, a fellow human being. But in that neglect there is equally a loss of self. Hell, as Dante says, is for those who “have lost the good of intellect.” The unbridgeable gap is entirely of our making.
The parable convicts us to act out of the vision of the love of God which we have been given to see in the witness of the Scriptures as a whole. Jesus makes a strong point here about the unity of the Old and New Testaments. Dives has ignored “Moses and the Prophets,” a symbolic way of referring to the Hebrew Scriptures, yet without the witness of “Moses and the Prophets,” we will not understand the necessity of the love of neighbour as essentially one with the love of God, even “though one rose from the dead.” It is an explicit reference to Christ’s Passion and Resurrection and to our being born anew. We cannot really understand the New Testament apart from the Old. “Love,” as Paul tells us, “is the fulfilling of the Law.”
The parable convicts us of the forms of our unloveliness in our neglect and indifference to one another. That neglect and indifference easily extends to hostility and hatred towards one another in the disorders of our world and day. The loss of self through the denial of the other is a picture of Hell. A loss of self because we are dead to God, the source and end of all life and light, the God who is love.
There is far more to this parable than a social or economic commentary on the disturbing forms of radical inequality. It is really a matter about where our hearts are: with God or with our worldly self-interests and concerns? How we act has real spiritual consequences. The parable moves us to act out of the love which has been shown to us in the witness of the Scriptures to the divine love which “was made flesh and dwelt among us,” precisely so that love can dwell in us. There is the close and inescapable nexus between the love of God and the love of one another. We ignore it at our peril.
Will we be like Lazarus, “a certain beggar,” who knows his need and who is named in the mercy of God? Or will we be like Dives, an unnamed rich man, indifferent to God and to his fellow man and lost to himself? As the desert fathers of the early Church observe, “our life and our death are bound up with our brother,” with one another.
Christians are simply those who know the love of God for our humanity. To know it is to live it. It is, of course, a life-long struggle, the struggle to let God’s grace perfect our souls. It means our thinking and acting upon what is proclaimed and heard in the Scriptures and in the liturgy. It is simply about Christ abiding in us more and more in the deepening of our love for God and for one another. It means care and compassion, service and sacrifice. Even more, it means being attentive to one another; in short, to Christ in each other. On this Sunday we embark upon the spiritual project of incorporating and interiorizing the love of God made visible in the pageant of Christ from Advent to Trinity Sunday into ourselves. It is the project of sanctifying grace, of living the vision of love.
Our abiding or dwelling in the love of God means letting that love shape and govern our souls and lives. It is our challenge and it is, quite literally, about heaven and hell. The readings this morning call us to be born anew, born upward into the love of God, the love which embraces the whole of our humanity.
“He who loveth God love his brother also.”
Fr. David Curry
Trinity 1, 2025