by CCW | 7 June 2026 10:00
The Epistle and Gospel complement one another and illustrate the ethical understanding of God as Trinity. Last Sunday celebrated what God reveals about himself and about our humanity in Christ. It is not some abstract speculation or a mathematical puzzle, a kind of mystical Rubik’s cube, as it were. God is love: the mutually indwelling love of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Ghost; consubstantial and co-eternal. That divine love is the mystery of God revealed as Trinity which, in turn, speaks to the mystery of our humanity. Mystery does not mean what is hidden but rather what is revealed. What is revealed in the witness of the Scriptures through Word and Spirit is the essential life of God in himself and for us and in us. That demands our thinking upon what is revealed and our acting upon it. In short, it speaks to the truth and dignity of our humanity as persons made in the image of God.
It is really all about Heaven and Hell seen in the contrast between Lazarus and Dives in today’s Gospel parable. It highlights the question about acting upon what has been revealed. Dives means the rich man. What is the point of the parable? Simply what is shown in the Epistle about the necessary connection and interplay between the love of God and the love of neighbour. They are inseparable. Yet the parable illustrates their fatal separation: a great gulf is fixed between Lazarus in “the bosom of Abraham,” an image of Heaven, and Dives, imaged as being tormented in Hell.
Trinity Sunday is the revelation of God as essential love and life, the love and life which is revealed and made known as essential for our humanity. Without love, we are nothing. “God is love and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God in him.” It is as simple as that and yet so profound. “We love God because he first loved us.” But that love is meant to live in us and belongs to the true end and purpose of our lives as human beings, namely, to love as God loves. Love is motion towards another but if we neglect or ignore one another then love is not alive and moving in us. That is the meaning of Hell, the complete and utter absence of love for one another and for God who is love. Hell is a denial of the ethical, an absence of the good.
The Athanasian Creed[1] shows the intimate and necessary connection between the revelation of God as Trinity and of theIncarnation of Christ which makes known what belongs to the radical truth of our humanity. Who we are is found in God, in God’s eternal knowing and loving of our humanity. In other words, our being known in God’s knowing of us. But that extends to our knowing and loving of one another; in short, the principle of the ethical about what is good to think and be and what is right to do that necessarily concerns our being and care for one another. All of this turns on what it means to be a person.
The theological language of persons and substance used about God extends to us and to the idea of our being made in the image of God. The idea of person comes out of the poetic culture of the ancient Greeks and is taken up philosophically in thinking about God as the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Person, as Boethius defines it, is “the individual substance of a rational nature.” That in turn applies to the understanding of human character. Just as in thinking God as Trinity means “neither confusing the Persons, nor dividing the Substance”, holding to the unity and distinction of each, so too in the Incarnation, Christ is “One altogether, not by confusion of Substance,” collapsing divinity into humanity or vice versa, “but by unity of Person,” preserving and maintaining the integrity and distinction of God and Man. This language extends to our human and social life as persons in a community of persons defined as being in the image of God and thus to thinking and acting accordingly. This is very different from ‘person’ in our current culture which is anti-essential, vague, indeterminate, and solipsistic.
The parable illustrates the exact opposite of the vision of love shown in the Epistle. “Beloved, if God so loved us, [then] we ought to love one another.” But you can’t love what you ignore or neglect or about which you are utterly indifferent. Dives, “a certain rich man,” is utterly indifferent to the presence of Lazarus, “a certain beggar”, “[lying] at his gate full of sores and desiring to be fed with the crumbs which fell from the rich man’s table.” In a lovely image, the rich man’s neglect and indifference contrasts with the dogs who came and licked Lazarus’s sores. They care. He doesn’t.
What that ultimately means is seen in the reversal that reveals their true character about what is moving in them. Dives,the rich man, is in Hell, and Lazarus, the beggar, is in Heaven; the one who was rich in the things of the world, “clothed in purple and fine linen, faring sumptuously every day,” is poor in the things of God, while the other who is poor in every worldly sense, is now rich in the things of God. Between them a great gulf is fixed, an unbridgeable gap symbolizing the failure to love one another which in turn is a failure to learn from the witness of the Scriptures about the all-embracing love of God. How we think (or don’t think) informs our actions. Dives, in this sense, denies the essential humanity of Lazarus, his individuality as a rational human being. The gap is us.
Jesus says something quite radical in this parable, namely, that the ethical idea of love as life is found in Moses and the Prophets and that love is the living force of the Resurrection in the radical overcoming of death and all division and opposition. Love never fails. Love is all and without that love in us we are counted dead. Moses and the Prophets are not superseded or eclipsed by the story of Christ but belong to our thinking about its meaning through the images about life and death which they present.
The parable provides a powerful indictment of the indifference of our humanity towards one another, an image of our inhumanity, on the one hand, and a powerful encouragement and reminder to act out of what we have seen and heard in the witness of the Scriptures, on the other hand. A powerful incentive to ethical thought and life.
Our life is bound up with one another. There is the inescapable connection between our knowing and our doing. This is wonderfully illustrated in the Office readings from Job and James this week. The point is that we can’t simply be indifferent towards one another as if they don’t matter. They do matter and are known to God. If we are indifferent towards them then we are indifferent towards God and thus betray ourselves as made in the image of God.
We can’t, to be sure, solve all the problems of the world but we can recognise ourselves in the situations of others whether near or far away. We pray and prayer is really about seeking the goodness of God for one another. This is not mere sentiment and emotion or outrage and judgement towards others. It is more about seeing and doing what we can, where and in whatever way we can. This is made concrete for us in the ethical and moral tradition of the seven works of corporal mercy. They are about our care towards one another as acting out of God’s loving care towards us. It is about thinking and doing, knowing and loving; they are the critical faculties of our humanity.
What are the seven works of corporal mercy? They pertain to the body, to the immediate and pressing realities of our world and day, now and always. They are in a way an extension of the Beatitudes, the blessednesses which speak to the end or purpose of our humanity. In the moral and ethical tradition of the Christian faith, and as derived from the Scriptures, they are as follows: 1. Feeding the hungry, 2. Giving drink to the thirsty, 3. Clothing the naked, 4. Sheltering the homeless, 5. Visiting the sick, 6. Visiting the imprisoned, and, 7. Burying the dead. They are all instances of compassionate care.
As works of mercy, they are the motions of heavenly love active in us in our earthly and worldly situations towards one another. They express our obligations, respect, and care for one another as made in the image of God regardless of any other considerations or concerns. To treat one another as persons is to honour the image of God in them and in ourselves. Such is the radical nature of love which belongs to the vision of the Trinity and the Incarnation of Christ and to the redemption of our humanity. In the Christian understanding, it is a matter of seeing Christ in one another.
Fr. David Curry
Trinity 1, 2026 (long)
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2026/06/07/sermon-for-the-first-sunday-after-trinity-14/
Copyright ©2026 Christ Church unless otherwise noted.